Benchmarking the four kawpow miners

This test was conducted by the MinerMore sysop Traysi over the course of exactly 24 hours from 2020-04-23 00:04:00 UTC until 2020-04-24 00:04:00. A followup to this test was conducted on May 3rd.

Hardware:
  • GPUs: 4x EVGA 1080ti 11G-P4-6593-KR
  • MB: SLI Z270
  • CPU: Celeron G3930 @ 2.90GHz
  • Power supply: Corsair HX Series, HX1000, 1000 Watt, 80+ Platinum

Other Details:

  • Operating System: Ubuntu 16.04.3 TLS, NVIDIA 440.33.01, CUDA 10.2
  • GPU details: 170W power, default clocks (no alterations to mem speed, clocks, etc).
  • Pool: MinerMore RVN Testnet, Username traysi, Port 5305 static difficulty 0.01 per submit

  • kawpowminer: 1.1.3+commit.27b72460 (Open source, no dev fee)

  • nbminer 29.1 (Proprietary with 2% dev fee)
    • nbminer -d $1 -a kawpow -o stratum+tcp://rvnt.minermore.com:5305 -u traysi.nbminer

  • gminer 2.06 (Proprietary with 2% dev fee)
    • gminer -d $1 --algo kawpow --server rvnt.minermore.com:5305 --user traysi.gminer

  • ttminer Version: 4.0.0 (Apr 21 2020 12:41:17) (Proprietary with 1% dev fee)

Methodology:

Each of the 4 miner software programs were assigned to a GPU in the system. Every 2 hours this assignment was changed. Starting at 04:00 the assignment was:

  • GPU 0: gminer
  • GPU 1: kawpowminer
  • GPU 2: nbminer
  • GPU 3: ttminer

At 06:00 the miners were stopped and restarted with a new assignment of:

  • GPU 0: ttminer
  • GPU 1: gminer
  • GPU 2: kawpowminer
  • GPU 3: nbminer

At 08:00 the miners were stopped and restarted with a new assignment of:

  • GPU 0: nbminer
  • GPU 1: ttminer
  • GPU 2: gminer
  • GPU 3: kawpowminer

At 10:00 the miners were stopped and restarted with a new assignment of:

  • GPU 0: kawpowminer
  • GPU 1: nbminer
  • GPU 2: ttminer
  • GPU 3: gminer

And finally at 12:00 the miners were restarted with their original assignment and the loop continued as described above. In this way, after 24 hours, each miner had mined for an equal amount of time on each GPU in the system.

Conclusion:

kawpowminer performed the best in this test.

All four miners were very close to each other in performance, with only a 2.13% difference between the best and worst. This mining algo probably does not have many opportunities for software optimization, so the individual person will not see substantial differences between the software options and should select the miner that they find works best for their individual environments. In the future, miner software developers may consider competing by focusing on reliability and features rather than speed improvements.

The Results:

MinerAccepted SharesHashratePercent
kawpowminer3527517.54 Mh/s-
nbminer3492317.36 Mh/s-1%
ttminer3471517.26 Mh/s-1.59%
gminer3452217.16 Mh/s-2.13%


Hash Rate for kawpowminer:

Hash Rate for nbminer:

Hash Rate for gminer:

Hash Rate for ttminer: