Good timing on this discussion. I just got done talking with some of my mining friends about this very thing. My biggest concern with the idea of algo switching is whether or not it will ever end. If I understood correctly, the hope is to have Feathercoin be to Algo X, as Litecoin is to Scrypt. I’m just wondering if this cat/mouse game will end there or if several more switches will have to be made along the way. I would assume that the answer is no (unless FTC has a successful algo pairing), as long as it’s profitable to create mining specific chips. Is it possible to have a coin that is truly ASIC proof that can still be mined by the masses?

The idea of a decentralized currency pretty much dies if the person with the most money can just purchase enough equipment to recentralize it. I don’t think Bitcoin will ever go away, I just think that it’s on its way to being just like everything else â€" controlled by the people with the most money. Take this video for instance. Bitcoin is already well on its way to being far out of the masses reach.

A LOOK INSIDE AMERICA’S LARGEST BITCOIN MINING OPERATION http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5CjldZLXiAU

I’ve invested a considerable amount of time, energy, and money into GPU mining. It’s fun, it’s been heating my house in Alaska all winter (yes, seriously), and best of all, it makes some spare cash to pay on utility bills â€" which are spendy at almost $0.2USD/kWh where I live. I have no problem with buying ASIC’s to mine feathercoin with *if they are available to the masses*. My big question for everyone is this: what are we trying to do? We seemingly face adversity at every corner.

Are we trying to preserve the GPU/CPU mining culture due to readily available off-the-shelf equipment? Are we trying to find an algo where ASIC’s can be easily created and purchased by anyone who wants to invest? Are we just trying to secure our own foothold on an algo like LTC has with Scrypt? It seems to me that no matter which path we choose, at some point, deep pockets can and will recentralize if it’s profitable. Somebody finds a way to produce cheap ASIC’s that are easily available to everyone, so the deep pockets buy ten billion of them.

The fact that GPU mining is so wasteful makes it incredibly unprofitable for people wanting to build a warehouse full of them. This is a good thing and a bad thing of course. My closing comment is this: Algo-switching every time that an ASIC threat hits will eventually get old and turn people off in my opinion. If we can just change the rules at every half-time when things aren’t looking good for our team, people will stop showing up at our games.

Here are the results of my various settings… Hopefully the table renders properly. These GPU’s are running at stock clocks. As far as power consumption, only had a 100w increase for almost double the hash rate in a 4x GPU rig.

edit: table didn’t render… Best settings were -i 13 -w 64, and -i 12 -w 64 which were both pegged at 300Kh/s

So far I’m getting the best results with the 14.6 drivers and the R9 290. When I used 14.4 for some reason the hash rates were far better than 14.9, but nowhere near as good as 14.6. I’m compiling a list of all of the settings I’ve tried with corresponding hash rates that I’ll post when I’m done. Currently the best I’ve seen is 300Kh/s using -I 13 and -w 64 (as mentioned earlier).

LoL. Works great now with 14.x. Edited the other post and updated the zip file.

Here’s the one that I threw together complete with the 13.x AMD drivers (you need them as the kernel included with this dev release does not appear to work with 14.x yet). For those of you who normally use cgminer, you use “-k neoscrypt” instead of --neoscrypt to tell the miner which algo to use.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0327xxwnuriv6z2/sgminerNeoScrypt-Dev.zip?dl=0

You can definitely tell that everyone just started using 3.7.8 - the network hash rate is up almost 40% and the diff with it.

Haven’t tried playing with the clock speeds yet on my 290’s - however… I was able to get them up to 160kh/s using -I 15 and -w 48… (hynix cards, haven’t tried the elpida ones yet)

Not too shabby for stock clocks :)

Absolutely… :) I’m getting pretty decent performance bumps from my 7950’s by tweaking the settings, but my 290’s aren’t doing much better than they already were.

So, some new observations… My initial results with 3.7.8 were based on using the exact same settings I had used with the 3.7.7 series. Try starting over with your configs (ie: bump up -w, change intensity etc). My 7950 rig got even more performance with -w 64 and a higher intensity, which it couldn’t do with the 13.x bin files… I’ll keep playing.

So how do we get a copy of this in-dev kernel? LoL

Wow, 255Kh/s with no HW errors? I’m assuming that’s 1 gpu… None of my stuff is OC’d except for my 7950’s (which went from 85kh/s to 113kh/s) …