GPU vs CPU mining and plotting...
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First of all, i'm new and i'm glad that i found this forum, since i have lots of questions but i'll try to be as specific as i can in order to get the best possible answer and for you guys for being able to answer me as precisely as possible.
I'm evalutating to use a disused server as Burst miner (i'm really new to this Burst world and looks awesome, but i'm no probie when we talk about gpu mining.. but i knwo that it's way more different.)
So far, as i understand, the Burst mining is in 2 phases, both of which are faster with the use of the GPU for plotting and mining..
The old server would be an old dual xeon with a total of 12 cores at 2.13GHz, whic would come handy due to the fact that it already has 12 HDD bays, and it has a PCI-e 8x expansion slot.But here's the questions, considering that i plan to add gradually 10TB hard drives.
I read that with a GPU you can get twice or more as fast compared to an high end CPU in both plotting and mining, but i read that you will still need to optimize those plot via CPU with xplotter.
Is the optimization phase faster ? or it's better to get the plots directly with a fast CPU ?
Considering the CPUs of the server, would i get better MINING (i can do the plot with an high end GPU in another pc) performance if i use an nvidia GT 730 (the best, not terribly expensive Pci-e 8x gpu that i could found) for the mining phase ?
Or it's better for me to build a new system alltogether, maybe with an i7 or a Ryzen CPU and forget about the GPU ?
Or maybe recycle a not so performant CPU and putting inside like a gtx 1050 or rx 550 and use that for mining ?
More so, i read, as i mentioned, that in mining phase, a GPU can be up to twice as fast. Does that mean double the earnings in terms of Burst ? Or it isn't as scalable as in "regular" GPU mining ?
I'm sorry if some or all of these questions sounds dumb, but since i plan to use as many hard drives as i can get, i'd rather not be terribly bottlenecked by the rest of the hardware. More so if i do my plans with 120TB of total hard drives for the server, i'd rather know in advance if i'm better off with a big tower filled with hard drives since i won't get as much value due bottlenecking from the server mining itself.
Thanks in advance.
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@Ther0byte My advice, start small then build as your knowledge grows. Both the Xplotter (cpu plotter) and GPU plotter can produce optimized plots. A decent GPU will be faster than any CPU due to the number of cores. The GPU plotter allows to build unoptimized plots. These unoptimized can then be mined and optimized (to another drive) at the same time.
So start off with a test 50GB plot with both xplotter and GPU plotter to see them each in action. The xplotter is more user friendly and the GPU plotter takes some tweaking for optimal performance. A 10TB plot could take days.
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@iKnow0 heya, thanks for the fast reply.
So, just to be clear. when you say that the unoptimized one can be mined and optimized to another drive, it means that every time that i plot with a gpu. i have to do that "twice" ?
More so, despite i know that it isn't a perfect science, i'd rather not waste time and\or money in hardware that might not be good for what i want to do :) (i.e. setting up the server with like 50 tb of plots and than it gets bottlenecked and i will have to move everything in another pc with a better hardware and maybe a gpu, etc etc.. ) so if i can clear myself from some questions without try and error it would be great !
P.S.
I've already ordered 2 x 10 TB hard drives :P and plotting them will be the first test. I'm allready scrambling to look for the best CPU i have to understand how much faster will it be an RX 570 to "complete a plot" (so plotting and optimizing).
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@Ther0byte
No, the GPU plotter can created both optimized and unoptimized plots.The advantage of creating unoptimized plots is that they can be created much faster and also be mined while optimizing to another drive.
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@iKnow0 ah.. i get it. cool! Now i have to wait if someone had the same hardware struggle to see if maybe someone already made my potential mistakes :)
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@Ther0byte myself and lots others have, its how we learn. :-)
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@Ther0byte Welcome to Burst!
I can tell you from my own testing that the GT 730 will bottleneck the scan times for your drives with jminer at the capacity you plan on having, so you would want the GTX 1050 or RX 550 at least. However, the dual xeon you mentioned might be fast enough as well. Each round, all miners scan their hard drives to find the best 'deadlines' for that round, but those deadlines have to be reported to the network for them to count. So, for example, if you have a 10 second deadline (rare), but your machine takes 2 minutes to find and report that deadline, another miner might report a 20 second deadline and 'steal' your block. You don't need the fastest CPU or GPU, just a system that's fast enough to scan all of your hard drives in a reasonable amount of time (about 30 seconds). After that, how much Burst you earn depends entirely on your mining capacity.
For plotting, I use the GPU plot generator with a GTX 1070 since it's 3 or 4 times faster than XPlotter would be with my old FX-8350. I always plot in direct mode which creates optimized plots on the first go-round. You can mine with unoptimized plots, but they are written in a way that's not ideal for hard drives to read while mining, so your scan times suffer and it puts more wear and tear on your hardware.
Unless you have some secret source of cheap 10TB drives (and do clue me in if you do), consider going with the more economical 8TB drives. Seagate Expansion and Backup drives (named 'archive' drives internally) are much cheaper than normal PMR drives because they use SMR technology but that's fine since you only need to write plots once. I create my plots on NAS drives first, then copy them over to the cheaper SMR archive drives. Keep in mind that you can also add on a USB 3.0 controller card or two and connect tons of external drives.
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@sevencardz aaah you came here with greatest news ! Thank you very much and thanks for the welcome !
With that said the 730 was sadly my thought... eh, watever, i'll give it a shoot with the server and i'll think about it in case.
What plotter do you use for plotting directly with the GPU ? Because 4 times faster on a 10 TB is huge.
EDIT: The cpus that i will be using are 2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor L5630... so there will be 16 threads at 2.13/2.4GH/z
Btw i have no secret source of 10TB drives, sadly, but the price per gb is not that far off, at least here. We're talking of 34€ TB for the 8TB and 36€/TB for the 10 TB.
And given the fact that i might put twelve of them in the server, it's really a matter of practicality vs price.
Of course if the 8TB costed like 10€ less per TB or whatever it would be another thing alltogether.
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@Ther0byte GPU Plot Generator is the only option for GPU plotting: https://forums.burst-team.us/topic/58/gpu-plot-generator-v4-0-3-win-linux/ However, Nvidia GPUs are tricky to work with and it's best to have a machine dedicated to plotting because the plotter tends to eat up most or all of your system RAM. I also tend to create plot files in 200 - 400 GB chunks just in case plotting gets interrupted for some reason and so I can easily transfer plots to other drives if need be.
However, with 16 threads from Xeons, I'd suggest at least trying XPlotter out on a small plot to see what kind of throughput you can get. The amount of available threads is a bit more important than the clockspeed when it comes to plotting, so I would expect the Xeons to do much better than my FX-8350. XPlotter has some other benefits like being able to resume creating a plot file if plotting gets interrupted for some reason (reboot, power out, out of memory error) which is very nice. It's also easier to keep your system stable and doing other things (like mining) while XPlotter plots in the background. The only real downside is that it's still probably slower if you have a powerful GPU you could use instead.
The 730 will still be faster than the CPU for mining (assuming an FX-8350 or similar), but just not as fast as it could be once you load up 10+ drives for it to scan. With 10 drives and 96TB capacity I get:
FX-8350 (blago's miner): 60 seconds
GT 730 (jminer): 42 seconds
GTX 950 (jminer): 31 secondsHowever, with fewer drives you need less threads, so at 10 - 20 TB it probably doesn't matter.
And if those are your local prices for drives, then yeah those 10TB drives might be worth it. But shop around because the 8TB drives go on sale a lot. I like to grab Seagate IronWolf drives from newegg when they're on sale for around $250. Also consider augmenting your capacity with external drives as well - the Seagate Expansion drives (which have ST8000AS0002 SMR drives within them) are only $180 for 8TB here in the states.
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@sevencardz I will consider that with time due. For the time being i have 12 hdd bay to fill :D And that's quite expensive already.
But if everything works out i might expand over time.
Anyway, thank you very much for your time, as soon as i'll start mining i will donate few burst to you as a personal thank you.
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@Ther0byte No problem, glad to help. Donation is not necessary either. If you think about it, snap a pic of that rig when you get it fully loaded. I'd like to see that. :)

