The benchmarking process is an essential part of the mining as it is a way to evaluate different mining options. Either you do it manually or with dedicated software, as soon as you are evaluating your hashrate and profitability and comparing it with some other or older results you are benchmarking.
When we introduced our benchmarking feature in 2019, we really thought it through and wanted to make it as easy for miners as possible. It is included in the free plan, so anyone can use it without having to upgrade the minerstat account. Furthermore, it allows different exporting options so the results can be used in different ways.
There are several mining software providers out there that support benchmarking - either to their pools or to custom-defined config templates. In this article, we will focus only on benchmarking with our tool, but even if you are using any other tool, you can use this post as a guideline on what to take into account when benchmarking.
Why benchmark?
There are several reasons why to benchmark, but all of them are connected to profitability - getting out of your rigs as most as possible.
⭐️ Getting a general overview
By conducting a benchmark on all algorithms and mining clients you can get a general overview on which coins are available to mine and on which algorithms is your rig performing the best.
⭐️ Finding the fastest mining client
In case you already know which coin and algorithm you want to mine, you might want to benchmark all mining clients available for this algorithm to find the fastest one.
⭐️ Finding the most efficient mining client
Depending on the electricity costs you have, you might not want to use the fastest mining client, but the most power-efficient one. This is a mining client with the highest speed per watt.
⭐️ Getting the latest data
Mining clients are getting improvements on a weekly basis and having the latest information on hashrates and power consumption is essential.
Preparing for benchmark
Before you start the benchmark, make sure that your rig is prepared for switching between different mining clients and algorithms. The unprepared rig is one of the main reasons why a benchmark fails.
- Your rig is up and running;
- If you are planning to benchmark different algorithms, your overclocking settings are appropriate for all of them;
- You have prepared your rig for mining (in terms of the firewall, auto-login, virtual memory, etc.).
Creating a benchmark
You can create your first benchmark through this form.
Each benchmark is conducted on a selected worker and must have a name. We suggest the name that will help you distinguish between other benchmarks, for example, 1080 Ethash, Vega 56 All, or RX 580 Ethash vs RandomX.
You can choose between 4 different duration periods: fast, medium, slow, and very slow. By default, the slow option is selected as it uses enough large time frame for most of the algorithms to run. However, if you are seeing a lot of missing hashrate results, we suggest going with a very slow option.
In the last part, you need to define all options that will get benchmarked. Each option consists of an algorithm, mining client, and configuration that will be used in the benchmarking. To include all possible options, you can click on a button Load all default options. Minerstat default means that you will benchmark to minerstat’s sandbox pool. You can find more details about it here.
Benchmarking process
While the benchmarking process is conducting there isn’t much to do, except checking your benchmark every here and then to see if any of the mining clients didn’t crash the rig.
Here is a list of things that can go wrong during the benchmark and how to solve them.
⚠️ The majority of options failed
This can happen if you have an overclocking profile set and this profile isn’t compatible with all algorithms in the benchmark. Remove the overclocking profile and start again. Similar can happen if you choose a too short benchmark duration period. Try to increase the duration.
⚠️ Rig crashes
Different mining clients handle different algorithms differently. In case your rig is crashing, this can happen if you have an overclocking profile set and this profile isn’t compatible with all algorithms in the benchmark. Remove the overclocking profile and start again. A crash can also happen on mixed rigs or when there isn’t enough memory available. If you see that your rig is frequently crashing and your rig is already optimized, we suggest keeping an eye on the benchmark so you don’t waste time. If crashing repeats on the same mining client, remove this particular mining client from the benchmark options.
⚠️ Firewall blocks (Windows rigs)
The Benchmark process will one by one download the mining clients it needs to conduct the benchmark process. In case you have a firewall turned on and didn’t whitelist the minerstat folder, it can quickly happen that a mining client will get blocked. Make sure to prepare your rig for mining before conducting a benchmark.
⚠️ Unsupported cards
Some GPUs are not supported for all mining clients and all algorithms, especially if they are newer. That’s why it is better to divide benchmarks into different algorithms and test for each algorithm separately.
After benchmark
After the benchmark finishes for the first time, we suggest to open the benchmarking profile and rerun the failed benchmarks. Benchmark with more than 5 options will almost never finish with 100% success as some mining clients don’t close the port as they should or there are some other interferences that can happen with quick switching between different mining clients. Hence, repeating the benchmark for failed options will increase the success rate for a few percents.
On our testing rigs, we usually reach a 98% success rate while the average success rate for all of our customers’ benchmarks is 85%. This means that you can easily achieve an 85% success rate or more by rerunning the failed options.
By clicking on the finished benchmark you can explore all the details and see the achieved speeds and consumptions.
Benchmark management
Now that you have run the benchmark and re-run all the failed options, you are ready for different benchmark management grips.
✔️ Export benchmark
You can export the benchmark as a JSON file and have all speeds ready to load to different databases.
✔️ Duplicate benchmark
In case you want to repeat a similar benchmark, you can duplicate it.
✔️ Merge benchmarks
You can select different benchmarks and merge them into one. Do note that the first benchmark in the selected list will be merged with selected benchmarks of the same worker - you can’t merge benchmarks on different workers. The result of merging is one benchmark where the latest hashrate and power consumptions are taken into an account. All benchmarks that are part of merging will be removed.
✔️ Share benchmark results
You will get a link to public benchmark results that you can share with your friends or colleagues.
✔️ Load to profit switch
You can load the results of the benchmark(s) to your profit switch.
✔️ Load benchmark results to the mining calculator
You can import benchmark results to mining calculator datasets and check your estimated profitability.
Want to try benchmark with minerstat? Create a new account and start with one free worker.
