Mining Zcash and Zclassic with latest AMD Miners from Claymore and Optiminer

Latest version of my guide to building and operating a mining rig is here,  How to Build a 6 Rig GPU Miner for Zcash and Ethereum with Nvidia GTX 1070 and EthosDistro posted Oct 1, 2017 on Steemit.

Thing move fast in the Altcoin mining world – I just upgraded my rigs to the latest version of Optiminer, and it works great! One of the rigs was not picking up 5 of the RX480 cards using Optiminer, so I downloaded Claymore and used it on that one. It’s good to have choices. Here are the latest versions and their links

Optiminer 1.7 on Github – Zcash/Zclassic miner for AMD GPU’s on Linux and Windows

Claymore 12.2 on Bitcointalk – Zcash/Zclassic miner for AMD GPU’s on Windows and Linux

I used the latest version of the AMD linux drivers on my rigs, found here:

AMDGPU-Pro for Linux version 16.60

AMD linux driver download reference link for when new version comes out

AMD Windows previous driver downloads – read miner instructions for the version to use

Zcash mining pools to use:

http://zcash.flypool.org/

https://zec.suprnova.cc/

Zclassic mining pools – you can use one of the two pools I operate, which currently have a 0.5% fee contributing to the Zclassic developer bounty fund:

zpool.blockoperations.com – in Atlanta

zpool2.blockoperations.com – in Dallas

Of course you can use other pools also. There is a good list at the zclassic website

Both Claymore and Optiminer have watchdog scripts to reboot the miner if one of the GPU’s has a problem. I prefer not to do that, and instead check in on the miners a few times a day and reboot ones that have a problem manually. I probably need to try the reboot and auto-restart and see if I like it better, but that’s what I do now.

I also create a directory named log in my home directory where I have the miner log the script output. It lets me do log analysis with zabbix so my monitoring application can provide me statistics and send me an email if there is a problem and the miner stops working.

For mining Zclassic using Optiminer, use this script to use my pool (change your username!) by creating a file called startmining.sh or something like that:

#!/bin/bash
xinit &
sleep 5

# General options

# The following line did not have any effect on my system but might reduce CPU usage on some.
# export GPU_SYNC_OBJECTS=1
export GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR=1

POOL=zpool.blockoperations.com:3032
#POOL=zpool2.blockoperations.com:3032
USER=t1J17KZKuVEekb5hWxLvZJnVqiVu3PaH3Ts
PASSWORD=x

cd "$(dirname "$0")"
while true
do
 ./optiminer-zcash -s $POOL -u $USER -p $PASSWORD | tee /home/miner/log/optiminer.log
 if [ $? -eq 134 ]
 then
 break
 fi
done

startmining.sh file for Claymore:

#!/bin/sh
xinit &
sleep 5
export GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR=1
#export GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE=100
#export GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1
#export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
#export GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT=100

./zecminer64 -zpool zpool.blockoperations.com:3032 -zwal t1J17KZKuVEekb5hWxLvZJnVqiVu3PaH3Ts -zpsw x -wd 0 -r -1 -logfile /home/miner/log/lognoappend

I’d recommend mining to your own wallet on a linux desktop computer, but you can also mine to an exchange. If you mine to exchange, make the settings on your mining pool so you end up sending zcash or zclassic just a few times a day at the most. You can download those wallets here:

Zcash linux wallet

Zclassic linux wallet

If you need assistance in setting up your GPU miner on linux, you can looks at my previous posts and just use the latest information above as the update:

Optiminer build:

https://blockoperations.com/zcash-miner-ubuntu-linux-16-04-optiminer-1-5-amd-gpus/

Claymore build:

https://blockoperations.com/build-6-gpu-zcash-headless-mining-rig-ubuntu-16-04-using-claymore/