I’m actually solo farming with drives full of C6 plots from MMX only with CPU to keep as low as possible the costs in terms of electricity. I have the impression that passing filters does not cause the CPU to ramp up at all, it seems it does it only when a proof is found which is fine for me compared to FlexFarmer for example with partials.
My question is :
Is it doing the same with GPU while solo farming ? I’m seriously thinking about improving my farm by re-plotting to C9 and add a powerfull GPU to handle the workload when necessary.
When farming solo my assumption is the GPU will only spike when finding a proof and if it’s the case then it will be idle or near idle the rest of the time reducing the power consumption of the farm and I will probably re-plot.
The other possibility is the GPU is needed to pass the filter and will spike at each challenge, in this case I will stay with C6 compression level
I don’t know how much GPU will ramp up and down, what I can tell you is:"don’t use C9 mmx unless you have a small farm + baller GPU
basically C9 is not recommended because it uses relatively much power compared to the gain over C8
Yep if in a pool it’s not interesting at all because the GPU is required and spike for each partial, but while solo farming if the GPU is only consuming power when you find a proof which in my case should be every 10 days then I think it’s a tradeoff I can make.
I’m actually replotting one drive and I will test it asap to get the answer
MMX also taps GPU every 10 seconds for VDF verifications - but still, at scale, the word is GPU can absolutely be more efficient. Let us know how it goes (I’m running a tame setup too at the moment: GT 1030 GPU and C5 plots).
**edit nvm, thought we were talking about MMX Node, carry on everyone and disregard
Yes you were right, after I plotted a drive full of C9, it seems like the GPU is needed and spike at every challenge plots passes filters. Probably to reconstitue the plot in order to check for a proof.
So I’m sticking with C6 and CPU farming
There is no inherent difference in the tasks that CPU or GPU have to perform, the operations are exactly the same.
GPU is just better at doing decompression than a CPU is. With the caveat that you have to account for idle usage and the fact that some of the improvement will be in shorter plot lookup times and not in less power used.
So GPU will give you better performance/watt overall given a correctly balanced farm size and compression level.
I understood it too late unfortunately, I said at the beginning of the post my CPU was near idle for each challenge and I was wrong, it’s because gigahorse was using OPENCL and iGPU on my 5600G to check my plots.
Learnt this when I farmed my 1st block solo today, to my surprise generated through GPU and farmer reward was retained by MMX for the farmer fee, blocked the iGPU since
Quite a strange feeling, ironically lucky and unlucky at the same time… I guess it’s the price you have to pay to go solo, otherwise you go to pool and I might go again with flexfarmer soon.
