Mad Max Plotter, some test results, some general info

Chia Plotting
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Does it finish under 1 hour? / Not exactly for the average Joe!

A simple test done on an i7-8700K clocked at 4.3 GHz, Evo Plus (Gen 3), the “phase 1” finished in 55 minutes (which is impressive comparing to the current version of chia plotter).

What seems to work the best so far:

  • Bucket size: 512 (i.e. -u 512)
  • Temp1 disk: a fast NVMe (25% of all writes)
  • Temp2 disk: a RAMDisk or your BestDisk (75% of all writes)

What does choosing 2 temp drives do?
Files are split over both drives, the bigger .TMP files in the 1st drive and the rest smaller pieces (buckets) into the 2nd drive. During the phase 1, 2nd drive takes the .75% workload while the 1st drive takes .25%. After the phase 1, the workshift goes to 1st drive between 15 and 25%, the 2nd drive stays idle.

What about RAM?
RAM allocation does not matter. It takes “only” the default RAM needed per plot. Just above 3 GB of RAM. You can set it to 10 GBs or 20 GBs in the settings but it does not change anything.

And about CPU threads?
In phase 1, it takes “all” the CPU power your system got, all at 100%. Say, you have 12 cores 24 threads, even you set it to use 16 threads, it takes every thread usable. After the phase 1, now the CPU usage bounces up and down, but it’s way better than the official chia plotter, still multi threaded although the constant 100% CPU is ended after the 1st phase.

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What makes you say this?

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Thanks for the test information, but if you were throwing a lot more processor power at it and were plotting to ramdrive, it wouldn’t be hard to imaging cutting down the plotting time to below an hour.

I’d love to try it still haven’t figured out how to get it to run in windows. Might have to install VMware and try in linux.

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With some costly system specs in consideration, yes, under 1 hour possible, then we are stepping from the average Joe entirely.

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so you’re saying the media was right and it does plot within an hour :slight_smile:
just not on your system.

The overall takeaway is that there is a much faster plotter now than the Chia official one and Chia is actually talking with MadMax to bring it into the official code base (currently licensing is different, can be fixed)

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I tested on Windows 10, all you need is “to type” CMD in the start menu. lol

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Under 1 hour? For the 90% of chia farmers, no. For a lucky few, yes.
(So over-all, it balances more towards “no”.)

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Where did you get the 90% number from :slight_smile:

I get your point that this is more like ASICS, where specialized hardware will win out over your kitchen sink Desktop put together… PaaS (plotting as a Service) will get a nice boost from this for sure.

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Yes, you are right, that is my point.
… The average person trying to get into chia can bearly manage 2 plots per day.
My specs: Intel Core i7-8700K, NVMe Evo Plus 1TB, 3200 DDR4, well above the average specs, still, it took me 55 minutes to finish phase 1. (With official chia plotter, it takes me 1h 55m to finish phase 1.)

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well in the other topics about this there are people with 5950x that where getting sub 40 minutes plots.
Sothtech was also getting good results on xeon systems, even plotting to 2 x sas hdd’s, think it was 73 minutes.

Just the way you write this, you make other people out for liars, and you shouldn’t do that just because you are getting bad results on your system

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/Voodoo,
Maybe your can help /DjDemonD to run this on Windows. He doesn’t need to run a VMware, etc.

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are you sure you are really using the madmax plotter?

All the version I’ve seen so far, need compiling after dl, and the original one is linux only
which version are you using

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I’m using this version here
Sans titre

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Can I download that from you? I’ll send you some XCH if the plots I plot with it win a block.

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Please be careful, this is not official software… use in a VM if possible…
That said, there is a Windows fork (somewhat behind the linux one from MadMax)

Plotting does not require your privKey to be on the machine (only farming)… no Internet connection required… a sandbox env will do just fine

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you got a link to github where it came from?

edit nm

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Sure, wait, I make a copy of the folder and then share it with you

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Here it’s, if others say risky, well, take the risk yourself

Mad Max Plotter version 0.0.4

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Replace the farmer public key and the pool public key, they are useless if you don’t change them. I forgot to delete them in the copy folder.

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… and the directory path is not the usual \User\chia…\deamon, it should point to that MadMaxPlotter folder.