PhoenixMiner Review and Benchmark
Developed by a team of anonymous programmers, the PhoenixMiner came out to compete with Claymore Dual Miner. Those two are well-known, well established miners that offer everything we need to mine Ethash. My question is – why would we need yet another Ethash miner?
Announced the next day after Christmas in 2017, the PhoenixMiner grew quite popular in Bitcointalk forums. Starting as a very raw and simplistic application, the miner now competes with Claymore and Ethash with it comes to complexity and customization.
The main reason for that is in the developer’s claims that the PhoenixMiner offers faster hashrate than the aforementioned ones. That’s quite a bold claim and the purpose of this article is to compare the two miners hashrate-wise side by side.
PhoenixMiner System Requirements
- AMD or Nvidia Cards – the miner supports mixed rigs
- Windows x64 (Windows 7 is better for GTX 9×0 GPUs)
- For AMD, use the newest drivers (18.1.1 or 18.2.1)
- If you are planning on using a third-party hardware monitoring program, the only ones that work good with Phoenix are GPU-Z and MSI Afterburner.
My first impression from this miner was that it is quite a nice end-user experience. Starting with a well-detailed and constantly updated BitcoinTalk thread, the miner is definitely not harder to use than Claymore’s.
PhoenixMiner can either run with command line options or without those by using a config file. There is a secondary config file called ‘epools’ that serves as a list of ethash pools to for the miner to use. This makes it a good option for large mining rigs – besides being able to run one instance of the miner on each separate card of the rig, you can copy-paste your best config files to your other rigs.
This miner can also be remotely controlled just like Claymore’s miner. You can’t however use Windows Remote Desktop (RDP) – use VNC or TeamViewer instead. Both config files can be updated remotely in real time.
For the full list of commands, check this official thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2647654.0
While the PhoenixMiner is not a fork of Claymore Dual Ethereum, it does completely support its command line and config file syntax. This makes the transition from Claymore to Phoenix quite easy and painless – you can use the exact same config files without the need to modify anything.
PhoenixMiner vs Claymore – Benchmark Comparison
Download PhoenixMiner precompiled: https://mega.nz/#!s5pTEZ5Z!ioPE3ofL7JoXdET5GxVrAo2_4jOzThhoYPavxYQPlBY
Ethash algo coins: Ethereum (ETH), Ethereum Classic (ETC), Akroma (AKA), Ubiq (UBQ), Expanse (EXP), Ellaism (ELLA), Pirl (PIRL), Metaverse (ETP), Musicoin (MUSIC), Pegascoin (PGC), Callisto (CLO) etc..
RX 470 4GB
PhoenixMiner
- Overall Hashrate: 149.3 Mh/s (30.120 Mh/s per gpu)
- Clocks 1200/2100
RX 470 4GB
Claymore 11.9
- Overall Hashrate: 148.8 Mh/s (29.950 Mh/s per gpu)
- Clocks 1200/2100
RX 580 8GB
PhoenixMiner
- Overall Hashrate: 193.100 Mh/s (32.150 Mh/s per gpu)
- Clocks 1240/2250
RX 580 8GB
Claymore 11.9
- Overall Hashrate: 192.100 Mh/s (31.990 Mh/s per gpu)
- Clocks 1240/2250
Pros:
- Low dev fee (0.65%)
- Easy transition from Claymore to Phoenix and back
- Supports older GPUs with enough VRAM
Cons:
- Dual mining not supported (yet)
- No Linux version (yet)
In Conclusion
I’m glad I have had the chance to test this miner firsthand on a handful of the most popular GPUs. Those were my results – what I would recommend you to do is to try the miner yourself – maybe you will be able to squeeze even more hashes from it than I did 🙂
As for today, the bigger drawback of the PhoenixMiner is its lack of dual mining. That being said, its devs promised us to add that feature somewhere in the near future. Looking back at how much the miner has evolved in the last 6 months, I am prone to believe that dual mining will eventually be added someday soon.
Thank you for reading!
As always, your comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome. I'd love to hear about your own experiences!
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