Once you have decided that you want to start mining cryptocurrency you need to work out how fast your mining rig crunch work blocks and earn you crypto coins. Working out how fast your rig is called benchmarking. We will use the BFGMiner coin mining tool to benchmark your system.
BFGMiner is a crypto coin mining utility that includes a benchmark mode. In this mode, it will tell you how many hashes per second your rig can computer. This number is very big so is abbreviated as follows:
- h/s - Hashes per second
- Mh/s - Mega (Million) hashes per second
- Gh/s - Giga (Billion) hashes per second
- Th/s - Tera (Trillion) hashes per second
- Ph/s - Peta (Quadrillion) hashes per second
- Eh/s - Exa (Quintillion) hashes per second
Once you have the number of hashes per second for your rig you can convert that into coins per hour using CryptoCompare mining calculator
Let’s dive into getting that figure. Start by logging into your Ubuntu 18.04LTS system where you are going to mine coins.
Install BFGMiner
This is really simple as it is in the default Ubuntu 18.04 repository so just run the following commands:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install bfgminer
Benchmarking BitCoin hashes
Again, this is super easy, you just need to run the following command to run BFGMiner on your CPU and GPU for SHA256 hashes that are used to mine BitCoins:
sudo bfgminer --benchmark -S auto
Here is the benchmark output from BFGMiner running on an 8 core CPU with an NVIDIA GPU:
bfgminer version 5.5.0 - Started: [2020-07-16 17:07:30] - [ 0 days 00:00:34]
[M]anage devices [P]ool management [S]ettings [D]isplay options [H]elp [Q]uit
Pool 0: Benchmark Diff:1 -Alive LU: User:Benchmark
Block: ...0000000000000000 Diff: () Started: I:?
ST:11 F:1 NB:0 AS:0 BW:[ 0/ 0 B/s] E:0.00 BS:7
9 | 74.63/192.7/429.4Mh/s | A:2 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
OCL 0: | 91.42/181.6/378.9Mh/s | A:3 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
CPU 0: | 0.71/ 1.83/ 0.00Mh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
CPU 1: | 0.66/ 1.72/ 0.00Mh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
CPU 2: | 0.70/ 1.82/ 0.00Mh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
CPU 3: | 0.68/ 1.77/ 0.00Mh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
CPU 4: | 0.74/ 1.93/ 0.00Mh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
CPU 5: | 0.70/ 1.83/ 0.00Mh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
CPU 6: | 0.73/ 1.90/ 0.00Mh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
CPU 7: | 0.73/ 1.91/ 0.00Mh/s | A:0 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
The GPU is shown as OCL and each CPU core is listed as CPU. You can see that the GPU is capable of a great deal more work than the CPU cores. This line:
9 | 74.63/192.7/429.4Mh/s | A:2 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
Gives you the takeaway hash rate of 420 Mh/s or 420 million hashes per second.
Benchmark LiteCoin and DogeCoin hashes
BFGMiner also allows you to select scrypt hashing algorithm which is used by other crypto coins such as LiteCoin and DogeCoin.
Benchmark your system for these coins by starting BFGMiner with the --scrypt option:
sudo bfgminer --benchmark -S auto --scrypt
scrypt hashes will give you a lower hash rate as you can see from the scrypt hashing rate on the same machine shown above:
0 | 9.8/ 25.4/ 42.6kh/s | A:13 R:0+0(none) HW:0/none
BFGminer has benchmarked this machine at 42.4 kh/s or 42 thousand hashes per second.