Dual mining Ergo + Kaspa on RTX 3000: a winning combo!

Mining Ergo and Kaspa at the same time on a single graphics card: the combination stayed at the top of the hashrate.no rankings for several days, at a time when the price of Conflux (CFX) had just jumped 55% in a few days. But tuning the overclock for dual mining is not straightforward. In this video (in French), we show you how we set it up on RTX 3070 cards in HiveOS (the principles are the same in Windows, launching the miners directly) and compare the result with mining a single coin.

Video from early 2023: the figures below date from that time. See "What about today?" at the end of the article.

1. The settings suggested by hashrate.no

We ran the test on RTX 3070 cards, which remain our favourite cards in the 3000 series. For Ergo + Kaspa dual mining on this card, hashrate.no suggested:

• a core clock lock at 1,470 MHz;
• a memory offset of +1,000 to +2,000;
• a power limit of 200 W, although the card ends up drawing about 135 W;
• a new parameter: a core clock offset (CC clock), on top of the lock.

With electricity at $0.10 per kWh, the site showed revenue of $0.43 per day per card, for a profit of $0.11.

2. Kaspa alone with lolMiner

For Kaspa alone, hashrate.no offered two profiles for the RTX 3070:

• Medium: 520 MH/s for 84 W, slightly below the maximum but with very low power consumption;
• High: 614 MH/s, about 100 MH/s more, but for 115 W.

We went with the medium profile, with the memory fixed at 810 (Kaspa does not need the memory), the core clock locked at 1,470 MHz, a core clock offset of 255 and a power limit of 130 W. In HiveOS, these settings go into the lolMiner flight sheet, under "Setup Miner Config" then "Extra config arguments". Result: 520 MH/s for about 60 to 75 W, so even below the announced 84 W.

3. Ergo + Kaspa dual mining with GMiner

For dual mining, we switched to a GMiner flight sheet. We ran into a few small issues with the miner and had to adjust the CC clock in GMiner's extra configuration. The settings we kept:

• core clock lock at 1,480 MHz;
• memory setting removed (it was at +2,000): you can vary it between 0 and 2,000 depending on the hashrate you want, and at 0 the power draw drops a little;
• core clock offset pushed to 220: at 250, the card crashed. You have to experiment;
• power limit at 200 W, as a safety net.

Result: about 140 MH/s on Ergo (an RTX 3070 usually does 160 to 170 MH/s mining Ergo alone) and 417 MH/s on Kaspa, for 140 to 150 W, which still leaves a little room for optimisation. Overall, you get about 75% of the hashrate you would have by adding up the two coins mined separately. We also tried BzMiner, without matching these results.

4. Watch out for the power limit

Be very careful: the miner does not always respect the power limit. During our tests, when we removed the core clock lock because of instability and kept only the power limit, the cards went above 200 W, ignoring it. Hence the importance of keeping the core clock lock and monitoring your cards' actual power draw.

5. Dual mining or a single coin?

With electricity at $0.10 per kWh, the profit per card compared as follows:

• Ergo alone, even highly optimised (160 MH/s for 110 W): about $0.01 per day;
• Kaspa alone (515 MH/s for 75 W): about $0.06 per day, a result confirmed on WhatToMine;
• Ergo + Kaspa dual mining: about $0.11 per day.

Dual mining was therefore the best option at the time on an RTX 3070, with card temperatures staying moderate.

6. What about other RTX 3000 cards?

We only tested the RTX 3070, but a few guidelines apply to the whole series. For the memory, stay between 0 and 2,000, whether on an RTX 3060, 3080 or 3090. The core clock lock, on the other hand, depends on the model and needs adjusting, especially on the RTX 3070 Ti, 3080 and 3090. The simplest approach is to start from the usual overclocking values for mining Ergo on your card, for example those on hashrate.no, then adjust the core clock offset and the memory.

What about today?

Earnings were already just a few cents per day per card. Since then, Kaspa ASICs (IceRiver, then Bitmain's KS series) arrived in 2023 and made Kaspa GPU mining marginal: Ergo + Kaspa dual mining on RTX 3000 cards is no longer relevant. The logic behind the settings (core clock lock, offset, memory, safety power limit) remains useful, however, for anyone still mining on GPUs.

To mine Kaspa today, explore our Kaspa miners and estimate your earnings with our Kaspa profitability calculator. For the basics of graphics card overclocking, see our complete overclocking tutorial for HiveOS and Windows.