what's the logic behind lowering the cards power limit, guys?
it's obvious that the card will force to downclock itself when hitting the limit and lose performance because of it
I've personally never touched the power limit, but I've always lowered the core voltage, with proper overclock it won't restrict your hashrate at all.
I do not totally agree with your description. In my case I have GTX 1070 Ti and been mining ZEC for 2 months.
In my little experience if I keep the power limit to 100% with +200 clock and + 700 men I get pretty much 40-50 sols/s extra mining ZEC but power draw from the wall it’s really high like 180W each card plus the CPU, motherboard, SSD, PSU and RAM so about 1180W. That in money for me means 849,6 KW per month and I pay 0.0840389 €/kw so around 72 euros in electricity per month.
By lowering the PL or TDP I try to find the sweet spot for the card to run full power with the overclocking settings without any downclock because it has reached the limits. For my cards (and my make MSI and EVGA) 70% TDP with +200 clock and +700 mem seems to be it so basically I only lose those 40-50 sols/s extra on ZEC but the power draw from the wall goes down to 870W which means 626,4 KW per month so 52,65 euros.
That all means I lose 4/5 euros per month with the lower hashrate but save 20 on electricity so overall I win 15 euros. To that you can add lower card temperatures lower fan settings and more life expectancy I would say.
Maybe you do exactly the same with the voltage but that’s unknown to me, never played with it and would need some mentoring to learn how to use it properly.
If I said something wrong please anyone feel free to correct me. I have used ZEC as an example because that is what I have been mining so far so can’t say anything about RVN and zealot enemy miner.
I have seen videos on YouTube, rigs with same cards as mine and everyone seems to be getting around 77mh/s using similar settings so I am not really that far off. My average now in ravenminer.com is 80 MH/S so can’t complain.
I think the lower performance is due to the fact that I am in Europe and connected to US server so more ping, and sometimes more rejected shares, the difficulty on RVN has gone up since yesterday and the pool hashrate fluctuates from 270 to 420 GH/s plus as someelse mentioned, X16R has different algos so my cards go from 10.5 MH/S with slow all the way to 24 MH/S with fast.
Anyway I have only been mining RVN for 24hrs so have to wait a bit more to see real numbers. The only thing I do not fully understand is why whilst the miner is submitting shares constantly (like 6-18 per minute) sometimes I can mine for 25 minutes without a single payment on the pool.
Any hints are appreciated