Monero (XMR) to Hardfork to the RandomX Algorithm on November 30th

Monero (XMR) will be once more changing its PoW algorithm for mining in an effort to attract regular miners CPU/GPU miners and drive away FPGA/ASIC miners. Testing on the private RandomX testnet has concluded successfully and RandomX PoW mining will move to public testing on the XMR testnet later today. There is quite some time left before the fork happens though, it is scheduled for block 1978433 that should hit sometime on November 30th, so there is time for you to get familiar with the new RandomX algorithm by then. If you are interested in checking out the performance of your CPUs, then you might want to check the official RandomX Benchmark app (link for download below). There is also a not so optimized OpenCL miner available that works on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs available as well, though performance might be disappointing compared to that of higher-end CPUs at this point.

It is interesting to note that the RandomX algorithm apparently favors CPU mining due to its design even GPUs might not do so well initially with it, though we are probably going to see better optimized GPUs miners soon enough. All in all this might make CPU mining attractive to miners around the fork date, though there are other factors to take into account as well, so we will have to wait and see. AMD’s Ryzen CPUs are doing particularly good in the initial benchmarks of the RandomX algorithm as it is already being used by the new project Epic Cash (EPIC). You can see that the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X is doing particularly good in terms of performance with its big number of cores and low power consumption, though it is also an expensive and still hard to find product.

– To download the RandomX Benchmark CPU app (Windows and Linux)…
– To download the RandomX OpenCL GPU miner (Windows only)…