Confusion over Monero Mining Software

Question

I have read all the Monero official website and many other sites(pools ...) and it seem there is no clear indication on what is the best software to do CPU or GPU Mining with Windows 10.

On the CPU side there is :

• Monerod (CPU mining only as per my finding)
• CPUMiner(Lucas and Wolf)
• Claymore CPU Miner
• YAM Miner
• XMR-Stack-CPU (new kid on the block)

On the GPU side:

• GPU (AMD): Claymore GPU Miner
• GPU (Nvidia): CCMiner (tsiv)

On both side what is the best option in term of performance (h/s)?

Is there other option that I should consider?

On the security aspect, I notice there is no signature for most of them, are they all safe?

Thank you!

Answer 1

The Monero Mining Wiki for Windows that I wrote can clear up a few initial misconceptions.

All of the ones you listed have been around for a long time. If you are running them intentionally, then they are safe. Often, virus scanners flag mining software as malicious since attackers often install this software on other users' computers.

CPU

The easiest mining tool for Windows CPU in my opinion is the Monero Spelunker. This simply adds a GUI to Wolf's CPU miner. Also pretty simple to use is XMR-STAK-CPU, which is newer and should have a higher hashrate. You can try rates for the other ones, but these two are the two prominent CPU miners.

AMD

Claymore seems to give the best performance on my RX 470s. Claymore's latest release added SSL support and lowered the developer fee. Wolf's is another option, which is open-source.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA mining support is quite limited. I believe ccminer is all you have.