There are three options for CPU mining Monero on a pool. Which one is best?

Question

I see Claymore's CPU miner, Wolf's CPU miner, and YAM. How do I know which one to choose?

Answer 1

Try them and see? Of the three Wolf's CPU miner is the only open source option; the other two, claymore and yam are closed source and do "fee mining" for the creator, sending a few percent of the hashes to the creator's pool and address of choice. I don't think there's been a really objective comparison of the three, especially across a range of processors. The best way to see would probably be to use each to mine on a largeish pool for a day or three using each of them when difficulty is relatively flat and see which gives the largest payout.

Edit: there is also now the open source xmr-stak miner, which I believe has a default donation to dev that can be disabled.