A few days ago we have posted our first test results from the new Gridseed Blade Miner. We got early remote access to a single unit that we were able to test and report our findings before the devices actually started shipping thanks to our friends at MinerEU who are an official Gridseed EU distributor. Meanwhile we got a second unit attached to the system we were testing, so we were able to run some longer tests with two devices in order to see what variance we can expect from device to device. We also expanded the tests to cover various usage scenarios to check what hashrate you can expect to get if mining for a fixed higher difficulty coin such as LTC as well as if you are mining in auto profit switching mode to mine the most profitable crypto coin. Meanwhile the new Gridseed Blade Miners should start shipping tomorrow, so the people that have ordered them should start receiving their units very soon.

We are starting up with a result showing the two Gridseed Blade Miners, each of which is reported as two separate devices, fixed in mining for LTC with a worker difficulty of 256 at the scryptguild pool. The Blade Miners are running at 800 MHz, a frequency that can normally provide up to about 5.6 MHS in mining a fixed crypto currency with higher worker difficulty. Note that one of the PCBs, namely the GSD 1 device does report a lower actual hashrate and that is a direct result of getting some HW errors from that PCB. It seems that this could be related to the cooling not giving a good contact to one of the PCB sides for example, so we recommend to inspect your miners and if needed to optimize them a bit before running them, just in case and to get the best performance. This is something that we recommend doing for the smaller 5-chip Gridseed ASIC devices as well, especially if you plan to overclock and voltmod them, you need to check the contact between the cooler and the chips.

Notice that the poolside result is pretty much consistent with the local reported actual hashrate. Do note the other worker above the Blade miner, it is from a voltage modified 5-chip Gridseed ASIC running at about 490 KHS local hashrate (1150 MHz). You can see that with close number of submitted shares to the pool, the number of rejected (stale) shares is almost twice as high on the smaller ASIC as compared to the Blade Miner. The reason for that difference is that the small miner is running on automatic profit switching and 64 worker difficulty, so it gets more stale shares due to the often switching between different crypto coins and due to the fact that some are with lower difficulty and many blocks are calculated quickly.

So how about leaving the two Gridseed Blade Miners for a few days to run in auto profit switching mode at 64 worker difficulty at scryptguild, the miners were running in 800 MHz. The result is quite interesting, local hashrate reported at about 5 MHS per device with about 6.8-6.9% of stale shares (the percentage is higher as expected) and more HW errors that you would normally get if mining for a specific coin only. What you should be well aware of is that based on the pool and the type of mining you are doing you might be getting different performance that could be lower or higher than what the official specifications about the miner say. Using automatic profit switching pool might help you get more profit than mining directly for LTC for example, though the extra percentage you might get may be lower in reality than what your raw calculations may show initially as you could be getting more stale shares as well as more hardware errors this way. So far we are satisfied from the results we are getting from the new Gridseed Blade Miner, though at the moment due to the uncertainty and the lower Bitcoin and Litecoin prices, people seem to be very careful in general when considering to buy ASIC hardware. And we are not talking only about investment in very powerful and very expensive mining hardware that is expected to ship later this year.

– For more photos, specifications and information about the new Gridseed Blade Miner…

• MinerEU Summer Promotion Prices for ZeusMiner and Gridseed
• Should You Be Gaming or Crypto Mining with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPUs
• GAWMiners Already Shipping Their Generation A Scrypt ASIC Miners
• Bitmain Has Announced New 7nm BM1397 ASIC chip for SHA256 Mining
• We Can Now Confirm That the iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC Miner is Real
• Testing GeForce GTX 750 Ti Maxwell for Alt Crypto Mining with CUDAminer
• New 31 THS Canaan Avalon A10 Bitcoin ASIC Miner is Coming
• Innosilicon A4+ LTCMaster 620 MHS Scrypt ASIC Up for Pre-order
• Sapphire Also to Release AMD-based Crypto Mining GPUs
• Innosilicon A5 DashMaster X11 ASIC Miner to Offer 30.2 GHS
• Innosilicon G32 GRIN ASIC Miners Now Up for Pre-order
• Voltmod Update for the Gridseed 5-chip BTC/LTC ASIC Miners
• Choosing a Good Motherboard for a GPU Mining Rig
• New Halong Mining DragonMint T2 Miner 17 THS ASIC
• Bitmain Antminer E3 Firmware Update to Extend the Miner’s Life
• Cryptonight ASIC Miner from Bitmain As Well – the Antminer X3
• First Impressions from the iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC Miner
• Integrated Intel GPUs that you can Mine Crypto Coins On with OpenCL
• What is the Power Consumption of the ZeusMiner Blizzard Scrypt ASIC
• The Evolution of the Innosilicon A4 Dominator Scrypt ASIC Miners
• Baikal Miner BK-D, a New First Dual Mining ASIC Miner
• iBeLink DM384 Specification and Users Manual Now Available
• Affordable and Low Power Hashra 100 MHS Astro Scrypt ASIC to be Available in December
• Innosilicon Taking Pre-Orders for its G32 GRIN ASIC Miner
• Antminer L3+ Blissz Modified Firmware For Improved Performance