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Thermal Images of the iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC Miner
16, Mar 2016
Time for a bit more in-depth look at the operating temperatures of the iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC with the help of a thermal imaging camera. We are starting with the front and rear of the case that the mining ASIC uses, the front has four powerful Delta Electronics server fans that such cold air through the whole case where the mining blades are and the hot air exits directly through the back of the case. There are no other fans at the back, just open space for the hot air to exit the case of the device effectively cooling. The only other fan is the one of the server grade power supply that is mounted inside the case, another server grade Delta Electronics fan that is also powerful and noisy when in operation. The fans do not have power control, so they operate at maximum RPM all of the time making the device quite noisy, but also effectively cooled even in no so cool environment.
The four blades with ASIC chips are located on the side of the cooling fans and on the other side of the case is the power supply with the Raspberry Pi controller mounted over it. The side with the RPi and the power supply is pretty cold compared to the side where the four blade with 48 chips each are located. As one might expect the hottest part inside the miner are the ASIC chips, the rest remains pretty cold thanks to the high airflow provided by the cooling fans. Even the heatsink that are on the back of the PCB with the chips remain pretty cool thanks to the high airflow passing through them.
And now let us take a look at the chips themselves as the hottest element of the iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC miners. Under the stock operating conditions they do remain with a surface temperature range of about 60-68 degrees Celsius as the temperature varies slightly depending on their position on the blade. As we’ve said already the cooling heatsink is not placed on top of the chips themselves, but instead is on the back of the PCB. This is the easier way to make things work, but not the most efficient for cooling as the chips use the PCB as a large heatspreader that then passes the heat to the large heatsink. This results in higher operating temperatures of the ASIC chips as there is no direct contact, but the temperatures are still Ok for normal operation. You should however be careful should you decide to overclock in order to get some extra hashrate as this will increase the operating temperatures of the chips. It seems that iBeLink has already chosen the optimal operating frequency for the device that results in very little HW errors while providing optimum performance. Further increasing the PLL frequency over the stock 110 MHz even with just a few Megahertz may result in increased percentage of HW errors.
- In: Mining Hardware|Tests and Reviews
- Tags: ASIC DASH Miner, DASH ASIC, DASH ASIC miner, DM384M, DM384M miner, Dual Miner, Dualminer, iBeLink, iBeLink DM384M, iBeLink DM384M operating temperatures, iBeLink DM384M thermal images, iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC Miner, Tiannengbo Group, TNB0301, TNB0301 ASIC, TNB0301 chip, X11 ASIC, X11 ASIC miner
Normally when you run a multi-gpu mining rig you are monitoring the operating temperature of the GPU and if it is keeping an acceptable level, then you think that everything is fine and may not pay attention to other components. We have done an interesting experiment with a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 WF3OC-based mining rig taking thermal images of the back of one of the cards in the setup while it is mining Ethereum and while it is mining Decred. As you probably know the Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm used by Ethereum is heavier on the memory even though the total power usage is lower while Decred and the Blake-256 implementation it relies on is more power hungry and not so dependent on the memory.
The power usage of the GTX 970 while mining Ethereum is around 150 Watts while mining Decred it goes to about 175 Watts. The GPU temperature of the GTX 970 while mining Ethereum in the test mining rig is around 68 degrees Celsius while mining Decred it goes to about 75 degrees Celsius. This of course is with custom settings for the fans, because normally Nvidia wants to keep the target temperature at 80 degrees Celsius, but that might not be that great for 24/7 mining. But if you look at the back of the GPU with the help of a thermal camera you can find pretty interesting things like the fact that the backside memory chips that do not have cooling like the ones on the front of the card actually get pretty hot. A bit too hot if you ask us especially in the case with Ethereum mining with their temperature reaching about 105 degrees Celsius while the back of the card itself remains at not more than 75-80 degrees. In the case of Decred mining, even though the total power usage is higher, the memory chips remain with over 20 degrees lower temperature and the back of the card is similar in temperature, so the difference of the overall temperature is not that big.
So if you are mining Ethereum, especially if you are getting into it just now, you might want to be sure that the GPUs you are using have better cooling on all of their memory chips, including the ones on the back of the card if there are such. While there might be no issues in short term with such higher operating temperatures of the video memory chips, on the long run temperatures of over 100 degrees Celsius might cause you hardware issues and you would want to avoid these on a mining rig that needs to fun 24/7. Do note that while this experiment was performed on Nvidia-based hardware you can expect to see similar results on AMD-based video cards as well with Ethereum driving the temperatures of the video memory higher than other mining algorithms.
Today we did took thermal images in order to be able to see how well does the GAWMiners Falcon Scrypt ASIC miner deal with the heat, since we have an unbranded Falcon unit it is essentially the same as the standard ZeusMiner THUNDER X3 inside. With a power consumption of over 900W you might worry a bit about the thermal performance of the device, or at least be a bit curious how good is the cooling and if you are able to possibly improve it would that bring the level of HW errors down a bit.
As you can see from the thermal images on the outside the Falcon is pretty cool with the hottest areas barely getting up to about 42 degrees Celsius. The device uses two large 120mm fans that pull the hot air through the case of the miner over the large aluminum coolers inside the case, these fans are very powerful and a bit noisy. In fact they are so powerful that they cause some vibrations of the whole case of the miner and since there are no rubber feet at the bottom of the case the miner might sound noisier if the surface it is placed on picks up the vibrations and amplifies them. Not that the fans are that cool, they are a bit noisy, butt they do their job very well in keeping the device cooler and operating without heat problems of any kind. Actually what you should be more careful with is the cables from the power supply that go to the miner as they may get hot due to the significant power being transferred through them. If they are cool or just slightly hot to the touch they are most likely fine, but if they start to get hotter after you turn on the miner, then you might need to think about getting a better power supply.
Opening the case of the Falcon Scrypt ASIC while it is operating may not be the wisest thing to do, especially for longer periods of time as it may permanently damage the device due to overheating. The fact that you have fans pulling air from inside the case means that when you open the top the efficiency of the cooling of the device drops a lot and everything starts to get hotter and hotter very quickly. We did it remove it very quickly just to take the thermal photos and put back together the case in order to measure the temperatures as close as possible to the actual ones while the miner is working normally. As you can see on the left image the four big aluminum heatsinks remain very cool at about 30-35 degrees Celsius while the fans are pulling a lot of air though them. Looking at the boards with the ASIC chips on them things do seem a bit hotter as to be expected, the chips are pretty hot as the design of the miner uses the back of the PCB to transfer the heat to the heatsinks and the chips do not have coolers placed on top of them. Temperatures of about 60-70 degrees Celsius are apparently something that is not a problem for them, though you should be careful not to get the temperatures much higher like for example leaving the miner to work open for some time. The power modules of the boards do seem cooler than the ASIC chips, though they do get a bit hot as well. So there is the possibility for some improvements to the cooling of the device to be improved further and now that we have some thermal images we know where we should focus on, you are also welcome to use these images to work on improving the cooling and possibly the performance of the device.