First Impressions from the Baikal Mini Miner ASIC

14 Sep
2016

baikal-mini-miner

We have been playing around and testing the Baikal Mini Miner for a few days now and we are ready to share our first impressions from the device. First off it really works and works well with all of the six supported algorithms – X11, X13, X14, X15, Quark and Qubit. This is the first and only ASIC manufacturer (to our knowledge) to offer a dedicated ASIC miner supporting multiple algorithms (though they are not that different from each other). The device is able to deliver the promised hashrate of about 150 MHS in the different supported algorithms and does it with a low power usage also as promised in the specs. Furthermore thanks to the low power consumption is it really compact and nowhere near as noisy as we are used to get from ASIC miners lately, so the Baikal Mini Miner is actually great for a home crypto currency miner.

We are going to be talking more about exact numbers as well as technical details in a future post about the Baikal Mini Miner. This post covers our initial impressions from the device after a few days of normal mining usage to confirm it is working stable and reliable and it does indeed do that. The build quality and the overall design is probably not the best out there, but it works well and apparently allows for easy stacking up of multiple devices as we’ve seen form the Baikal Quadruple Miner that essentially stacks for of these devices together. Everything about the device looks pretty impressive so far aside from the price, the device is being sold for about $500 USD or 56 DASH coins. So it seems a bit expensive, but it is not when you compare it to the competition in terms of X11 ASIC miners that are less power efficient for the hashrate they provide and end up costing you more for the same hashrate. Not to mention that they only support X11, while this one comes with support for 5 other algorithms, so it is more usable and offers support for significantly more crypto coins.

baikal-mini-miner-2

The Baikal Mini Miner comes with its own mini computer unit similar to a Raspberry Pi that essentially controls the device, so there is no need to actually connect it to a computer for it to work. All you have to do is connect it to your Ethernet LAN network and then open up the web interface for control and monitoring of the device through a browser, the device uses DHCP to get an IP address on your network. The web interface is a modified version of Scripta mining distribution for Raspberry Pi. The default password for the web-interface is baikal and the username and password for the console login are also the same baikal and baikal respectively. You should be able to change them for security reasons of course, though be careful when you change them to note the new passwords for access.

The Scripta mining distribution works stable and really well with the Baikal Miner, it is easy to configure and monitor the device with it. There is a temperature sensor available and it is being reported by the software, though you probably will not be interested much in it as the temperature of the miner is really low. The switching between the 6 supported mining algorithms is as easy as clicking a button after you configure mining pools for each of them of course. The software supports priority based failsafe switching between pools/algorithms. What it could really use however is some sort of automation for profitability based switching between the supported mining algorithms.

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Talking about profitability we cannot forget to do some calculation on the actual profitability of using the device as this is the factor that can be decisive in you choosing to get it or not. The Baikal Mini Miner does come with support for 6 mining algorithms, though not of them are really that popular and widely used. For example X11 is quite widespread, but there are already a lot of X11 ASIC miners on the market, yet it is still often the most profitable one to mine. Other such as X14 and X15 were never that popular, so unless there are some new coins coming out using them there are probably not that much worth mining (they use more power). Mining Quark and Qubit can also do you some good profit if you manage to catch something good. So for actual profit you will probably have to go looking for new coins or for trending ones and risk a bit more and mine them.

If you decide to go the safer way and just sell your hashrate on a service such as NiceHashfor example you will have a bit more stable and reliable profit in Bitcoin, but it might not be as high as if you can get by mining the right coins at the right time. Based on our experience using NiceHash with the Baikal Mini Miner we can say that you can expect to get something like 0.0034 BTC per day with the more profitable algorithms. That is like $2.08 USD a day, fortunately the power used by the device is really very little and the cost is not much, something like up to 1 kWh per day. So making let us say $2 USD per day and $60 USD per month it would take you more than 8 months to get enough to cover the cost of the miner. Not that much, but not that little time for the crypto currency world either, and that is only if the current conditions remain for the duration of the next 8 months. Of course you can also risk it and try to get more profit than using the more safer way, though in the end the result might be either better or worse. It is up to you to decide…






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11 Responses to First Impressions from the Baikal Mini Miner ASIC

Dem0n

September 15th, 2016 at 14:57

Can you comment on the temperature and/or ambient noise levels of the device while running? Everything else sounds great, but the temp/noise level could be a dealbreaker for a hobby miner like myself.

Felix

September 15th, 2016 at 17:00

i also own one and for me the noise level is low, regarding temperature it never exceeded 45° (europe ambient temperature, currently relatively hot)

stef

September 15th, 2016 at 20:47

i confirm very low noise level and temp around 40°

@cryptomining blog : you mined on Nicehash but did you find a way to auto-switch algos? if yes, can you share your configuration? thanks

Felix

September 15th, 2016 at 21:09

autoswitching on zpool works fine, nicehash not sure (as sgminer is 4.9.3 and not >=5.0)

for myself i have written a small bash script to switch between nicehash and zpool and select the most profitable algo

admin

September 15th, 2016 at 22:52

Still yet to see the miner go past 40 degrees Celsius, on the algorithms that use less power it is closer to 30 than 40, though that may depend on the ambient temperature a lot.

Didn’t yet have the time to write anything for auto switching, but maybe Felix would want to share his solution…

Felix

September 15th, 2016 at 23:40

the bash script is here: http://pastebin.com/ke8Rkkmg

it uses https://github.com/felixbrucker/profitability-service which has to be installed *somewhere*, the miner should also work (its ubuntu after all)

Felix

September 18th, 2016 at 14:48

turns out one does not need to restart the miner after setting the config with the php settings script, so i have removed those steps like so: http://pastebin.com/5WTFCj3C

Felix

September 20th, 2016 at 22:53

update regarding the temperature: with my current colder ambient temperature the miner sits at 26°C, no extra cooling

Todd Hill

September 22nd, 2016 at 00:06

I posted on the prior Baikal miner article, not realizing that their follow-up article had already been published. I purchased one of these miners almost two weeks ago, and it does perform as advertised. The speeds seem to be impressive, and in a perfect world you’d think that you had purchased a really powerful miner.

However, given the recent flood of ASIC X11 miners from Baikal and two other manufacturers, I’m seeing disappointing returns. On at least one DASH pool, my 150 MHs was quickly dwarfed by another user who was mining at an unbelievable 65 GHs!!! leaving me with a much smaller award than I had hoped for with my brand new X11 powerhouse miner.

In fact, the amount of DASH I received was almost on par with what I had been earning when doing X11 mining on 3 NVIDIA GPUs a year ago.

So while you will see very fast performance from your miner compared to the good ole days of GPU mining, understand that the field is quickly becoming crowded and it will take you awhile to break even on your hardware investment.

Brandon

September 23rd, 2016 at 19:19

I think I learned my lesson trying to be in the ASIC game when Scrypt got its flood of asics. Unless you have deep pockets and space/time/cheap electricity….it’s too hard to make a profit on a coin that has asics publicly available.

Fare thee well, x11…

Danny

May 10th, 2017 at 20:34

baikalminer.com is a CROOK and a SCAM (s or no s, they are all BULLSHIT)

I have been ripped off from baikalminer.com for $4676 and want you share my HORROR story so hopefully you don’t end up getting ripped off. STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM BAIKALMINER.COM !!! After weeks of research on Google and Youtube, I thought the Baikal Miner would be a good investment mining Dash coins at 300 MH/s using only 75 Watt of power. Boy was I in for the biggest SCAM and RIPOFF and RIDE of my life!!! After one month of Baikal Miner hustling and scamming me, he stole $4676 and I am now stuck with a defective Baikal Miner Cube. I am now still SHOCK and SO DISGUSTED of these people! This is why they don’t accept credit card or paypal. Just bitcoin, dash or ethereum. I don’t think there is any recourse or any way you can get the coins back from these people!

On April 11, 2017, I pulled the trigger and sent baikalminer 0.7216068 BTC which equals to $876.02 USD. These people are very difficult to deal with and very slow to respond on email. Worst, they only take bitcoin and they are located halfway around the world in China. So this made me very concern. 8 days later on April 19, the unit arrived at my home. I emailed Baikal on what power supply to use and they won’t recommend which power supply to buy or send me an ebay or Amazon link, they just said 12V 10A. I searched on Google, Amazon and ebay and end up buying 3 power supply from Amazon and ebay. The first P/S came home the end plug was too big and did not fit. Then a couple days later the two P/S I ordered on ebay arrived and this one fit. You would think spending $876 on a little box with a fan, heatsink and circuit board they would include a P/S. The box did not come with any manuals so I had to google to find the CUBE.pdf manual and figured everything out myself. When first powered up and log in with the default password baikal, the miner show down. It looks like they still have their dash wallet address on there. I setup an account on coinmine.pl and dash.suprnova.cc and added my account and dash wallet address to the Baikal Pool page. Doesn’t matter what I do, the miner still show down.

On April 24, 2017, I emailed baikal@baikalminer.com. The following day, they email back ask me to skype them.

Hi,
Thank you for your email.
Please contact us via skype in order to deal your business more effectively.
Our skype account: “baikalminer” (no more other letters or characters)
You can check the following link for your information: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1804508.0
We will take care of your request as soon as we get the message from skype.
Best regards,
Baikal

On Skype, they did not offer any technical support or troubleshooting at all. They kept on insisting I download and read the CUBE.pdf file.
http://www.baikalminer.com/cn/down/CUBE.pdf Their support is shitty! Then they wanted me to ship the unit back at my expense to repair it. I wasn’t happy at all!!! To make me happy, they offered a Quad unit at a discounted price. The miner cube is $800 + $76 Shipping. Total is $876. Quad is 4 miner cube so $800 x 4 = $3200. I already paid for the first miner cube so I just need to pay for the difference of $2326 and I have to ship the defective unit back. I wasn’t happy paying more at a full price when I already received a defective unit. So they offer 5% discount + free shipping + power cable at $2166 more + $876 I originally paid.

>4/25 Ok I will deduct the same so that you can pay the shipping price from your end for that cube.
>4/25 3196-870 = 2326$
>4/25 But you have to ship the product to us.
>4/25 Does it make you happy..
>4/25 Ok as this is our fault we give the 5% + free shipping and power cable = 3036- 870 = 2166

On April 27 and 30, 2017, I sent them $2150 to upgrade to a Quad Cube ($900 in ETH and $1250 in BTC). As of this date, I have sent them
$3026.02.

On May 1, 2017, they offer me two baikal quads for $2400 instead of instead of $3400 .

>5/1 Ok after lot of considerations in your case we feel like the fault is from our end only.
And to do the compensation for that if you are interested we ship out two baikal quads in which you have already paid for one and for the second one we give you 25% off + free power cables and shipping. So you have to pay 2400$ instead of 3400$ I this this makes you a happy customer.
What do you say.?
>5/1 This is only one time offer please don’t consider this discount in future just to make sure you should be happy we are offering this and please post this any where in social media.
As people will start bargaining..
This offer for you also only once from next time please don’t ask us as definitely we don’t give any offers anymore.
Definitely you don’t need to worry this time as I personally test the products which we are going to send you.

>5/2 Hello my friend we have received your payment
But we had an issue with our financial tem.
In the morning our jr accountant accepted that you can pay 1600$ later but from afternoon we had so many discussions and our Sr accountant is not agreeing for more than 1000$ credit to a customer and blaming me for giving such credit after 25% discount.
Some how I managed by telling that customer lost a lot because of the machine problem and managed to give you 1200$ or with huge extra offer.
Because we consider the money which we get before the shipping and after shipping we always will be having 50:50.

Case1) pay 1000$ and pay nothing except shipping the old product.
So here for second quad you will be getting 3400-1600 = 1800$ total to pay(800 already paid and balance 1000$). Close to 47% off on total for the second machine.

Case 2) pay 400$ now and remaining 1200$ after shipping.

This is just to make sure that it is fine at least we don’t make profit but we should not lose money by selling.
We sell our products through out the world and you are an individual customer for us.
I hope you understand our Sr accountant concern.
Please think for a while and let me know which case suits well so that I will proceed and also please be hurry so that tomorrow morning hours I would like to ship them. Thanks.

On May 2, 5 and 6, 2017, I sent them a total of $1650 in BT and ETH. After sending them the last payment, they said to me on skype “Hi my friend please contact us via email for the confirmation. thanks.” And this is when the HORROR begins. I email them at baikal@baikalminer.com and they just pay dumb and said they never received my $$$ BTC and ETH.

05/02/17 Paid $800 BTC
05/05/17 Paid $550 ETH
05/06/17 FINAL payment $300 BTC

baikalminer.com and all other baikalminer web site and all of the baikalminer on skype are the SAME people. They will hustle you in sending bitcoin, dash coins or Ethereum coins. They will steal your coins and you cannot do anything about it like me! I am very unlucky and very stupid to trust them! DON’T buy anything from Baikal Miner or any other web site or anyone on Skype. They are all the same people. I will attached screen capture of my skype conversion with Baikal Mining and emails so you can read for yourself and share with families, friends, co-worker and the mining community. I FEEL SO SICK INSIDE. These people have stole $4676 of my hard earn money. VERY VERY SAD! Don’t know what else to do.

Danny

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