Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

Bitmain AntMiner S2 1 THS Miner Starts Shipping in April

18, Mar 2014

bitmaintech-antminer-s1-asic-miner

The company Bitmain Technologies has announced that the production of the successor of their 180 GHs AntMiner S1 Bitcoin ASIC (on the photo above) is underway and they are going to be shipping the 1 Terahash AntMiner S2 starting in April (next month). The Bitmain has become known for their fast shipping and very competitive prices that go down with the difficulty increase and they are yet again showing how to do business with BTC ASICs. The new S2 units are based on the company’s 55nm BM1380 chips that are used in the S1 miners, but apparently they have managed to achieve high-density chip chains and lower power usage in order to be able to squeeze 1 Terahash in a 4U case along with a 1000W PSU manufactured by Enermax.


Bitmain AntMiner S2 Specifications:

– Hash rate: more than 1,000GH/s
– Power consumption: 1,000W from the wall
– Power efficiency: 1Watt/GH/s
– PSU: 1000W produced by Enermax, 80PLUS gold
– 4U Rack
– PSU inside
– Plug and Mining
– Stable and quietly

The pre-orders for the first batch of the new Bitmain AntMiner S2 1 THS ASIC miners have been filled with a price of $3899 USD (6.34 BTC) and a shipping date of April 1st (not a joke hopefully), the second bach of devices is scheduled for April 10th shipping and the price is a bit low at $3599 USD (5.852 BTC) and there are still units available. The new S2 miners do come a bit more expensive than 5x AntMiner S1 miners overclocked to 200 GHs each to give you a total of 1000 GHS with a price of less than 5 BTC. The difference however is that the power consumption for the S2 miner is 1000W and for the same hashrate with S1 miners you would get roughly about 2100-2100W. So with S1 you get cheaper price for the hardware (you will need to also buy 5x 500W+ PSUs for the miners), but more than double the power consumption for the same hashrate, even though the same chips are used in both products. Putting more BM1380 chips running at lower voltage and frequency is what BitMain has done in order to lower the power usage and get better performance per watt without having to increase the cost of the hardware too much.

– For more information about Bitmain Technology’s current and upcoming BTC ASIC miners…

Motherboard Maker Biostar To Launch Bitcoin ASIC Devices Soon

18, Mar 2014

biostar-btc-24gh-bitcoin-asic

The motherboard maker Biostar is apparently going to be launching soon a dedicated crypto mining motherboard or as the call it a “Professional Bitcoin Mining Machine”. The product called Biostar BTC-24GH will use 64 ASIC chips on a single board that supposedly will provide 24 GH/s hashrate for mining Bitcoins (SHA-256). There is no word about release date or pricing available, but this offer already seems like a too little, too late thing with other ASIC makers going for the Terahash range already and the newtwork difficulty already way too high for just 24 GH/s to be profitable, unless it is very power efficient and very cheap, both of which do not seem very likely and you’ll now in a moment why.

biostar-btc-24gh-bitcoin-asic-2

The specifications of the 24 GH/s SHA-256 ASIC device say 130W as power consumption per module and you can stack up modules, up to 50 together for higher hashrate. Each module will be with dimensions of 244×244 millimeters and use COM to USB connection to the computer. With 50 of these boards you could get up to 1.2 TH/s hashrate which does not sound bad at all, if the price is right, however you would need 6500W of power so in terms of performance per watt the Biostar BTC-24GH won’t be interesting at all. As we’ve already said: too little, too late .

– For more information about the Biostar BTC-24GH Bitcoin mining ASIC devices…

Voltmoding and Overclocking Even Higher the Gridseed 5-chip ASICs

18, Mar 2014

gridseed-asic-higher-voltage-mod

It seems that the community has figured out a way to do a voltage mod for the Gridseed 5-chip ASICs that allows for higher overclock frequencies and thus even higher hashrate. We have decided to try out the mod ourselves and report our own findings and results with our older and newer dual mining mode ASIC devices from Gridseed. What you need to do in terms of hardware modification to your miner is to solder a bridge on the place marked with the green line on the photo above. Then you need to run the latest version of the modified cgminer for Gridseed with an extra option for the gridseed options line “voltage=1”. Note that the space where you need to solder a bridge is very small, it is designed for SMD resistors and if you are not experienced with a soldering iron you will have trouble performing this modification by yourself. Also if you are not very careful you may damage the device by soldering something that should not be soldered and thus shorting the ASIC, so be very careful should you decide to mod the device or higher voltage!

gridseed-asic-higher-voltage-mod-power-usage

After performing the hardware modification to our two miners that are from different revisions apparently we have tried running them with the modified cgminer (download link for the windows binary below, for the source). The older revision of the device we’ve got with CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller trying to run the setting to set the higher voltage from within cgminer returns an error about the firmware not supported. The device has a firmware version 01140116 and apparently this version is not supported, even modifying the cgminer to recognize it as supported firmware did not help in being able to overvolt and overclock the miner. The other newer ASIC device with STM32 Virtual COM port driver was with the correct firmware version 01140113 and the miner apparently did activate the overclock and overvolt mode. The power consumption of the device we have measure with the voltmod and running at 950 MHz frequency was with about 2W higher than at 850 without the voltmod, or with other words 8W instead of 6W (in fanless mode) with 2W more with the fan working (10W and 8W respectively). If you are doing the voltmod however we would not recommend to use the device in passive fanless cooling mode, though at 850 MHz and with no voltmod we have been running a single miner for already 48 hours without any issues.

gridseed-asic-voltmod-overclock

With the increased voltage of the Gridchip GC3355 processors we were able to get from 850 MHz with no or very few HW errors (361 KHS) to 950 MHz with no to very little HW errors (404 KHS) after the modification. We could also go to about 425 KHS at 1000 MHz with very few HW errors, going up to 1050 MHz produces almost 450 KHS, however the number of HW errors we are getting at that frequency is significant, so the real performance is probably much lower than at lower clock speeds. What we would recommend as the most stable result is to go to 950 MHz as overclock frequency as good starting point after doing the voltmod and go up in 50 MHz steps to see how will your miners perform at higher frequencies and if they will do any better results. The latest version of cgminer supports overclock up to 1300 MHz in 50 MHz steps, so you can go pretty high, though you should be careful as the increased voltage and frequency might lead to damage of the device.

– You can download cgminer 3.7.2 for Scrypt mining on Gridseed 5-chip GC3355 ASICs on Windows OS here…


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