Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

MicroBT WhatsMiner M30S+ 100 THS and M30S++ 112 THS ASIC Miners

18, Apr 2020

MicroBT has announced their latest Bitcoin ASIC miner models – WhatsMiner M30S+ capable of 100 THS and WhatsMiner M30S++ capable of 112 THS, bringing strong competition to the already announced earlier this year AntMiner S19 and s19 Pro from Bitmain as far as hashrate and power efficiency is concerned. The 100 THS WhatsMiner M30S+ is supposed to be offering 34 J/THS power ratio with 3400 Watts of power usage, while the higher priced and better in terms of hashrate ad efficiency model with 112 THS WhatsMiner M30S++ is rated at 31 J/THS with 3472 Watts of power usage. It is most definitely good to have competition in Bitcoin ASIC mining, as otherwise things are not good when a single entity has control over most of the mining hardware being offered on the market for sale, fortunately Bitmain has long lost their market domination and we have a decent level of competition.

Both new miners from MicroBT are listed on their website already and are supposedly shipping, but are already sold out. The M30S+ is priced at $2740 USD and the M30S++ is $3900 USD wit deliveries starting it two weeks for the first orders. These prices are higher than what Bitmain is selling their S19 lineup, however they currently are selling miners for June delivery, so it is normal for the price to get lower for pre-orders that can be delivered in more than a month or even two from now. Do not forget that in less than a month there will be a Bitcoin halving meaning that by the time you get these miners delivered their efficiency in terms of Bitcoin mining will most likely be the half of what they are currently capable of mining.

– For more details about the latest MicroBT WhatsMiner M30S+ and M30S++ ASIC miners…

HashAltcoin Blackminer F1 FPGAs with Support for Tellor (TRB)

5, Apr 2020

The Tellor (TRB) crypto project has officially entered into the FPGA domain with HashAltcoin just announcing the release of support for their Blackminer F1 FPGA line of miners. Prior to that you could mine Tellor with your GPUs using a miner like the latest NBMiner, though with a GTX 1080 Ti GPU doing just about 750 MH/s now it is becoming rather pointless with a single Blackminer F1+ FPGA doing about 10 times that.

HashAltcoin Blackminer F1 FPGAs Expected TRB Hashrate:
– Blackminer F1 Hashrate: 4.7 GH/s
– Blackminer F1+ Hashrate: 7.05 GH/s
– Blackminer F1u Hashrate: 9.4 GH/s

According to Hash Altcoin’s profitability calculator the newly released Tellor (TRB) mining support is not that profitable at the moment and certainly not the most profitable to mine unless you have a Blackminer F1 Ultra miner. For the other two older products it is in the top 3, so if you you have any of these FPGAs miners physically or hosted you should keep an eye on the new Tellor (TRB) support and its profitability as it may grow or not with FPGAs replacing the GPU miners.

Trying Out the Autotuning Function of Braiins OS+ on AntMiner S9

31, Mar 2020

One of the most interesting features of the brand new Braiins OS+ firmware for Antminer S9 ASIC miners is the auto-tuning functionality that automates per-chip overclocking in order to maximize performance for the available power and temperature conditions in order to increase the performance of your available miners. Since we already had a couple of S9 ASIC miners that used older release on the Braiins OS we did a quick and easy upgrade offer SSH to the latest Braiins OS+ release and decided to do a quick test of the auto-tuning feature. We remind you that the OS+ version is not completely open source and “free” like the normal Braiins OS, but it is the one that features the auto-tuning option. Braiins OS+ has a 2% developer fee built-in as a means to help further development, but thanks to the auto tuning feature you should be able to squeeze some extra performance to cover the fee and still be better than manual or stock settings.

We started our testing by disabling the temperature control and forcing the fans to operate at 100% all the time in order to ensure that the cooling performance will be at maximum level all the time for these air cooled S9 miners. Then we have set the PSU power limit to 1500W and started waiting for the automated script to do its magic in finding what the optimal settings would be for all of the chips in the ASIC miner and what will be the final hashrate we are going to be getting in a while from this stock 14 THS SHA256 ASIC miner. Do note that you are not actually required to specify a power limit of the PSU that the autotuning algorithm can take into account in order to maximize the TH/W produced by the mining device, but that can help to ensure that you will not have problems caused by the miner reaching the limits of the PSU you are using.

The result after leaving the auto-tuning to run a while on the miner showed the following result: 16.5-16.6 THS hashrate within the set power limit of 1500W and operating temperatures of the chips trying to stay below 90 degrees Celsius with the cooling fans operating at 100%. We should also note that even though the firmware may do per-chip optimizations for best results, the web-based interface does not provide you with detailed per-chip information, you still get a somewhat summarized hash chains information. We are not sure how long it may take for the auto-tuning to finish or of it actually finishes or tries to find optimal settings when operating conditions change… it is just not well documented for the moment, but it does seem to be working pretty well based on our first experience using it. Of course depending on a lot of conditions the results you will be getting from the auto-tuning feature may vary from miner to miner, so do not expect to see the same improvement on all of your available S9 miners!

– For more information and to download and try the new Braiins OS and OS+…


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