Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

More Scrypt ASICs Apparently Shipping, Some Still Not

29, Oct 2014

mat-excalibur-scrypt-asic

It seems that MAT (Mining Asics Technologies) has “resumed shipping” or more like actually started shipping their Scrypt ASIC miners to customers, there is even a user review of their 250 MHS Excalibur miner. Interestingly enough there is also a discussion going on that the MAT Scrypt ASIC miners and the Alcheminer Scrypt ASIC miner use essentially the same hardware. If this is true the it is interesting who is the actual manufacturer of the hardware when even the timing of the two companies in releasing ans shipping hardware also pretty much coincides. We can speculate that either Alcheminer or MAT has developed the hardware and one company is the OEM supplier for the other company, though there is no official information linking the two companies… or the actual designer and manufacturer of the chips could be a completely different company.

Another Scrypt ASIC manufacturer, namely Alpha Technology has still not started shipping their miners. The company did not manage to meet their initial target to start shipping in September and has announced that they should be able to do it in October. Now, at the end of the month we still haven’t seen an announcement that the company is ready with the actual miners and will start shipping this month, so we can assume that the target for shipping has slipped to November. Eve though about the company has shown some photos of their ASCI chips earlier this month they are apparently not ready with the complete solution yet. Alpha Technology like many other Scrypt ASIC manufacturers that do or did take pre-orders does not like much to keep their customers up to date on how things are progressing, even after failing to meet their promises, so status updates are still rarely released.

KnCMiner is apparently also shipping again some more Titan Scrypt ASIC miners to customers after they have recently promised to ship all of the remaining Batch 1 pre-orders in the next three weeks. As a result we are seeing some more significant increase in the total network hashrate and difficulty of the Litecoin network with the Titans performing best when mining high difficulty coins such as LTC. That however does not contribute that much to making customers of the company happy as people are still not satisfied by how KNC is not keeping their promises.

Bitmain Antminer C1 is a New 1 THS Water Cooled Bitcoin ASIC Miner

25, Oct 2014

bitmain-antminer-c1

Bitmain Antminer C1 is a new interesting offer coming from Bitmaintech, a 1000 GHS Bitcoin ASIC miner with water cooling. The new Antminer C1 ASIC miner comes in a kind of DIY form as Bitmain is only selling the mining unit with integrated water block for the ASIC chips, the rest of the cooling you need to buy separately and install yourself. The Antminer C1 miner is being sold for 1 BTC or $349.34 USD at the moment and you can buy a ready kit with the rest of the water cooling components for extra $50 USD or use your own components to complete the cooling solution of the miner. The C1 miner is offering 1000 GHS hashrate with a power consumption of about 800W according to the specifications quoted by the manufacturer and you will have a bit more power usage for the additional fans and the water pump for the water cooling part.

bitmain-antminer-c1-complete

The new Bitmain Antminer C1 Bitcoin ASIC miner with water cooling should offer a quieter operation, making it suitable for use by home miners and with the winter coming this could turn out to be a nice combination of quiet device that provides you with a heating for the winter. The drawback with the Antminer C1 using this approach for water cooling is that it may not be suitable for everyone, especially people with no experience in water cooling solutions for computers, even though the suggested ANT C1 kit should be easy to install. The miner does not come ready to be used and you need to buy extra hardware form a separate supplier, a decent and cheap choice apparently offered as an option, or use more expensive and serious PC water cooling components to make the miner operational.

– For more information about the Bitmain C1 water cooled Bitcoin ASIC miner…

Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 OC vs GTX 980 Hashrate Results

24, Oct 2014

gigabyte-gtx-980-970-gpus

Last month we have done some initial GeForce GTX 980 crypto mining benchmarks with the announcement of the new Maxwell GPUs from Nvidia. Now we got our hands on a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming video card (GV-N970G1 GAMING-4GD ) and have decided to run some tests to see how well it will fare against a standard reference design GTX 980 again from Gigabyte (GV-N980D5-4GD-B). The reference design GTX 980 we’ve used is running at stock frequencies, including the boost one and the results below are with the card not additionally overclocked, even though it can take quite an increase in the frequency. The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming card however is factory overclocked to a really high frequencies as compared to the stock ones and there is not that much left for the user to add, though some extra overclocking is also possible. The G1 Gaming card from Gigabyte also comes with the company’s Windforce cooler that proved to be a very good and silent cooling solution even when you overclock. Also the GTX 970 model is with a factory increased max TDP level to go along with the overclock the 100% of the power limit actually represents 250W instead of 145W or 165W. This leaves a lot of headroom for more power hungry crypto mining algorithms, even though in our tests not a single algorithm was able to hit 100%. The closes we got was about 90% of the increased TDP reached with the groestl algorithm most others were keeping in the 60-70% of the 250W TDP limit.

gtx-980-970-ccminer-hashrate

The results you can see in the table above are achieved with the ccMiner release 1.4.5-tpruvot using Compute 5.2 compiled binaries. This might not be the single best performing fork of ccminer available, however it is probably the one with most comprehensive support for various crypto algorithms (we tested with all of the supported ones) and with support for Compute 5.2. Some other forks might be able to provide slightly better hashrate on a specific algorithm, but the idea here was to do a comparison between a reference GTX 980 and a factory overclocked GTX 970 to see what you can expect in terms of performance. The results are pretty interesting as the factory clocked G1 card is getting very close to a stock GTX 980 and with some extra user overclock it might even achieve the same results. Considering the fact that the GTX 970 is still much better priced than the GTX 980 we can easily conclude that the GTX 970 and especially GTX 970 G1 Gaming from Gigabyte is a really good choice not only for gaming, but also for mining crypto currencies.


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