Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

Bitcoin Mining Getting Harder and Harder for Miners

9, Oct 2014

bitcrane-bitcoin-asic-miner

Have you looked at the specifications of the currently available generation of Bitcoin ASICs lately while considering getting a miner in order to get some coins at home? As Bitcoin network difficulty is progressively increasing every ~13 days, the hardware manufacturers are already hitting the limits of the 28nm production technology and the BTC exchange rate stays at low levels things are not looking good. We have checked what you can expect to earn with some of the SHA-256 ASIC miners for Bitcoin and have done some calculations that you can see below using the current network difficulty as a base.


SHA-256 ASIC Miners for Bitcoin:

Rockminer R3 Box – 450 GHS @ 450W – $185 USD
BitMain AntMiner S3+ – 453 GHS @ 355W – $215 USD
Rockminer T1 BOX – 800 GHS @ 1000W – $349 USD
BitCrane T-110 – 1.1 THS @ 1100W – $1299 USD
Spondoolies-Tech SP20 Jackson – 1.7 THS @ 1100W – $1190 USD
BitMain AntMiner S4 – 2 THS @ 2000W – $1250 USD

Looking at the list of miners above you can see that they are actually not that many options available that you are currently able to order and get very soon in your own hands. There are some miners available for pre-order with next month shipping or Q1 2015 expected availability for example but we have not included these. KnCMiner’s Neptune is also not included as these are not being sold at the moment and even if they did at the last listed price nobody would be buying them anyway. We have not listed some other miners from companies that are supposed to be shipping, but we have not found a single trustworthy review or confirmation from anyone that actually received a product from them.


Expected daily mined BTC with the current network difficulty:

Rockminer R3 Box – 0.006466 daily, 0.04526 weekly, 0.194 monthly
BitMain AntMiner S3+ – 0.006509 daily, 0.04556 weekly, 0.1953 monthly
Rockminer T1 BOX – 0.01149 daily, 0.08043 weekly, 0.3447 monthly
BitCrane T-110 – 0.0158 daily, 0.1106 weekly, 0.474 monthly
Spondoolies-Tech SP20 Jackson – 0.02443 daily, 0.171 weekly, 0.7329 monthly
BitMain AntMiner S4 – 0.02874 daily, 0.2012 weekly, 0.8623 monthly

Do note that the above numbers represent what you can earn with the hashrate that the specific ASIC miner provides with a Bitcoin network difficulty remaining at 35,002,482,026 for the duration of the whole specified period. Also these numbers represent the mined coins and you would need to subtract the costs for the electricity from them based on the power usage for the miner and your electricity prices per kWh in order to get an actual profit you will get. As you can see even 2 THS are already not that much and you are going to mine less than 1 BTC per month with this hashrate and with the current sub $400 USD price for Bitcoin when you subtract the electricity fee (can get to half the mined coins) things do not look promising. So for small time miners Bitcoin mining with ASIC miners is not very interesting anymore and even for larger farms things might not be that bright as you might think, so it is no surprise that some of these are selling their hashrate in the form of cloud services. The only thing that could make Bitcoin mining attractive to normal users again is a significant increase in the price of BTC, so you can be mining now and keeping the mined coins waiting for that to happen…

Hashnest Still Has ~2 PHS of Bitcoin Cloud Hashrate to Sell

3, Oct 2014

hashnest-new-hashrate-prices

It seems that Hashnest, Bitmain’s Bitoin cloud mining platform, is having trouble to sell their initial 4 Petahashes worth of Bitcoin hashrate even though they have recently lowered the price per GHS down to 0.001125 BTC from 0.00135 BTC. They still have almost 2 PHS unsold and the reason for that is very simple – with the current BTC price the maintenance fees you need to pay are about 60% of what you are mining with your purchased hashrate. The new lower price was apparently not the only countermeasure they have taken, as we have received 20% increase in our initial purchase of 100 GHS to try out the service when it was announced early last month. We have not seen any official announcement or received anything by email about the increase of the hashrate, but it seems that this is some kind of bonus…

The hashrate we have purchased on 2nd of September was 100 GHS for 0.135 BTC and now, a month later, we are checking how things are progressing with our earned coins for this whole time. What we have earned until 2nd of October in our wallet is 0.0318239 BTC or a bit short of 1/4th of the amount we have paid for 1 month. That however does not mean that we are going to be able to ROI in three more months, because of the constantly increasing network difficulty it will take more time than that, especially if the fees continue to remain as high as they currently are. So at the moment it may not be a wise idea to invest in cloud hashrate at Hashnest and people apparently are aware of that as the service is having trouble to sell the second half of their initial offering of 4 PHS Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate powered by Bitmain AntMiner S2 ASIC miners.

Crypto Mining Performance of the New Nvidia GeForce GTX 980

19, Sep 2014

gtx-980-ccminer

Nvidia has just introduced their new high-end Maxwell-based GPUs the GTX 980 and GTX 970 and the expectations from them in terms of performance for crypto mining are pretty high. After earlier this year we saw what the mid-range GTX 750 Ti, the first Maxwell card was capable of, we already had high hopes for the upcoming faster models. Apparently we are not going to be disappointed by the performance we are going to get, below you can see a chart with the hashrate that the new GeForce GTX 980 (GM204) provides in various crypto algorithms. These were actual tests ran using the latest versions of CudaMiner and ccMiner with support for Compute 5.0 with no special optimizations that could possibly benefit the new cards any further.

gtx-980-cryptomining-hashrate

In the table you can see the algorithm, the hashrate you get with the GTX 980 and the TDP usage percentage. The GeForce GTX 980 has a TDP rating of just 165 Watts, so with this maximum power consumption you can see that not all algorithms are utilizing it at 100%, meaning the actual power usage is lower. The performance you can expect to get from the GTX 980 is roughly about three times higher with about three times more power usage as compared to the GTX 750 for crypto mining. The initial price of the GTX 980 however could be a reason for miners to go to the slightly slower GTX 970 model for crypto mining as you should be able to get two GTX 970s for a price a bit higher than for a single GTX 980 and the performance you will get from the two cards should be significantly better than from a single GTX 980.

gtx-980-overclock-results

The results posted above are with a reference GTX 980 card running at stock frequency, considering that the GM204 does overclock really good, higher results can be attained when the card is overclocked. The second set of results (the OC ones) are achieved with the card overclocked to GPU at 1520 MHz, Video RAM to 8250 MHz and TDP limiter set to the maximum 125%. This is really pushing the GTX 980 to its stable maximum limits as the card really does handle serious overclock pretty well. Unfortunately we do not have access to a GTX 970 GPU for the moment, so we cannot yet test to see the difference in performance, though it should not be that high, but the 970 should be available at a much more attractive price, so it could be the more obvious choice for crypto mining rigs. The GTX 750 Ti still seems like a good more budget oriented solution for mining.

You should be well aware of the fact that some ccMiner forks are nor working very well with the GTX 980, we’ve had some weird results showing like way too little load and low hashrate or the miner crashing, also one of the reasons that not all available algorithms are listed. The GTX 980 and GTX 970 does support Compute 5.2 and not all forks of ccMiner we have used for testing are compiled to even support the Compute 5.0, the CudaMiner has not been updated for a while and we have used the latest official release for the Scrypt testing… not that you would use a GPU nowadays to mine Scrypt crypto coins anyway.


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