Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

First Hands On Impressions From the New Gridseed G-Blade ASIC Miner

24, Apr 2014

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Not long ago when Gridseed has announced the new 80-chip Blade Miner with an expected retail price of about $3000 USD we were not planning to buy any of these devices, but at the new $1600 USD price we have decided to order one and play with it. We just got our unit yesterday and have been playing with it since, so we are ready to share our first hands on experience with the new G-Blades. Soon after the announcement of the new Blade Miners we were able to do some remote testing of the performance, so you might want to check that out first if you still haven’t read the post. Now, that we finally have the device in our hands we can say it performs pretty much the same as we’ve seen from our tests.

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Starting with our first impressions, the new G-Blade Miner is a bit smaller than we have expected it to be, but that is not a problem. The thing that we did not like very much is the noisy fan – a 92mm fan is being used and a quite powerful one that can produce up to about 55 dB. The cooling radiators however do seem very cool after 24 hours running the device, so the fan does its job perfectly fine, however we suspect that with a quieter fan we could have achieved the good cooling performance and much quieter operation. The fan is directly powered by 12V from of the PCBs of the miner, so there is no temperature based control for example and it runs at maximum RPM all of the time.

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A single Gridseed G-Blade ASIC Miner consists of 2 PCBs that are attached into a single device, each of the PCBs has 40 GC3355 chips and has separate power and control logic built in. So essentially you get two separate miners each with 40 chips packaged in a single device.

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Do note that the cooling radiators are at the back of the PCB and not directly on top of the chips, this is the easier way to do things, especially if the chips don’t get too hot, as you use the back of the PCB as a cooler as well. There is a thermal pad between the PCB and the radiator on the back and apparently with the powerful fan there are absolutely no problems for cooling the Gridseed GC3355 chips.

Now, the actual problem is with the parts of the PCB that is not covered by the radiator – the place where the power and control chips are located as well as the connectors for the power supply and the USB port for control of the miner. The weakest point in terms of cooling actually do seem to be the voltage regulators and the powerful fan is some kind of a not-so-good solution to address the issue with the VRMs getting quite hot without getting a serious airflow. Gridseed uses International Rectifier 5300 and 5302 power mosfets and while these are a bit better than the ones used on the 5-chip ASICs, they are not much more powerful to handle serious increase in the power consumption. In fact they are not capable of supporting the power consumption that the GC3355 chips would require if they are used in BTC mining mode, so that is why Gridseed does advertise the new miners only as Scrypt capable and warns users not to try to mine BTC with them.

The good news for people that are interested in voltmodding these new G-Blade miners is that the voltage control part is again controlled by UPI Semiconductor UP1509 Single-Phase Synchronous-Rectified Buck Controller with 2-Bit VID Input control, just like on the smaller ASICs from Gridseed. So you can easily increase the operating voltage by replacing a single resistor, however we do warn you to be extra careful in doing so, especially with higher value resistors as the voltage regulators will not be able to handle voltages as high as on the smaller ASIC miners. Another good news is that the resistor you need to replace here on the G-Blade is a 603 type and not the smaller 402 type used in the 5-chip ASIC devices, so you can have less trouble replacing it. We have already done a voltage mod to our G-Blade and are currently running tests on the device, so shortly we are going to publish a little more details about that, meanwhile we warn you not to be in a hurry to mod yours as you can very easily damage the device. And using a 47 or 49 kOhm resistor will most likely be a bit too much for the VRMs to handle and you can easily blow them up in a matter of seconds without the appropriate cooling or even with such!

Performance Results from 2x Gridseed Blade Miner ASICs

8, Apr 2014

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A few days ago we have posted our first test results from the new Gridseed Blade Miner. We got early remote access to a single unit that we were able to test and report our findings before the devices actually started shipping thanks to our friends at MinerEU who are an official Gridseed EU distributor. Meanwhile we got a second unit attached to the system we were testing, so we were able to run some longer tests with two devices in order to see what variance we can expect from device to device. We also expanded the tests to cover various usage scenarios to check what hashrate you can expect to get if mining for a fixed higher difficulty coin such as LTC as well as if you are mining in auto profit switching mode to mine the most profitable crypto coin. Meanwhile the new Gridseed Blade Miners should start shipping tomorrow, so the people that have ordered them should start receiving their units very soon.

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We are starting up with a result showing the two Gridseed Blade Miners, each of which is reported as two separate devices, fixed in mining for LTC with a worker difficulty of 256 at the scryptguild pool. The Blade Miners are running at 800 MHz, a frequency that can normally provide up to about 5.6 MHS in mining a fixed crypto currency with higher worker difficulty. Note that one of the PCBs, namely the GSD 1 device does report a lower actual hashrate and that is a direct result of getting some HW errors from that PCB. It seems that this could be related to the cooling not giving a good contact to one of the PCB sides for example, so we recommend to inspect your miners and if needed to optimize them a bit before running them, just in case and to get the best performance. This is something that we recommend doing for the smaller 5-chip Gridseed ASIC devices as well, especially if you plan to overclock and voltmod them, you need to check the contact between the cooler and the chips.

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Notice that the poolside result is pretty much consistent with the local reported actual hashrate. Do note the other worker above the Blade miner, it is from a voltage modified 5-chip Gridseed ASIC running at about 490 KHS local hashrate (1150 MHz). You can see that with close number of submitted shares to the pool, the number of rejected (stale) shares is almost twice as high on the smaller ASIC as compared to the Blade Miner. The reason for that difference is that the small miner is running on automatic profit switching and 64 worker difficulty, so it gets more stale shares due to the often switching between different crypto coins and due to the fact that some are with lower difficulty and many blocks are calculated quickly.

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So how about leaving the two Gridseed Blade Miners for a few days to run in auto profit switching mode at 64 worker difficulty at scryptguild, the miners were running in 800 MHz. The result is quite interesting, local hashrate reported at about 5 MHS per device with about 6.8-6.9% of stale shares (the percentage is higher as expected) and more HW errors that you would normally get if mining for a specific coin only. What you should be well aware of is that based on the pool and the type of mining you are doing you might be getting different performance that could be lower or higher than what the official specifications about the miner say. Using automatic profit switching pool might help you get more profit than mining directly for LTC for example, though the extra percentage you might get may be lower in reality than what your raw calculations may show initially as you could be getting more stale shares as well as more hardware errors this way. So far we are satisfied from the results we are getting from the new Gridseed Blade Miner, though at the moment due to the uncertainty and the lower Bitcoin and Litecoin prices, people seem to be very careful in general when considering to buy ASIC hardware. And we are not talking only about investment in very powerful and very expensive mining hardware that is expected to ship later this year.

– For more photos, specifications and information about the new Gridseed Blade Miner…

Raspberry Pi Controller Images with Gridseed ASIC Support

8, Apr 2014

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About a week ago we got our Raspberry Pi and started checking out the different available images for the device that could turn it into a mining controller for Gridseed ASIC miners. We have tried pretty much everything we were able to find available and it is time for us to report our first impressions from the different RPi images we have tried as well as some useful information that e have stumbled upon while trying them…

Zoom Hash offers a console-only based Raspberry Pi image in the form of a very basic solution along with a short guide and instructions for installing the image. Their RPi image is freely available for download, requires 4GB and contains a compiled cpuminer for Scrypt only mining. Easily configurable via a command line script. You can login with user/pass – pi/zoomhash.

MinerEU does provide a very basic console-based Raspberry Pi image with support for Gridseed ASIC devices. The company does not currently sell Raspberry Pi devices, so you cannot buy a ready controller solution with the software, but if you have the hardware you can set their image on your own and try it out. The image is 8GB, comes with compiled cpuminer and cgminer and does support scrypt only mining, there is no web interface, everything is controlled through the console. You can login via SSH as root user with username/password – root/minereu.

Hash Master does provide their Raspberry Pi image along with the device only if you purchase the complete controller package from them. We could not find their Pi image available for download other then the complete package they offer as a Pi-based controller with SD card and preloaded image on it, so we are not going to be able to test this image, but it seems to be pretty much Scripta with some visual modifications and the proper cgminer for Gridseed. We haven’t been able to test it, so we can’t report anything, though it probably handles well being based on Scripta (earlier version though). They do sell their RPi controller a bit pricey considering the normal price of the hardware you get.

Hashra provides a downloadable Raspberry Pi image for use as a controller solution for Gridseed ASIC devices. The version you can download from their website is 1.2, though you can easily update from the web interface to the latest version of the software (the web-based part) and we have done most of our testing with version 1.2.7 and there is a newer one also available. The good thing about Hashra is that their software is basic and easy to use and provides easy access for both scrypt only (bfgminer), SHA-256 (cgminer) only or dual-mining mode (cpuminer + cgminer). The drawback we did not like much is that there is no root access avaialble for you to have full controll, though there is a user fixed image available. The 1.2.7 was lacking the ability to overclock past 900 MHz, but the latest 1.3.3 version has that fixed with up to 1300 MHz selectable and a bit cleared interface. We like that solution quite a lot, though the load on the RPi and the lack of root access is a bit of a drawback, still probably the best option for dual mining. What is still missing as a feature is the support for backup pools if there is a problem with the main one you have set.

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Scripta is our favorite solution so far at least in terms of features, especially after getting an image made by user that has everything setup and ready for use with Gridseed support, so no need to modify and compile things yourself. That particular image by mox235 is available here for download and it is really nice and easy to be used. Note that Scripta does support only Scrypt mining, you need a 4GB card, and the solution with mox235 comes with a modified version of girnyau’s version of cgminer that supports per device overclock via serial number (700-1400 MHz). You are able to pass individual parameters to cgminer, so no fixed drop down boxes to set frequencies for example, the web interface also does support reporting of serial number and device frequency, helpful when overclocking different devices with different frequencies. The image uses HTTPS for the web interface, though it relies on self signed certificate, so you will get a warning when trying to login, the default web password is scripta. You have full root access with user/pass – root/scripta. The thing that we did not like very much is that the miner control options do not seem to be working well, so when you change settings it is a bit frustrating to get them applied.

The best options you have are probably the Hashra and Scripta images for RPi, both seem to work pretty well, though you may still have some issues running them, especially if you plan on using a lot of Gridseed devices connected to them. It is important to monitor them carefully initially to ensure that your setup is working well before leaving the Raspberry Pi to handle things on its own. You are welcome to share your feedback and suggestions based on using any of the above RPi images with Gridseed support. Do note that so far we have been testing with a single Gridseed ASIC devices and we are now just going to add more miners to see how well will the Hashra and Scripta images going to handle more ASICs on the long run.


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