Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

Cloud Mining Service Testing Progress Report

20, Mar 2014

cloud-mining-services

We have decided to post a short update on our progress in testing various cloud mining services for mining Bitcoins and Litecoins without having to purchase any hardware, instead you just rent hardware that mines for you. We are already testing a few of these services and have shared some experience and feedback and will continue to as we continue using them. The biggest concern with most cloud mining services is if they are here to stay and will not take away your coins or money and run away with them. This is especially true with new services that have just launched and the way they run and the information they provide raises some concerns. That is why we are proceeding with caution when using them and start with small investment in hashrate for a few weeks to see how they will work and try them for a while.

Bitcoin/Litecoin Cloud Mining Services:

CexIO is the oldest and biggest Bitcoin cloud mining service, no concerns there, though our experience has shown that it is good mostly for trading GHS/BTC and long term investment in Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate does not work that well. Apparently the service is soon planning to launch Litecoin cloud mining as well, but it is still not available. Currently the price of 1 GHS worth of Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate is around 0.0117 BTC. The service has a dedicated pool that you may also point your own mining hardware to mine with a 0% fee for Bitcoins and since recently for LTC as well.

PiggyBack Mining is a Bitcoin cloud mining service intended for long term investment as there is no exchange where you can buy/sell the purchased hashrate at any time. The service offers one of the best prices per GHS for BTC cloud mining hashrate and you purchase it in the form of a contract for 5 years. Currently the price per 1 GHS is 0.0078 BTC and the price gets down usually every difficult increase of the Bitcoin network. The only drawback is that you are getting paid your mined earnings once a week. We’ve been using the service for a few weeks already and had absolutely not trouble with them.

Bit Mining is a service that we just recently started using, even though it has been operating for a few months already with Bitcoin cloud mining service, though we are more interested in the more recently launched LTC cloud mining as well. The company has announced a partnership with the BTC ASIC maker Bitmain not long ago, but more recently they have been hacked and for the last about 10 days already they have been fixing things. The service is almost back to normal operation and everything in our account is back to normal and the only thing left is probably the restoration of the automatic withdraw payments as currently they are confirmed manually and it can take some time for the coins to be available in your wallet (up to about a day in our experience). The prices are currently around 0.0098 BTC per 1 GHS for Bitcoin mining and 0.047 LTC for Litecoin mining. There are also pools that you can point your mining hardware to mine for you with 0% pool fee along with your cloud mining hashrate.

MarketsCX is a new cloud mining service that has launched just recently as a Litecoin cloud mining service with an exchange that relies on Gridseed ASIC hardware. The service had some hiccups in its operation like delayed withdraws that we have experienced a few times, but seems to be working stable and is here to stay. We’ve had some concerns about it initially, but it seems that they might not be a problem. What we did not like initially was the fact that the price per KHS worth of Litecoin cloud mining hashrate has dropped significantly in very short time, probably due to the significant processing power available at the service. The good new is that if you are just starting the service you can purchase hashrate very cheap, probably the lowest price available at only 0.022 LTC per KHS. The service has just started adding BTC cloud mining option as well, but it is not yet fully operational. Since this is a new and unproven service we do recommend to be careful and start small if you want to give it a try!

ScryptCC is the first Litecoin cloud mining service that we’ve tried a while ago and we were very excited about it at first. Unfortunately we were very disappointed soon after we started testing the service as they’ve had some small but annoying bugs and issues that we reported multiple times and now more than a month later they are still not being addressed. We gave up on the service completely as apparently the support is virtually non existent there, but we check from time to time if there is any change. We are also reporting the problems from time to time again hoping that they will be resolved for the users that still continue using the service. We would not recommend that service to anyone, so stay away from it, there are already other alternatives available.

Cloud Hashing is a Bitcoin cloud mining service that has been available for some time and seems to be a very serious one according to what they claim (2.87 PHS total hasrate), but we still haven’t given it a try. We plan on trying out the service soon and what has been stopping us so far are the not so attractive price they have for the hashrate that you can purchase in the form of a 1 year contract. You are not able to purchase less than 85 GHS as a minimum, so not easy to test the service with a low investment before deciding if it is worth to invest more. Still worth checking it out and we’ll soon be giving it a try with a small 85 GHS contract in order to be able to give a proper review of the service based on our experience using it.

Voltmod Update for the Gridseed 5-chip BTC/LTC ASIC Miners

19, Mar 2014

gridseed-asic-higher-voltage-mod-new

Yesterday we have reported about a solution for volt modding and overclocking even higher the 5-chip Gridseed ASIC miners for use with the cgminer software modified to support Gridseed ASICs. We have tested the voltage modification on our older and newer revision ASIC miners, and t has allowed us to go from 850 to 950 MHz overclock on the newer miner. Unfortunately it was not working on the older ASIC miner and it was not working with other software miners such as bfgminer or cpuminer for Gridseed. Meanwhile there is an update that solves both of these issues we’ve experienced with the earlier solution. In fact you only need to solder a bridge between another two points on the ASIC miner – note the second green strip on the right from the firs one from yesterday where you need to solder too. This modification will permanently activate the higher voltage and should allow you to overclock all (most likely) Gridseed 5-chip ASICS regardless of their revision and firmware version with all of the available software miners that support them.

gridseed-asic-permanent-voltage-modification-cgminer

The power consumption after applying the permanent voltmod is 10W per 5-chip Gridseec ASIC miner with the fan or about 8W if you remove the fan and use passive cooling (not recommended for voltmoded miners) or use another form of active cooling. Doing the permanently activated voltmod solution we are still able to get best results at 950 MHz with no to very few HW errors and performance of a little over 400 KHS. Pushing for 1000 and 1050 MHz is also possible (going for 1100 MHz or more results in only getting HW errors), but the number of HW errors increases as well, so the actual performance might be lower than running the miner at lower frequency such as 950 MHz with less HW errors. As always do try on your own hardware as there is a variance and you might be able to get better results with your miners. If you do plan to do the hardware voltage modification be aware that there is a risk of damaging the ASIC, especially if you are not good with the soldering iron, so proceed with caution.

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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