Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

What to Expect from ASICMiner Block Erupter Cube Bitcoin ASIC

4, Mar 2014

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The Block Erupter Cube Bitcoin ASICs are the latest products (though already a few months old) to come out from the company ASICMiner – the same company that made the small USB sticks for mining Bitcoins. These ASIC devices are capable of 32 to 38 GHS (stock and overclocked) and come with a small form factor, but with a relatively high power consumption to be good choice to continue mining for much longer. We got our hands on one of these devices and decided to check it out and report some interesting things we’ve found out about it and that you will probably not find anywhere else. Like for example the thermal images of the miner in action that you can see above that give interesting insight into the operation of the miner. You can see that inside of the device can get pretty hot, while the outside aluminum case remains pretty cool, so the cooling is apparently quite effective in moving air through the chips to keep them operating problem free even when overclocked, even though the chips temperature can go as high as 80 degrees Celsius. Another interesting finding is that the safety fuse on the back of the device can get pretty hot, so e careful with the fuse while the device is working.

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The inside of the Block Erupter Cube Bitcoin ASIC consists of a main control board and six modules with chips, each of the boards with chips has 16 chips and the total number of chips inside the device is 96. These are the same chips that are found on the Block Erupter USB devices, so they are not very power efficient nowadays as compared to other alternative solutions available. As you can see the idle power consumption of the ASICMiner Block Erupter Cube is 130W and having the device overclocked to run at 38 GHS the power consumption can go up to about 350W (measured at the power outlet). The high power consumption is with the relatively low hashrate already is what is making these a bit outdated and in a few more jumps in the Bitcoin difficulty.

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The Block Erupter Cube devices comes with a built-in web management interface that also allows you to switch between the normal and overclocked operation mode with a click of a button. The web interface lets you enter the pool settings, so the device can operate without the need of a computer, however it only supports getwork and not stratum. And with stratum pools you need to use a stratum proxy in order to be able to connect to a stratum pool and that needs to be installed on a computer. We have managed to get about 37 GHS stable hashrate from the unit we have tested in the overclocked state and it was running stable and reliable for the whole week of testing that we did. And while the Block Erupter Cube ASIC miners do have some specifics, they do look nice and well built and already can be found quite cheap, pretty soon there will no be much point in mining for Bitcoins with them, unless you don’t pay for the electricity used. So do not get very tempted by a too attractive price for a Cube miner and better consider another ASIC alternative for mining Bitcoins that provides higher hashrate and uses less power.

Our Conclusion About the Scryptcc Scrypt Cloud Mining Service

2, Mar 2014

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After using the scryptcc cloud mining service for a over two weeks already we are ready to draw our final conclusions about it. Initially the service seemed very promising with a few things that needed to be fixed and some extra polishing of the already available features, so we had high hopes and have invested into it until going up to 400 KHS worth of Scrypt mining power. We were buying from the second batch of 100 MHS (total of 200 MHS or 200000 KHS) were sold by the service provided to users and we have also reinvested our earnings into more kilohashes. And as expected when the second 100 MHS batch was sold out the price per KHS started to increase as you had to buy from other users that are selling their already purchased hasrate. As predicted this meant that if you went early and bought from the “cheaper” KHS you could also profit by selling them later at a higher price, along with the earnings you will get by them mining for you.

Everything seemed to work fine and we’ve received our mined earnings every 10 minutes into the account balance, though we’ve noticed some bugs and have reported them to the support. We got response from the support that they will look into them and even suggested some workarounds. That was during our first days of use of the service, so we were not aware that the support will be so bad in terms of not fixing anything ad even not responding anymore to our numerous reports about the fact that the problem still exists two weeks after our initial report about it. We suspect that other users have also reported these problems and they are still not being addressed and we got only promises and excuses that the service is still in Beta and the reason for issues is that. Now, more than two weeks have passed since we started testing the cloud mining service and the issues still persist, so we were fed up and decided to sell our KHS and stop using the service. When money or crypto coins are invested into some service or product you expect to get something worth these money in return, and apparently we are not getting proper support, so we better stay away…

Selling the 400 KHS hashrate that we’ve had purchased in the service along with the profit from mining for this time, we ended up making about 0.05 BTC profit which is not bad. However we wanted to invest into more Scrypt hashing power as well as to continue using the service for longer periods of time. With this level of support, or the lack of such, we have decided to get out of the service with small profit and not risk having a more serious issue that will have to wait for who know how long to be resolved and that could lead to loosing money or coins. Our final advice is to stay away from the scryptcc cloud mining service and if you have already purchased some KHS there you might want to sell them and reinvest the coins into another more reliable and better service. We have done that and are already trying another alternative services and may revise our conclusion in a few weeks of time if there is some improvement.

First Impressions from the Gridseed 5-chip Scrypt Asic

1, Mar 2014

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Yesterday we have received our order of a single 5-chip Gridseed DualMiner device that is capable of Scrypt mining with a hasrate of 300 KHS as per the deice description, so we have already played with it for a bit and are ready to share what are our first impressions. A few days ago we have also shared our First Impressions from the DualMiner USB Scrypt ASIC that uses a single Gridchip GC3355 processor. The single chip device did work pretty well and although it needs a bit more improvement on the software side, it is well designed and works well in terms of hardware. So we were eager to try out the more powerful 5-chip version that we actually don’t know how to call exactly yet – Gridseed Golden Orb, Gridseed 5-chip Dual Miner, Lightningasic DualMiner it goes by all of these names with some variations in the color of the cooler – gold, silver, or red. The hardware inside remains the same however, capable of mining BTC and LTC at the same time or only Scrypt cryptos such as LTC with a higher performance then when working in dual mining mode. We don’t care about the BTC mining capabilities of the device, so we are going to focus only on the LTC (Scrypt) mining capabilities and performance.

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From the outside the miner looks pretty good, so we have opened it to see what is the build quality inside the device – checking the components and the cooling design. Unfortunately we cannot say that we are happy from what we saw inside. While the PCB design is good and seems well made, the additional components on top and the wiring disappoint. We see masking tape used to insulate components like for example the USB to COM board, amateurish solution for the button next to the adapter power socket etc. Furthermore our unit had two of the wires from the USB to COM board squashed by the bottom part of the cooler over one of the Gridseed chips. This could cause issues with cooling and can also create problems with communication between the device and the computer feeding it with work, so we had to fix some of the wiring and insulation in order to avoid possible problems in the future. We can say however that we do not really like the build quality for something that is currently sold quite expensive, it seems amateurish and like it has been assembled in someone’s garage without adequate quality control. We really expected more, especially after seeing how good the single chip USB miner was made…

cpuminer-for-gridseed-5-chip-asic

After fixing the hardware inside the miner it was time to fire up the device and try it out. So we had to look for some instructions how to use it as well as drivers and mining software (no documentation or software was included). We actually had some trouble having the miner properly recognized on half of the computers we have tried – the drivers did not function properly or did not assign a COM port for the device – it is connected via a USB port. Then to our surprise we’ve had to use a modified version of cpuminer that will work with the device and that software is really lacking advanced features that are found in the likes of cgminer for example. The miner software even does not give you a local report on the actual hashrate of the device, it only shows 0 KH/S, so you have to rely on the hashrate reported by the pool. There is also no adequate information about stale shares or hardware errors, so on the software miner side there is much work to be done for proper user experience – we need at least a recent version of cgminer modified to support the ASIC device.

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Moving to the power consumption of the 5-chip Scrypt ASIC miner. By specifications the device should consume about 8W for Scrypt only mining and 60W for Scrypt and SHA-256 (LTC and BTC) combined mode. We are only interested by the Scrypt mining functionality of the device, so we expected to see very low power consumption, but to our surprise the watt meter showed 56W. It seems that even though we are not mining BTC with the miner that functionality is still active and the miner consumer power as if the device is working in both BTC and LTC mining mode. We’ve read that there is apparently an update released to fix the power consumption issue, but only released as a source code for the miner and you need to be able to compile it yourself – hardly anything that most miners are able to do by themselves.

So to conclude our initial impressions. It seems that these 5-chip Gridseed Dual Miners are far from ready for release to end users, however the company (companies) making them have rushed them on the market due to the user demand. They do not seem well enough built with good quality control, the mining software is in a very basic form just to say it is available and works. There is no detailed documentation for setup and use, so you will have to figure some things by yourself… not to mention any support, so if you have a problem you will have to rely on the mining community for help. It seems that these 5-chip Gridseed ASIC devices are not even in Beta, they are more like an Alfa stage product rushed to the market. We suppose that Gridseed did not even consider using these as a separate units, but had in mind to sell them in packs of 10 or 20 orbs with an additional controller that they will be connected and controlled from. We’ve ordered a single unit just to try it out before deciding is it is worth go for a 10 (3 MHS) or 20 unit (6 MHS) solution, but after reading about issues people are having with these and having issues ourselves with the single orb devices we can say that we are not happy with what we got for our money. We expected much more and actually a finished product, not some half baked solution that you can hope will work somehow and not cause you issues. We cannot recommend to an average user or miner these devices at all, if you are a technical guy with a lot of experience and knowledge in mining and miners (including software) you might like the challenge however. The single chip DualMiner USB ASICs however are a much more finished and user friendly product, so you might want to check these out for now and stay away from the bigger 5-chip devices until they become a more complete and properly working solutions.


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