Archive for the ‘Tests and Reviews’ Category

Real world example with Protoshare (PTS) mining

25, Jan 2014

protoshares-ypool-cpu-mining

Here is our real world 24 hour test with mining Protoshare (PTS) with CPU only in order to get an idea what profitability you can expect with the current market price for PTS. We’ve used two CPUs – one AMD and one Intel on systems that already mine Scrypt coins with video cards the idea to not waste the CPU performance we have available since Scrypt mining with GPUs does not require a lot of processor power.

The two CPUs we’ve used for mining are:
– Intel Core i5 2500K Quad Core 3.3 GHz
– AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Six Core 3.3 GHz

The pool we used for PTS mining is ypool:
– 5% fee

The total earnings for 24 hour period (confirmed + unconfirmed):
– 0.10423418 PTS

The value of the Protoshares mined for 24 hours is as follows:
– 0.00138917 BTC
– ~$1.10 USD

The end result is quite interesting as the profitability we got in USD is pretty much the same as the one we’ve managed to get in our Primecoin (XPM) mining test for 24 hours with the same CPU hardware. A bit over a dollar a day pretty much covers the extra increase in power usage, so the real profit minus the expenses is minimal. But there seems to be GPU miners already available for PTS, so the next thing is to try out these and see if it is worth to mine PTS on the GPU or there is no point since scrypt mining on the GPU will be more profitable.

Bitmain AntMiner S1 Bitcoin ASIC Miner Thermal Images

25, Jan 2014

antminer-s1-btc-asic-miner-thermal-1
If you ever wondered how hot does the Bitmain AntMiner S1 Bitcoin ASIC Miner get when operating and mining for BTC now you can get a better idea about the temperatures thanks to some thermal images that we’ve made of one of these BTC ASIC miners. The AntMiner S1 has the cooling radiators on the other side of the PCBs and not on the one where the SHA-256 mining chips are placed, so the operating temperature of the chips is not so low. Running at the default hashrate of about 180 GH/s you can see temperature of about 68 degrees Celsius and it is of the voltage regulators above the chips. As you can see the temperature on the left is lower than that on the right side of the board due to the fact that the cooling fan is on the left side.


antminer-s1-btc-asic-miner-thermal-2
Moving on to the exhaust side of the AntMiner S1 cooler where the hot air passing through the cooling radiator passes you can see that on the hotter output end the maximum temperature is about 61 degrees Celsius. At the same time the web interface reports operating temperatures of about 45 degrees Celsius for the two boards with chips that make the Bitmai AntMiner S1. As you can see it is a good idea to think more about the improvement of the cooling of the ASIC miner, especially if you do plane to overclock it to 190 GH/s or even 200 GH/s. The hardware is probably able to handle pretty well higher temperatures than these, but ensuring good cooling will make it perform great for longer period of time and you would want to have that when talking about a BTC ASIC miner.

Testing Cloud Mining Bitcoins at CEX IO

17, Jan 2014

cexio-bitcoin-commodity-exchange-test

CEX.IO is the leading Bitcoin Cloud Mining and Commodity Exchange at the moment where you can purchase hashrate and start mining for BTC immediately. All of the mining hardware and software is cloud hosted and managed for you, so you don’t have to do anything besides purchase some KH/s, MH/s or even GH/s.


Benefits you get with CEX cloud mining for Bitcoins:

– The hashrate you purchase is yours for life.
– You can sell your hashrate the moment you decide.
– No technical knowledge required to mine for Bitcoin.
– No hardware to maintain yourself, so it is very easy to start.
– No software to configure, support or monitor.
– Collective mining, where the chance of getting a reward gets bigger proportionally to the overall pool capacity.
– All mining hardware is kept safe and maintained properly in a full featured data-center.
– No cooling or space-related problems or big electricity bills as with dedicated hardware.
– No power or network connection losses, your hashrate is stable and guaranteed.
– 0% pool fee, yes No FEE for the mining pool, so this means higher profit for you.
– Real-time Stats (see how much you’ve mined, how the system is doing, etc).
– Automatically mining some other coins (NMC, IXC, DVC) as an extra bonus.


But how does all of this work in the real world? We decided to try it out and already a week has passed out, so it is time to report what we have earned mining BTC in the cloud with a hash rate of about 187 GH/s that we have purchased. The total earnings we have accumulated in the course of 7 days equal to 0.39040324 BTC or more than $300 USD at the current exchange rate BTC/USD. And the best thing is that if we sell the GHS we have purchased in order to turn them back to Bitcoin at this moment we are going to get an extra 5% due to the higher exchange rate per GHS since the time we have purchased the hashrate. So just for one week you can say that our invested coins in BTC Cloud Mining have managed to give us about 10% profit… not bad at all.

– You can check out the Bitcoin Cloud Mining services offered by CEX IO here…


top