Bitcoin ASIC Miners Still Hard to Get for Small Miners

28 Jan
2018

If you are a small crypto miner and not a large mining operation you may find it very hard to acquire up to date Bitcoin ASIC miners as the demand is still pretty high and the wait time is long. If you manage to find an ASIC miner is stock the chances are the price will be significantly higher as they are being resold with serious profit by people that prefer to make money this way instead of mining with the devices. At the moment there are pretty much 4 main manufacturers of Bitcoin ASIC miners that sell to end users and in small quantities and as you might expect they do not have anything in stock as the wait time is in months.

1. Bitmain AntMiner S9 (13.5 THS)
Bitmain is the most popular name among the ASIC manufacturers and probably the biggest one as well and even they are struggling to have stock of the AntMiner S9 ASIC miners they produce. It is interesting to note that the S9 has started shipping in the summer of 2016 and is still their top product. Bitmain has already sold all of their production up until the end of March, so when they release a new batch it will be scheduled for delivery sometime in April earliest.

2. Canaan AvalonMiner 821 (11 THS)
Canaan has been making their Avalon miners for years, though they were a bit slower in terms of specifications as compared to Bitmain and not as popular among end user miners. Their latest AvalonMiner 821 was announced in December last year and just started shipping its first batches for people that have preordered early. You can currently preorder AvalonMiner 821 for shipping/delivery in the second half of March, so you can probably get these a bit earlier than if you wait to preorder an AntMiner.

3. Ebang Ebit Miner E10 (18 THS)
Ebang’s Ebit miners are mostly popular in Asian countries, though they are trying to get to a wider market and their latest announcement of a 10 nm ASIC miner – the E10 made some waves. It is however an expensive device and still hard to get with a minimum purchase quantity of 20 units and all batches already sold through the end of March.

4. Halong Mining DragonMint 16T Miner (16 THS)
Halong Mining is a newcomer that just recently announced their plans to enter the Bitcoin ASIC miner market to try and fight with the market dominance that BitMain already has. They are still yet to start shipping their first devices in March this year and you cannot currently preorder units on their website with new batches probably to be available for April earliest.

Octominer B8PLUS 8 PCIe Slot Mining Motherboards

27 Jan
2018

There is an interesting new Chinese company called Octominer that is apparently focusing on the GPU mining market by offering a specialized mining motherboard for 8 GPU mining rigs. The Octominer B8PLUS motherboard has 8x full size PCI-E slots spaced decently enough to eliminate the need to use PCI-E riser boards. The manufacturer suggests that the motherboard is suitable for any Nvidia or AMD GPU that is 4.5 cm or thinner, so all 2 slot thickness cards should fit, 2.5 slot cards might also fit, but very tightly and there could be some trouble with cooling them. Furthermore the motherboard comes with integrated Intel mobile CPU with built-in graphics. The motherboards uses SO-DIMM DDR4 memory and comes with M-SATA slot for an SSD memory and a sATA interface for an external HDD or SSD drive that you need to buy separately of course.

Octominer B8PLUS Specifications:
– Motherboard: support 8x PCI-E 16x slots for GPUs
– GPU: Embedded 6th gen Intel Celeron Processor 3855U
– CPU cooler integrated on the board
– Supported GPUs: 8pcs AMD470/480/570/580 or Nvidia P106/P104/1060/1070/1070TI/1080/1080TI
– Memory: Support SO-DIMM DDR4 up to 8GB RAM (Laptop memory)
– Ports: 2x USB, 1x VGA, 1x RJ45 Network
– Power: Support server style power supply and ATX PSU
– Board dimensions: 46 X 18 cm

The price of the integrated 8x GPU mining motherboard from Octominer is currently USD $199 with shipping from China (shipping and import taxes and VAT not included). Shipping is with DHL Express and should take about 5-7 days according to the website and cost you $25 USD for most locations, though the price may vary for some regions. Octominer is currently accepting pre-orders for the motherboards with deliveries expected to start shipping by the end of January or the beginning of February, so not much wait, though shipping may not be immediately after you order.

– For more information about the Octominer B8PLUS 8 PCIe Slot Mining Motherboards…

Bminer, a Faster Equihash Alternative Miner for Nvidia GPUs

24 Jan
2018

Bminer is a relatively new miner for Nvidia GPUs for mining cryptocurrencies using the Equihash algorithm such as Zcash (ZEC). It is a closed source miner, available for both Windows and Linux operating systems and comes with a 2% dev fee included (optional, though disabling it apparently removes some optimizations). Bminer comes as an alternative to the popular EWBF miner, the development of which has been stalled for a while already, as well as the more recent dstm ZCash CUDA Miner that looks promising and is actively being developed, but still lacks some features such as failover pool support for example. So any new alternatives such as Bminer that are being actively improved and developed are more than welcome for the users and the crypto community as well.

According to its developers and most users that have tried the Bminer already it is the fastest publicly available Equihash miner for Nvidia GPUs and we can confirm that our initial impressions are showing a better local hashrate compared to the alternatives mentioned. So if you have a Compute Capability 5.0 or newer Nvidia GPU used for mining you might want to give Bminer a go and see if it will work better for you. The miner does come with SSL support as well as NiceHash support, has some interesting extra features, though it is still very easy to use. There is also an API and a web-based interface available for monitoring of your mining rigs that can be quite useful, so go and give it a try and report your results.

– For more information and to download the Bminer Equihash miner for Nvidia GPUs…

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