Bitmain AntMiner R4 is Supposed to Bring Mining Back Home

26 Aug
2016

antminer-r4-1

Bitmain is apparently setting a very ambitious goal of their new miner called AntMiner R4 and that goal is to bring back home mining of Bitcoin. What they are doing in order to get home miners’ attention is trying to make the miner more compact and less noisy while still managing to provide quite a serious hashrate rated at 8.6 THS with just about 845 W of power usage. What will make the most difference for home users however is the price of the new miner and if it is not right, then why would you bring one or even more of these home, guess we’ll know in a few days as sales start at 23:00 (GMT+8) on 29 August when we’ll probably also get an idea about the price of the device.


Bitmain AntMiner R4 Specifications:

– Miner Hash Rate: 8.6TH/s (Variation of ±5% is expected)
– Power Consumption: 845W +9% at the wall (with Bitmain APW5 PSU)
– Power Efficiency: 0.1 J/GH +9% at the wall (with Bitmain APW5 PSU)
– Noise level: 52dB (at an ambient temperature of 35°C)
– Chip quantity per unit: 126 x BM1387
– Default Frequency: 600MHz
– Rated Voltage: 11.60 ~13.00V
– Network Connection: Ethernet
– Operating Temperature: 0°C to 40°C
– Product size: 515mm (L) x 100mm (W) x 222mm (H)

antminer-r4-2

One of the most interesting things that you will notice with this miner is the cooling fan it uses, Bitmain calls is “a groundbreaking custom-design fan” that is intended to reduce the noise coming from the miner. Instead of using traditional computer fans (designed for servers) that are not intended to be silent, but instead to do their job providing good cooling they have opted out for a different design for the R4’s cooling. The fan that Bitmain uses in the AntMiner R4 is apparently inspired by the fan of a silent split air conditioner, so it was designed to make less than half the noise of the standard miner fan. Furthermore the rotational speed is being automatically controlled to ensure it never creates more noise than is absolutely necessary to keep the miner cool and running, so the noise will also depend on the ambient temperature.

bitmain-apw5

Bitmain will be also offering an optional custom-built PSU for further noise reduction to go along with the AntMiner R4 – the Bitmain APW5. The power supply works with both 220V and 110V (the standard in North America) input to deliver 2600W and 1300W, respectively. It has a dynamically controlled fan that runs at full speed only after heat sink temperature is 80°C. The Bitmain APW5 should start selling along with the Antmier R4 miner in a couple of days, do note that this is a 12V only power supply that is capable of delivering a very good efficiency of up to 93%. So it may be a great choice to go along with the R4, unless of course you already have some spare 1 KW or more computer power supplies sitting idle.

– For more details about the upcoming release of the Bitmain AntMiner R4 Bitcoin ASIC miner…

Modify the Bios of Reference Radeon RX 480 For Faster Ethereum Hashrate

25 Aug
2016

rx-480-ethereum-bios-mod

If you are using reference design AMD Radeon RX 480 GPUs for mining Ethereum only or Dual Mining Ehtereum and DCR or SIA and you still not have tried any of the custom video BIOS roms available from Heliox / Eliovp you should give them a try. With the right clocks and timings you might be able to achieve over 31 MHS hashrate apparently from an RX 480, or a bit less with much lower power consumption if that is what you are looking for – to optimize power usage. As usual with BIOS modifications always make sure you have a backup of the original ROM file in a safe place should something goes wrong, so that you can get everything back to normal operating mode again.

The availability of the PolarisBiosEditor tool now also allows users to experiment with different settings and memory timings in order to achieve even better results for their mining configuration, such as optimum hashrate for a dual mining system and not only for mining Ethereum alone. So you might want to check the tool as well and use it to optimize your GPU even not for mining Ethereum for instance as it allows you to play with a lot of settings in the BIOS.

– Check the Heliox / Eliovp thread on Bitcointalk for more details…
– Check the Heliox / Eliovp thread on Ethereum’s Forum for more details…

Try Claymore’s Dual Ethereum GPU Miner With Nvidia Support

24 Aug
2016

claymore

Claymore’s Dual Miner now offers support for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs for both Linux and Windows (binary only releases), so you can dual-mine Ethereum and SIA or DCR at the same time or only use the miner for Ethereum mining. Using Windows 7 is recommended for Nvidia video cards all the way up to Maxwell and Windows 10 updated and with the latest video drivers or Linux is recommended to be used for Ethereum mining, regardless if you use the dual miner or other Ethereum mining software. The latest version 6.3 is no longer beta and it also adds support for NVIDIA 10xx cards in Linux, there are only 64-bit binary builds available though.

Claymore is also making available a modification for a driver for Nvidia Pascal GPUs (GTX 10xx series) for Windows 7 that should work better than the standard ones, so if you are using GTX 1080, GTX 1070 or GTX 1060 on Windows 7 you can check the driver out as well. The Dual miner has support for both Getwork and Stratum for Decred (DCR) as well as Getwork and Stratum for SiaCoin (SC), however not all Stratum implementations are currently supported as there are multiple ones used by different pools!

– To download and try the latest Claymore Dual Ethereum on Nvidia GPUs…

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