Crypto Mining Blog
It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Search
Search Results
If you remember the story from last month about an supposedly upcoming 19.2 MHS Scrypt ASIC based on Gridseed chips that was briefly put for preorder on aliexpress by a Chinese seller with not a lot of details, then you would be interested to read this exclusive information hat we just received. We just got some real and exclusive information and photos of the upcoming Gridseed Blade Miners from MinerEU.com, an official Gridseed EU distributor. It seems that the new Gridseed Blade Miner will be officially released next week and we already have some real photos and information about the specifications of the hardware.
The new blade miner will still use GC3355 ASIC chips, the same same as in Gridseeds USB miners. There are 2 PCB panels in each Blade Miner and each panel has 40 GC3355 chips, or you get a total of 80 chips on a single Blade Miner device. Each PCB of the miner has own power socket and USB port to control it, so it is like having two miners in a single package with. The official Scrypt mining hashrate is 5.2 MHS (2.6 MHS for each PCB), but we believe we should be able to improve that hashrate a lot as what we did with their USB ASIC miners by overclocking and modifying them.
We should note that apparently Gridseed is no longer advertising the new Blade Miners for use for BTC (SHA-256) or Dual Mode mining, instead they are intended for use for Scrypt mining only. Using these devices for BTC mining could create power and cooling issues and the resulting hashrate you could expect is definitely not worth it compared to what you should be able to get in Scrypt only mode… especially after overclocking and maybe voltmodding.
The new Gridseed 80-chip Blade Miner is equivalent to 16 Gridseed 5-chip USB miners, the official total hashrate is quoted as 5.2 MHS or about 65 KHS per chip, so there should be some room for improvement with overclock and possibly voltmod. The total power usage at default frequency should be around 64-70W for each panel or a total of about 140W per Blade Miner. The device should be compatible with the already available software miners such as cpuminer, cgminer and bfgminer with Gridseed support as it essentially uses the same way of communication with the computer as the smaller 5-chip devices.
If you are eager to get your hands on these new Gridseed Blade Miners, you can order from MinerEU now and expect a delivery probably sometime next week (deliveries are scheduled to start around April 8th). Due to limited availability at the moment, the new miners are not yet publicly listed in their online shop, the order link is intended for their resellers. You can see the official product page of the new Blade Miner on MinerEU’s website with photos and specs, link below. We are going to be ordering one of these devices to be able to play with it more and meanwhile we have been invited to test the new miner by MinerEU, so more details will follow very soon.
– To check the official product page of the Gridseed Blade Miner on MinerEU’s website…
- In: Mining Hardware
- Tags: 80-chip Blade Miner, 80-chip GC3355 ASIC, 80-chip Miner, Blade Miner, G-Blade, G-Blade Miner, GC3355 ASIC, Gridseed, Gridseed 80-chip Blade Miner, Gridseed ASIC, Gridseed ASIC Miner, Gridseed Blade Miner, Gridseed G-Blade, Gridseed G-Blade ASIC, Gridseed G-Blade Miner, MinerEU
We just got our Raspberry Pi and we are about to start testing the few already available mining images for the device that help you get started in using it for a Gridseed ASIC mining controller. You can of course start with a normal distribution and compile the miner yourself and set things up to run with the Raspberry Pi, however this requires some extra knowledge and time and not anybody can do it. On the other hand you have readily available images that you just need to write on and SD card and run them on the Raspberry Pi and supposedly you just need to configure the pool settings and you will be up and running in no time. Could it be that easy, or you should expect to have some troubles, we are going to find out soon enough. For now we’ll list the Gridseed optimized images that we could find available to use on Raspberry Pi, so you might want to give them a try as well…
Scripta is a Litecoin mining distribution for Raspberry Pi that provides a web interface for easier controlling, configuring and monitoring your mining devices. Originally it does not support Gridseed devices, but by replacing the supplied cgminer with a one supporting Gridseed ASICs you can easily make it work with Gridseed devices as well. In fact we suspect that most of the other images available below are based on Scripta based on some screenshots we’ve seen even though we still haven’t started testing any of them.
MinerEU does provide a dedicated Raspberry Pi image for Gridseed usb miner to their customers only. The image is now freely available, so you can download it and try it out if you are interested. We are going to give it a try for sure.
Hash Master apparently does provide their Raspberry Pi image along with the device if you purchase the complete controller package from them. We could not find their Pi image available for download other then the complete package they offer as a Pi-based controller with SD card and preloaded image on it, so we are not going to be able to test this image, but it seems to be pretty much Scripta with some visual modifications and the proper cgminer for Gridseed.
Zoom Hash does not give out much information about their image or even screenshots, but has a short guide and instructions for installing the image along with a download link available for everyone. We are going to be trying their image for the Raspberry Pi.
Hashra also does provide an image with some instructions to setup and use the Raspberry Pi as a controller for Gridseed ASIC devices. They do not sell RPi separately, but include it with their 20 miners package as a controller for the ASIC devices. They call their software for RPi Hashra Controla and it has web-based interface available.
This is it for now, time for testing the images. If you know about another Raspberry Pi image for Gridseed ASIC miners please feel free to share information about it so that we can include it in the list and also test it along with the others.
We have compiled a windows binary of the latest cgminer 3.7.2 for Gridseed 5-chip GC3355 ASICs (source) that allows you to have finer control over the overclock frequencies you select. Previously you had to increase frequencies in steps of 50 MHz, with this version however you are able to use smaller steps of 25 MHz. So instead of having to go from 850 MHz to 900 MHz, now you can also try running at 875 MHz. This may allows you to squeeze a few more KHS out of your ASIC device when overclocking it to the maximum stable frequency with low or no HW errors at all.
– You can download cgminer 3.7.2 OC for Gridseed 5-chip GC3355 ASICs on Windows OS here…