Is BLU View 2 a Good Smartphone for Crypto Mining – Unfortunately No

23 Oct
2023

If you are looking for a good deal on a smartphone that you can use for crypto mining a coin such as VerusCoin (VRSC) then you might’ve stumbled on a really great looking, price-wise at least, offer for the Total by Verizon BLU View 2, 32GB, Black – Prepaid Smartphone (Locked) for just $29.99 USD (Ad). The offer at that price for the BLU View 2 (Tracfone inside) locked for Verizon does seem very good after a quick look at the specifications of the device as listed on Amazon’s website, so good, that in fact you will probably be tempted getting one just like we did. A 5.5-inch smartphone with 32GB internal memory (expandable via micro-SD card), 3000 mAh removable battery, 3GB RAM, 2.0 GHz Octa-Core CPU, 64 Bit, USB-C connector and even a charger included and that for just 30 bucks, seems like a very sweet deal mind you that it is locked even though you should not care if you are going to use it for mining only.

A qucik look at the smartphone’s specs over at GSM Arena confirms that the processor should be an “Octa-core 2.0 GHz Cortex-A53” (8-core), even though there is a bit of discrepancy there saying 2GB of RAM only and not 3 GB as Amazon’s description mentions. There is however a tiny bit of a problem here, both the product page of Total by Verizon on Amazon and GSM Arena’s specifications of this device are wrong as it turns out that Mediatek MT6761 Helio A22 (12 nm) chipset used in this device is actually only a quad-core CPU and not an octa-core as both websites claim and we actually had verified that personally after ordering one of these smartphones expecting it to do great for mining VRSC with it. You can always make a mistake, but when the mistake is multiplied it gets confusing even for people that usually double-check things…

Not that it is such a big issue when you can easily return the smartphone for a refund, but what remains is the disappointment from something that might’ve been a great deal ending as just a simple mistake and the BLU View 2 had the potential if it was really with an 8-core CPU. However, not only that it is a quad-core A53 ARM CPU inside, but the Architecture reported is armv7l and that is the second huge disappointment here essentially making this device unsuitable at all for crypto mining as even with a decent 4-core 64-bit CPU you should be getting decent hashrate… or at least be able to run the mining software. Essentially, while the CPU itself should be 64-bit, the operating system (Android 11) comes with a 32-bit kernel, so you are not able to run 64-bit applications and most miners (at least the ones that are worth using) do require both 64-bit CPU hardware as well as 64-bit operating system to properly install and run and in order to provide you with a decent hashrate while mining.

The situation with the 32-bit software here is very similar to what we have seen with the Verizon Samsung Galaxy A13 5G that is also a no go for crypto mining. And while the BLU View 2 is much more budget option, with a bit older and lower-end hardware and with a 4-core processor apparently, here the 32-bit software won’t come as that much of a surprise like it is on the A13 5G from Samsung that we really did not expect to come with 32-bit Android support only. Anyway, the BLU View 2 comes very attractively priced (the locked model), but is not such a great deal with the wrong specifications listed and considering the correct ones and the fact it is with a 32-bit Android 11 operating system. It is indeed with a 4-core ARM CPU, 2GB of RAM and a 32-bit Android OS. The result is essentially an unusable device for crypto mining!

Optimizing the Cooling of Orange Pi 5 for Mining VerusCoin (VRSC)

22 Oct
2023

If you are considering using an Orange Pi 5 for Mining VerusCoin (VRSC) (Ad) one thing you should have for sure is an additional cooling solution like the GeeekPi Orange Pi 5/5B Cooling Fan with Heatsink, however although good and working well this solution is far from optimal and can benefit from some additional tweaking. The main thing that you can improve is the heat transfer efficiency since the default thermal transfer material that sits in between the CPU and the cooler is a pretty thick thermal pad. Thicker thermal pads are not that efficient, however with a big gap you cannot replace a pad with just thermal paste so you need another solution here…

What you need is a solid copper thermal pad to replace the pink thermal interface that the cooler kit comes with. There are a lot of different copper pads available both in terms of size and in terms of thickness. The ideal width and height would be 18 by 18 millimetres, though there are harder to find and you can go with 15 mm or 20 mm just fine as you can see on the photo above, we went for the bigger one as it covers a larger area. The more important thing here is the thickness and what worked out very well for us is a 1.2 mm thick copper pad (Ad), though you could probably use 1 mm or 1.5 mm as well and compensate with more or less thermal compound. Good thermal compound that we like to use is ARCTIC MX-4 Thermal Compound (8 g) (Ad), though you can use anything else that has good capabilities and you may have lying around already.

The average temperature with the active cooler installed with the default flexible thermal interface pad we have observed was around 65-67 degrees Celsius while mining VerusCoin (VRSC) or around 40 without 100% load. Without the active cooler installed the temperature quickly hits 85 degrees Celsius when the miner is started, so the cooler is doing quite a good job in reducing that operating temperature, however it is still higher than we would like to be for a device running 24/7 mining crypto currencies.

As for the hashrate, a little below 6.6 MH/s average hashrate with a power consumption of about 9 Watts measured at the wall. This is again the result with the active cooler installed with the default flexible thermal interface pad, but as we’ve mentioned things can be improved by replacing the flexible thermal interface pad with a solid copper pad and good thermal compound… the question is how much of an improvement will that bring.

In terms of operating temperature, quite a significant improvement when we add the 20×20 mm copper pad with thickness of 1.2 mm and MX4 thermal compound in between… there is more than 20 degrees Celsius drop in the operating temperature. The newly measured stable operating temperature of the CPU of the Orange Pi 5 with the copper pad is now around 43.5 degrees Celsius, just a little bit higher than the Pi 5 with no active cooling and no load. You can hardly get any lower than that probably with conventional air cooling and you probably would not want to do it anyway as that operating temperature is really what we are more than fine with while mining.

After replacing the flexible thermal pad with a copper pad, we are seeing a slight increase in the average hashrate produced of a little over 100 KH/s to about 6.7 MH/s which might not be that much but is still somewhat of an improvement. There is also a slight drop of the power usage, we’ve measured 8.8 Watts at the wall down from 9 Watts before, so 0.2 Watts decrease in power usage. Again, might not be much but is still something that if you put in a large-scale perspective might build up to more significant numbers over time. The main goal was to lower the operating temperature while mining, but it has led to some other slight improvements as well, so a good job doing this little bit of modification to improve things overall. So, if you have an Orange Pi 5 or a few and if you are using them for mining VRSC or for other things that actually do require more processing power you might consider doing this modification for the cooling as well.

– For a guide on setting up and using Orange Pi 5 for mining verusCoin (VRSC)…

New SRBMiner-Multi 2.3.9 With Fixes and Improvements for Dynex (DNX)

19 Oct
2023

Another update from Doctor83 for his SRBMiner-Multi mining software to version 2.3.9, after the recent mandatory update 2.3.8 for Dynex miners a new bugfix release is available that fixes some issues with invalid shares that was present in the 2.3.8 update as well as brings performance improvement for some GPUs. Furthermore the new release also brings down the development fee to 2% for DNX mining and if you are dual-mining DNX with ZIL (Zilliqa has %0) you get some extra profit from that as well with no extra cast. There are apparently some other fixes and improvements, but the focus is mostly towards getting better Dynex mining experience and a bit of a performance boost, at least to some users…

A quick test of the new SRBMiner-Multi 2.3.9 release shows pretty good results, not only that the higher hashrate from the early 2.3.7 version is back on for Nvidia users (at least the 3000 series), but you get something a bit more as an extra than you should’ve gotten with the older release. The performance drop that came with 2.3.8 is now not available anymore, with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 you should be back at the same level as with 2.3.7 in terms of hashrate or even a slightly higher. But miners with RTX 3080 and RTX 3080 would be happier as these GPUs do get an extra boost as well (3-5% average) and that one should be higher than on the 3070s, so they are quite a bit faster than with 2.3.7. And let us not forget about the 0.5% reduction in DNX mining dev fee, so definitely worth upgrading to the new release as soon as possible in order to take advantage of all of the improvements.

– To download the latest SRBMiner-Multi 2.3.9 With Support for DNX and ZIL Dual-Mining…

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