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The Alpha Technology Scrypt ASIC manufacturer has been silent for more than a month already since their last update, even though they did promise to release a video of a prototype miner after showing pictures of the chips that they have apparently received already. Since then however there is no word on anything going on, no video, no new delay information for the shipment schedule of the actual products, no nothing. Interesting enough the company seems to be still sending partial refunds to users that wanted to get these instead of continue to wait for hardware. In the end the intention of Alpha Technology could’ve been just that – promise something, not delivering it and returning a percentage of the money they’ve got from customers, and keeping the rest. It all sounds a lot like a classic scheme for a scam as apparently the company does not plan to deliver anything, even if they have actually made some hardware, or at least things look more and more like that is the case. In the meantime customers are apparently working on taking legal action against the company, though it seems that many have already asked and received partial refunds and have given up completely on dealing with Alpha Technology as well.
Hashra, a company that sells crypto currency ASIC miners based on chips manufactured by other companies, but the final products are branded under their own Hashra name has announced interesting specifications update for their latest Scrypt ASIC miner. The 100 MHS Astro Scrypt ASIC, announced back in August, will have a power usage of just about 550-600W, a price of $450 USD and is supposed to be available for shipping next month. The device apparently is “based on readily available technology already in the marketplace, no speculative pre-order on non tested technology or chip design here” according to the information official product page and the 100 MHS Astro miner is relying on 7 modules with 28nm chips. Hashra promises to ship the Astro Scrypt ASIC miner by the end of December latest or they will offer a refund and although they claim this is not a “speculative pre-order”, it essentially is as it may take a month and a half for the device to be shipped to you as the products are apparently not yet ready, even though the chips they use apparently are. The other new product from Hashra, the Moonraker that is also scheduled for shipping next month is a Bitcoin ASIC miner that although is also very attractive in terms of price is not so much in terms of power usage. There are already Bitcon ASIC miners with similar hashrate and power usage, but they are just ore expensive than the price that Hashra has set for their Moonrakers. So you might want to be more careful with these considering the fact that the products are not currently available and ready to be shipped when you make an order.
When the new sgminer 5 develop version was updated to include the latest Neoscrypt OpenCL kernel from Wolf9466 a few days ago it has turned out that the latest performance optimizations do break compatibility with Nvidia cards as well as with the latest AMD video drivers. The solution was to use older AMD Radeon drivers to generate the kernel binary and them get back to the latest, but now there is an even easier workaround that was discovered by an user called insanid from the Feathercoin forum that does not require you to instal different drivers. All you have to do is to include the OpenCL libraries from an older driver such as 14.6 or 14.7 in the folder of the sgminer and the miner will generate properly the kernel binary file. Then you can either run sgminer for Neoscrypt with these DLL files in the folder or remove them and use the ones installed by the latest video drivers such as 14.9. To make it easier for you we have included the OpenCL DLL libraries in our windows binary compilation of the latest sgminer 5 development branch (source) and you can download the full package from the link below and try this workaround yourself.
– You can download the new sgminer 5 with the NeoScrypt fix for Windows OS here…