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It seems that another cloud mining operation is having trouble to keep running, this time because of mining hardware stolen by one of the partners. We are talking about the Chinese mining mega farm AMHash, a partnership between ASICMiner, RockMiner and Havelock Investments. You would expect that when ASIC manufacturers start their own cloud mining operation it should be reliable and secure and have no trouble, but apparently not if these are Chinese companies as it turns out. Throughout February some people started reporting that they are not getting their payments sent for the hashrate they have in AMHash. The apparent reason was due to the long New Year holidays in China, but it turns out that it was way more serious than that, but AMHash just recently at the last day of February explained the actual reason.
The Announcement of AMHash Dividends Suspending
Dear customers,
We are very sorry to inform you that we have to continue to delay AMHash’s dividends, as we haven’t received the payment from ASICMINER since 8th Feb, we are trying to communication with ASICMINER for this issue:
1. Dividends will be restarted in 24 hours as soon as ASICMINER sending us BTCs.
2. Dividends will be paid from 8th Feb and all missing dividends will be included if we get the payment.
3. Trading of AMHash1 on HAVELOCK will also be suspended until the dividends restart.
4. Any third-party platform collapse will be handled in the same way as hashie.co, AMHash will complete the hashrates transferring and subsequent dividends.We are still in active communication with ASICMINER, please be patient,and we will update in time if we get any new information.
AMHash Team
And a bit later another post detailing the actual reason why the payments from ASICMINER have stopped appeared yesterday also posted on the Bitcointalk forum.
update
The 3.546PH AMHash’s hashrates have disappeared since 25th Dec 2014. We found this problem two days later, we asked friedcat, he said it was mining farm’s maintenance issues, hashrates would come back soon. But one week later,hashrates didn’t come back yet. When we asked FC again, we were told that all mining devices were robbed by the partner of the mining farm. And all hashrates were out of control.
After then, FC told us that hashrates from new mining farms will be deployed, but we didn’t know the amount at that time. Right now, we still don’t receive any update from those new hashrates.AMHash Team
Things are definitely not looking good for AMHash and for their customers, but we still need to see how they will handle the situation as they previously had some trouble with other partners and they have managed to do things right. We are going to keep an eye on how the situation develops as we also do have some hashrate in AMHash and we have not yet received any dividends from mid February until now.
TechnoBit DICE Bitcoin ASIC Cooling Performance
27, Feb 2015
We are still playing with our hardware latest toy, the small TechnoBit DICE Bitcoin ASIC miner and today we were checking the cooling performance of the device. When we first saw the announcement the DICE was supposed to be a very silent miner as per the official specifications that stated (and still state) “Noise: ~20 DB at 25 °C ambient temperature”, however the moment we have turned on the unit a few days ago we knew this promise was not kept. If the noise level was just about 20 decibels than the DICE should’ve been so quiet that you would hardly know it is present and working in a quiet room. The reality is quite different though, our sound level meter has detected a noise level of almost 50 dBA and this is really quite noisy and a far cry from the promised noise. So we just had to take apart the device to see what fan it is using and also test to see if the case of the miner could be the culprit that is responsible for the very noisy operation of the DICE Bitcoin ASIC…
When we have opened the case of the ASIC miner we’ve discovered that the cooling fan used inside is a 92mm Evercool EC9225M12CA, a mid range fan that does 2200 rpm with about 1.8W of power usage. Apparently the fan itself was sufficient to cool the miner with its 39.35 CFM of air flow and interestingly enough the specifications of the fan do say less than 25 dBA in terms of noise generated. The fan itself was directly soldered to the pins of the 6-pin PCI-E power connector on the unit, there is no thermal control or variable rpm, it is working at maximum all of the time. Running the miner without its metal casing has show us that it can be quite silent indeed, so the cause of the noise apparently was the metal case of the miner. More specifically the holes at the fan air intake that apparently are responsible for the significant increase of the noise level, so when TechnoBit has promised us a silent Bitcoin ASIC miner they should have modified the case of the device, so that it can really be silent and not the opposite – make a case that will increase the noise level way over what was promised in terms of specifications.
The cooling of the single RockerBox ASIC chip that is at the heart of the DICE miner is sufficiently provided by two large aluminum heatsinks, one on top interfacing with a solid copper block to the ASIC chip and one at the bottom with direct contact to the whole surface of the PCB. There is enough thermal paste in between the heatsinks to provide good heat transfer and the not so powerful cooling fan has no trouble keeping the temperatures low, so that the about 100W of power used at the stock settings are not a problem. The device can also handle a nice boost in performance with some overclocking that is possible via parameters for the ASIC chip voltage and operating frequency, though you should be careful should you decide to clock the unit higher.
In the end we take a look at the operating temperatures of the DICE with the help of a thermal imaging camera, the thermal image you see above shows how hot the top and bottom heatsinks get while the device is working normally. We are getting close to 60 degrees at the top heatsink and a bit over 40 at the bottom at the hottest sports, do note however that the operating temperature of the Bitcoin ASIC chip under the heatsink should be higher with something like 10-20 degrees Celsius over the temperature we have measured on the heatsink. So if you decide to overclock the miner you should proceed with caution and monitor the operating temperatures as the power usage increases along with the hashrate when you increase the operating voltage and frequency of the Bitcoin ASIC chip.
- In: Mining Hardware|Tests and Reviews
- Tags: asic miner, bitcoin asic, DICE, DICE ASIC, DICE ASIC miner, DICE noise level, DICE operating temperature, DICE overclock, DICE performance, DICE power usage, DICE thermal image, RockerBox ASIC, Spondoolies-Tech, TechnoBit, TechnoBit Dice, TechnoBit DICE ASIC miner
Genesis Mining has announced that will start to offer Bitcoin mining contracts starting Thursday, August 28th 2014 or with other words tomorrow. The new Bitcoin mining contracts will be introduced at very competitive prices starting at as little as $2.15 per GH/s according to the company. And the pricing is transparent: there are no additional fees or hidden costs. Up to now Genesis Mining has been offering only Scrypt cloud mining and we’ve been using the service for quite a while already and testing it, our initial impressions can be found here.
Genesis Mining has been open on what hardware they are using to back up the cloud mining hashrate they sell to users and also is one of the few companies into the cloud mining business that allows the user some control on what currency to be mined/payed in such as LTC, DOGE or BTC for example. Similar functionality should also be available to the Bitcoin cloud mining users who will be able to choose to mine other SHA-256 coins such as Peercoin or Namecoin for example. If you are wondering about the supplier of the Genesis Mining of Scrypt ASIC miners, it is ZeusMiner and the company that they have partnered for the SHA-256 mining hardware is apparently Spondoolies-Tech.
We do plan to purchase some Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate as soon as it becomes available and to do a short review of the new BTC mining functionality that should be introduced tomorrow, so stay tuned for our first impressions.
Update: 28th has passed and the Bitcoin cloud mining functionality is not yet available, it is not wise to announce a date and then not to deliver the promised things on it. Furthermore there is not a single word on either Twitter or Facebook about why and when we are actually going to see the functionality available. This is the easiest way to loose the users trust – promising and not keeping your promises, and not giving an excuse on you were not able to!