It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
We have been using and testing the 27 MHS GAWMiners Falcon Scrypt ASIC miner for a few days already and we did measure the power requirements of the device and are ready to do some recommendations for a suitable PSU to use. On the GAW website the power consumption of the miner is stated as 1040W and since this is essentially a ZeusMiner THUNDER X3 inside, we have also checked the specifications announced on the Zeus website – 920W. Zeus however does recommend a 1200W modular 80PLUS Gold or Platinum rated power supply to be used for this miner, though you can actually do well with a slightly less powerful model if it is a good one.
As you can see from our measurement on the image above, where we are using a Corsair 1200W 80Plus Platinum power supply, the actual power usage of the miner is 916W, so very close to what Zeus has stated on their website. The fact that we are using a more powerful 80Plus Platinum power supply gives us very high efficiency of over 94% at this serious load, so the total power consumed at the wall is roughly 970-975W. This means that even with a good quality 80Plus rated 1000W power supply you should be fine. No need to go for 1200W as recommended, though the higher power model will most likely help you minimize the power wasted as it will be operating at better efficiency when not pushed to the limit. We did a test with a 1000W power supply that was barely managing to work at 78-80% level of efficiency and got a power usage of almost 1100W at the power socket. So if you want to save yourself some heat and waste less power, you better go for at least 1000W power supply that is rated 80Plus Gold.
It seems that there is now an alternative to the official cgminer 3.1.1 with Zeus support in the form of a new fork of bfgminer that adds support for ZeusMiner’s Scrypt ASICs (source). This fork is compatible with GAWMiners and Hashra Zeus-based Scrypt ASICs as well and it pretty much uses the same options as the official cgminer, but comes with support for many more features since it is based off the latest version of bfgminer. Below you can find a windows binary of the bfgminer 4.1.99 that you can try, just make sure to set the right number of chips depending on your miner model as well as the virtual COM port at which the miner is detected. The best operating frequency still seems to be 328 MHz for most people as a good balance in terms of performance and HW error rate, though you are welcome to play with it.
– You can download the new bfgminer 4.1.99 ZeusMiner binaries for Windows OS here…
If you were wondering what caused the latest drop in price of Bitcoin, well it was the US Marshall Service that made an announcement for their intention to be auctioning 29,656.51306529 Bitcoins at the end of the month. These are the BTCs that were seized from Silk Road, though the auction will not include the substantially larger amount of Bitcoins belonging to Ross William Ulbricht, the operator of Silk Road. This news has caused the quick drop in price, but it seems that already things are starting to calm down and the price is slowly starting to get back up.
– For more about the Bitcoin auction organized by the US Marshall Service…