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ibelink-dm384m-2

The iBeLink DM384M is the first to market X11 ASIC miner and while it is a pretty good product, there are still some things to be desired. In terms of hardware the X11 ASIC miner offers a solid build and reliable performance making it pretty capable for mining in a data center even in not so favorable conditions even when the environment temperature is not the best. The power usage is at a good level for the high performance it offers of 384 MHS for X11 mining, but the noise level makes it inappropriate for home miners. Temperature wise the situation is good thanks to the powerful server grade cooling used to keep the miner operating stable as you can see from these thermal images of the device in operation. Pretty much what is missing in terms of hardware is the presence of thermal sensors and fan control available for the users, the first is not hard to implement considering that the built-in controller of the miner is a Raspberry Pi. Fan speed control and failsafe could be trickier to implement as it would also need to be able to ignore users settings if the conditions require it and even to shutdown the miner in case a fan fails. Not to mention that implementing fan speed control and monitoring would not be very usable without the miner having thermal sensors, but the current implementation with server grade fans is good enough and should provide long and reliable operating with adequate cooling.

ibelink-pool-control-software

On the software side however there is much more to be desired, even though the basic web-based functionality you get is a pretty good starting point. we have already mentioned the device uses a Raspberry Pi controller with a modified version of the MineNinja software to provide a web-based frontend to the cgminer 3.5.6 backend. The web frontend provides a lot of numbers to the users, but they do not always seem to be correct, especially in terms of the actual hashrate you are getting from the device, so you need to look at the pool reported speed. Furthermore the web-based control lacks some very basic features such as password protection for access control or the ability to use a different pool mining strategy than the default failsafe one that is available. With big and powerful ASIC miners we often see that the web-based control software offers only pool failsafe options, but no load balance strategy for example. So while this will be fine if you are mining a high difficulty coin, if you go for a low difficulty and hashrate one throwing your full hashrate you will quickly raise the coin difficulty a lot. The cgminer backend does come with support for different pool strategies, so the problem is in the functionality available in web-based interface. Unfortunately for the moment the source code of cgminer or at lest the driver for the device is not yet publicly released, so we cannot have support built in other miners and web frontends. So for the moment the iBeLink DM384M is best for use with high difficulty X11 coins…

kncminer-titan-scrypt-asic-miner

The KnCminer Titan Scrypt ASIC is still probably the fastest and most power efficient miner for Scrypt coins out there, but at the same time it is also one of the most problematic one to use and run. There are hardware issues resulting in dying cores and problems with the DCDC power modules, the software is also far from perfect, even though there are modifications over the last official firmware such as GenTarkin’s Custom KNC Titan Scrypt ASIC Firmware, there is still more to be desired. One of the things that is quite annoying is that the Load Balance pool strategy in the official Firmware 2.0 for the Titan is not working, so you are essentially left only with the Failover option.

Even if you run just one Titan cube you are still getting quite significant hashrate and while this is fine if you are mining for high-difficulty coins such as Litecoin for example, it is not for low difficulty coins that may have just a couple of MHS total network hashrate. Throwing your full KnC Titan hashrate at a coin with low difficulty and total network hashrate will simply increase the difficulty in very short period of time (depending on the difficulty adjustment algorithm of the coin) making it pointless to be mined. What you would want to have for low difficulty Scrypt crypto coins is to be able to split your Titan hashrate between multiple cons on a single multipool or between multiple mining pools in order to maximize your mining profit without bumping the difficulty to a level making it unprofitable for a given coin to be mined.

gentarkin-balance-pool-strategy

GenTarkin’s custom firmware has implemented support for the alternative Balance strategy in the web interface, though it is essentially something supported by the bfgminer as an alternative to the Load Balance pool strategy. Considering that the Load Balance strategy is not working properly and you cannot dedicate lets say 10% to one coin, 30% for another and the remaining 60% to a third one, you might at least try the equal spreading of hshrate that the Balance strategy should provide. The Balance strategy should split the hashrate in equal parts between the multiple defined pools, so if you have 4 pools the total KnC Titan hashrate should be equally split between them with about 25% for each. The Balance pool strategy works just fine not only on the custom GenTarkin firmware, but also on the stock Titan 2.0 firmware as both rely on the bfgminer 5.1.0 and the miner provides the actual functionality, you just need to configure it.

{
"pools": [
{
"url": "hash-to-coins.com:4444",
"user": "titan.1",
"pass": "d=512"
},
{
"url": "hash-to-coins.com:4444",
"user": "titan.2",
"pass": "d=512"
},
{
"url": "hash-to-coins.com:4444",
"user": "titan.3",
"pass": "d=512"
},
{
"url": "hash-to-coins.com:4444",
"user": "titan.4",
"pass": "d=512"
}
],
"scrypt-n": 10,
"balance": true
}

With the stock firmware you will have to go to the Manual edit mode and edit the pool configuration file by hand, what you need to essentially do is add the option "balance": true at the end of the configuration file to tell bfgminer to use the Balance pool strategy. Above is an example configuration file with four different coins and Balance pool strategy that should equally split the total hashrate to about 25% for each of the coins. GenTakin’s latest custom firmware adds support for the Balance strategy in the Normal edit mode as well, making it a bit easier for users, but the end result is the same. As we have said already, the Balance pool strategy will work just fine with the latest official Titan 2.0 firmware, so you can try it even without a modified firmware. However custom firmwares such as GenTarkin’s add a lot of other and more useful features than just making some of the things that do not work properly in the official firmware more user friendly.

whattomine-x11-asic

The iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC miner is actually advertised as a DASH ASIC miner with DASH (previously known as DarkCoin) being the most popular and widely used X11 altcoin, is also currently rated as number 6 in terms of Market Capitalization. The ASIC miner can be used for any coin using a regular X11 algorithm for mining and in fact mining DASH with it is not the most profitable and anyone who purchases a new ASIC miner know that the first thing he needs to do is to ROI first in the fastest possible way and then can choose what to mine based on subjective preferences for example. So if you just got the 384 MHS X11 ASIC miner iBeLink DM384M you would probably want to head on to NiceHash and sell your hashrate to anyone willing to buy it as it will get you a few times more profit than directly mining for DASH at the moment according to the What to Mine service. The reason is simple, there are many new altcoins popping up all the time that use X11 algorithm and people are renting hashrate to mine them and with the increased demand for hashrate you might earn much more than mining for a more established coin such as DASH.

ibelink-x11-nicehash-hashrate

Here is how the average hashrate looks like when selling your X11 hashrate with the iBeLink DM384M X11 ASIC miner on NiceHash with the graph covering more than half a day. The average hashrate reported poolside is about 392 MHS with an average pay rate of about 0.5 BTC per Gigahash per Day. As mentioned earlier today you should update to cgminer 3.5.6 for the iBeLink machine in order to get the software that supports NiceHash’s extranonce in order to minimize stale shares and maximize profit. If the above trend continues for 24 hours this would mean an actual daily profit for the iBeLin X11 ASIC miner of about 0.2 BTC at the moment and that is pretty good when you are looking to get the fastest ROI time. Have in mind though that the profitability of X11 at NiceHash may vary more that if mining for any given more established X11 crypto currency with a stable exchange rate. There is always the possibility of jumping at the right time to the right new coin and making even better profit thanks to the high hashrate that the ASIC miner provides, but the risk is also higher and you may actually make less in the end this way.

For more details on how to sell your hashrate using the NiceHash service…


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