Posts Tagged ‘AntMiner S1’

180 GHS AntMiner S1 vs 180 GHS Cloud Mining Contract

3, Mar 2014

bitmaintech-antminer-s1-asic-miner

Bitmaintech, the company making 180 GHS AntMiner S1 BTC ASIC devices is still pretty much the only company that only sells units that are on stock and are shipped fast to you with express delivery. Currently the price of a single 180 GHS AntMiner S1 is 1.345 BTC directly from the maker and that includes the shipping costs too. But the question that arises is if these devices are worth investing in now with Terahash ASICs right around the corner? That is why we have decided to do a comparison between the 180 GHS AntMiner S1 ASIC and a cloud mining service as an alternative option and we have chosen the PB Mining Bitcoin cloud mining service. We choose that provides of cloud-based hashrate for mining BTC as they currently offer the most attractive price per GHS of just 0.0089 BTC per GHS.

pbmining-5-year-btc-mining-contracts

We choose the PB Mining service for comparison as we have been using the service for a while already and it seems to be running smooth and without issues. Note that what you get there is a mining contract for 5 years, there is no exchange available where you can trade the purchased GHS. This long term contract is the reason why the price is much more attractive as when compared to CEX.io or other similar services.

So what are the raw numbers:
– 180 GHS AntMiner S1 is 1.345 BTC
– 180 GHS Cloud Mining is 1.602 BTC

This you should however add some more to the price of the AntMiner S1 as you will need to buy a power supply for using the ASIC as there is none included. For a good 500W power supply that you will need you should add in about 0.1 BTC more, plus customs taxes for the ASIC as it is shipped from China that are going to be at least another 0.1 BTC and you get 1.545 BTC or a value that is already pretty close… With the current value in two-three days mining you will be able to cover the remaining difference and you may need to wait for about a week for your miner to arrive, and the cloud mining hashrate will start mining for you pretty much right away or in a few hours after you send the payment.

So it seems that the PB Mining cloud mining service seems an option that is not less attractive than purchasing an 180 GHS AntMiner S1 ASIC device. Of course there are other variables as well, like the fact that you can easily overclock the AntMiner S1 to about 200 GHS, but you will also have an extra cost for the power used by the device that will probably be covered by the extra hashrate achieved by overclocking the miner. So you really have an interesting cloud mining alternative than to purchase mining hardware, both will take pretty much the same time for you to break even before starting to make extra Bitcoins. The choice is yours, but you should consider the alternative options you have in the form of cloud mining instead of purchasing ASIC hardware directly from the manufacturer even if it will be shipped immediately to you.

How Much Power Does the Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC Use

22, Feb 2014

antminer-s1-hashing-chips-sideways

Today we’ve decided to finally do a measurement to see how much power does a Bitmain AntMiner S1 Bitcoin ASIC use both at idle (not mining), at stock 180 GHS and at overclocked 200 GHS mode. We’ve been using Bitmain AntMiner S1 miner for a while now and have already shared our best settings for overclocking AntMiner S1 to 200 GHS as well as some very interesting thermal images that what gets hot and how hot actually gets on the AntMiner S1 board. We are going to be measuring the power consumption (at the power socket) with the help of a very good 80 Plus Gold certified Power Supply (Seasonic SS-400FL) that is able to deliver about 90% efficiency at maximum load. This means that the actual power usage of the ASIC miner is 10% less than what our measuring device shows and the other 10% of power are being lost during the conversion essentially in the form of heat dissipated by the PSU. What you are paying for is the actual power measured by the device we are using for the tests of the power consumption.

antminer-s1-idle-power-psu

The idle power we have measured was 75W (67.5W + 7.5W). This is the power usage that you can expect from the device as soon as you power up the AntMiner S1, it takes some time to start up and to connect to the Internet in order to get work from the pool and the power usage during that time is about 75W. Also should your ASIC miner loose connection to the Internet or the pool it is configured to mine at gets down and there is no backup or the other pools are also not available the device will consume 75W of power doing essentially nothing.

antminer-s1-power-usage-under-load

What you will be more interested in though is the power usage of the Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC when it is working and mining for Bitcoions. At the default frequency of 375 MHz of the Bitmain chips used in this device and a hashrate of about 180 GHs you can expect a power consumption of about 407W (366.3W + 40.7W). And if you overclock the device to 393.75 MHz as per our guide here you are going to be getting 20 GHS more hashrate at the cost of a small increase in power usage. In 200 GHS overclocked operating mode Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC will use about 422W (379.8W + 42.2W). So if you haven’t overclocked your Antiner S1 yet, then you should and our overclocking guide will ensure you get low HW error rate, lower power consumption and stable 200 GHS of hashing performance.

How to Overclock Your Bitmain AntMiner S1 to 200 GH/s

27, Jan 2014

bitmain-antminer-s1-200-ghs-overclock

The Bitmain AntMiner S1 Bitcoin ASIC miners are shipped at 180 GH/s default hashrate and they do support easy overclocking to about 200GH/s or a little over by increasing the operating frequency of the chips that is set at 350 MHz by default. Increasing the frequency to 400 MHs seems to be the most common solution to overclock your AntMiner S1 in order to get about 200GH/s hashrate, however that leads to an increase in the number of HW errors that you are getting. Now, it is completely normal to get some HW errors for an ASIC, especially overclocked one, but the percentage value should be fairly low if everything is normal.

When you login to the Bitmain AntMiner S1 web interface and open the Miner Status page you have a field called HW, this field may show a high value, but in order to calculate the actual percent of the HW errors you need to use a special formula and not directly compare the number in the Accepted and HW fields as they may show similar numbers getting you to think that you are getting way too many errors when that is not the case.


AntMiner S1 HW Error Calculation Formula:

HW / (diffA + diffR + HW) * 100


By using the formula above we can calculate that our miner has:

1937 / 1747537 * 100 = 0.11% HW Error Rate

0.11% is a very acceptable HW Error percentage for a Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC overclocked to provide about 200 GH/s hashrate. That is however the case with our settings using 393 MHz overclock frequency of the chips with an average of 201.55 GH/s hashrate. If overclocking to 400 MHz we are getting a little bit of a GH/s increase, however the HW Error rate also goes from 0.11% to a little more than 1%, so no point pushing the clock of the chips to 400 MHz in our opinion.

In order to overclock your Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC to provide 200 GH/s and low HW Errors rate with our settings you need to follow the steps below:
– Login with SSH to your AntMiner S1 ASIC using the IP and username/password you’ve set it to use.
– Type “cd /etc/config” (without the quotes) in order to get to the folder where the config file is located on the miner.
– Type “vi asic-freq” (without the quotes) to edit the config file, comment the currently set options by placing # in front of them and add the following lines or directly replace the values with the following ones:

option ‘freq_value’ ‘5f05’
option ‘chip_freq’ ‘393.75’
option ‘timeout’ ’36’

– Save the changes you have made and type “reboot” (without the quotes) to restart the miner, so that it can apply the new settings and start mining at 200 GH/s with the overclock settings you’ve set.


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