Posts Tagged ‘bitcoin asic miner

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Last week KnCMiner has reported that they are ready to start shipping the 3 THS Neptune miners and this week the users that have pre-ordered the Batch 1 units have started receiving their units. The 3 THS Neptune ASIC miners that were pre-ordered back at the peak of the Bitcoin and purchased with BTC at the end of last year might end up with very nice return of investment time. However if you have paid in cash for them and at some point after the MtGox affair, then you might have harder time to return your investment by mining Bitcoins with them as the difficulty is climbing fast already.

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The 3 THS KnCMiner Neptune SHA-256 ASIC miners are using about 2.1 KW of power at the wall, so the best way to power them is by using two 1.2 KW ATX power supplies, so that you might be able to also have some reserve for possible future hashrate upgrades with slight increase in the power usage. If you still haven’t pre-ordered a Neptune miner and do not plan to get into the Batch 2 order list, but you are interested in getting some more affordable Bitcoin miners, then you might want to take a look at the upcoming 500 GHS AntMiner S3 from BitMain or the already available 1100 GHS Innosilicon A1-based BTC miners.

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KnCMiner has just announced that they are already in the testing/tweaking/assembly stage of their 20 nanometer Neptune ASIC processors in Sweden and shipping should commence some time later this week. The Neptune processors are quite an interesting technological achievement as they are actually the first commercially available 20 nanometer processor shipped to end users… and we are not talking about ASIC miners only. Intel for example is currently shipping 22nm CPUs, though they are already preparing for a 14nm launch maybe sometime later this year, and AMD’s latest processors take advantage of 28nm fabrication process. So it is interesting to see a Bitcoin ASIC manufacturer pushing advanced technology ahead of other much larger and more established companies are able to do so.

The Neptune is a 1440-core 55×55 mm package tailor-made for the Bitcoin mining (SHA-256 ASIC). Each Neptune miner will consist of 5 ASIC chips and comes in new sturdier enclosure and packaging and should be capable of 3 THS or even more while consuming about 2.1 KW of power at the wall. That results out to just about 0.7 watts of power used per GHS, so really god power efficiency and KnC does promise to possibly further increase the performance of the device with software updates. The first two batches of the Neptune Bitcoin miners are already sold-out and KnCMiner is taking pre-orders for Batch three at the moment. They expect to start shipping Batch 1 to customers this week and to Batch 2 pre-orders before the end of the month.

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If you ever wondered how hot does the Bitmain AntMiner S1 Bitcoin ASIC Miner get when operating and mining for BTC now you can get a better idea about the temperatures thanks to some thermal images that we’ve made of one of these BTC ASIC miners. The AntMiner S1 has the cooling radiators on the other side of the PCBs and not on the one where the SHA-256 mining chips are placed, so the operating temperature of the chips is not so low. Running at the default hashrate of about 180 GH/s you can see temperature of about 68 degrees Celsius and it is of the voltage regulators above the chips. As you can see the temperature on the left is lower than that on the right side of the board due to the fact that the cooling fan is on the left side.


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Moving on to the exhaust side of the AntMiner S1 cooler where the hot air passing through the cooling radiator passes you can see that on the hotter output end the maximum temperature is about 61 degrees Celsius. At the same time the web interface reports operating temperatures of about 45 degrees Celsius for the two boards with chips that make the Bitmai AntMiner S1. As you can see it is a good idea to think more about the improvement of the cooling of the ASIC miner, especially if you do plane to overclock it to 190 GH/s or even 200 GH/s. The hardware is probably able to handle pretty well higher temperatures than these, but ensuring good cooling will make it perform great for longer period of time and you would want to have that when talking about a BTC ASIC miner.


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