Posts Tagged ‘Bitcoin miner’

Bitcoin Mining Getting Harder and Harder for Miners

9, Oct 2014

bitcrane-bitcoin-asic-miner

Have you looked at the specifications of the currently available generation of Bitcoin ASICs lately while considering getting a miner in order to get some coins at home? As Bitcoin network difficulty is progressively increasing every ~13 days, the hardware manufacturers are already hitting the limits of the 28nm production technology and the BTC exchange rate stays at low levels things are not looking good. We have checked what you can expect to earn with some of the SHA-256 ASIC miners for Bitcoin and have done some calculations that you can see below using the current network difficulty as a base.


SHA-256 ASIC Miners for Bitcoin:

Rockminer R3 Box – 450 GHS @ 450W – $185 USD
BitMain AntMiner S3+ – 453 GHS @ 355W – $215 USD
Rockminer T1 BOX – 800 GHS @ 1000W – $349 USD
BitCrane T-110 – 1.1 THS @ 1100W – $1299 USD
Spondoolies-Tech SP20 Jackson – 1.7 THS @ 1100W – $1190 USD
BitMain AntMiner S4 – 2 THS @ 2000W – $1250 USD

Looking at the list of miners above you can see that they are actually not that many options available that you are currently able to order and get very soon in your own hands. There are some miners available for pre-order with next month shipping or Q1 2015 expected availability for example but we have not included these. KnCMiner’s Neptune is also not included as these are not being sold at the moment and even if they did at the last listed price nobody would be buying them anyway. We have not listed some other miners from companies that are supposed to be shipping, but we have not found a single trustworthy review or confirmation from anyone that actually received a product from them.


Expected daily mined BTC with the current network difficulty:

Rockminer R3 Box – 0.006466 daily, 0.04526 weekly, 0.194 monthly
BitMain AntMiner S3+ – 0.006509 daily, 0.04556 weekly, 0.1953 monthly
Rockminer T1 BOX – 0.01149 daily, 0.08043 weekly, 0.3447 monthly
BitCrane T-110 – 0.0158 daily, 0.1106 weekly, 0.474 monthly
Spondoolies-Tech SP20 Jackson – 0.02443 daily, 0.171 weekly, 0.7329 monthly
BitMain AntMiner S4 – 0.02874 daily, 0.2012 weekly, 0.8623 monthly

Do note that the above numbers represent what you can earn with the hashrate that the specific ASIC miner provides with a Bitcoin network difficulty remaining at 35,002,482,026 for the duration of the whole specified period. Also these numbers represent the mined coins and you would need to subtract the costs for the electricity from them based on the power usage for the miner and your electricity prices per kWh in order to get an actual profit you will get. As you can see even 2 THS are already not that much and you are going to mine less than 1 BTC per month with this hashrate and with the current sub $400 USD price for Bitcoin when you subtract the electricity fee (can get to half the mined coins) things do not look promising. So for small time miners Bitcoin mining with ASIC miners is not very interesting anymore and even for larger farms things might not be that bright as you might think, so it is no surprise that some of these are selling their hashrate in the form of cloud services. The only thing that could make Bitcoin mining attractive to normal users again is a significant increase in the price of BTC, so you can be mining now and keeping the mined coins waiting for that to happen…

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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