Posts Tagged ‘Bitmain AntMiner S9’

Boost Performance or Optimize Power Usage on AntMiner S9 and L3 ASIC Miners

14, Nov 2022

The Bitmain AntMiner S9 series for Bitcoin (BTC) mining and AntMiner L3 series for Litecoin (LTC) or other Scrypt crypto coins re now legendary as although a bit old already they are still being used around the world and can still be nice to play around for various custom projects. You can pick these ASIC miners pretty cheap at the moment and use them as space heaters with a little tinkering to make them not so noisy. And they will not only provide you with heat or the cold winter days, but will also pay for some of the electricity they use by mining some crypto coins for you. So, although they may not be profitable if you think about them as miners, they can be turned into great space heaters that will still be better than regular heaters that only use a lot of electricity to generate heat.

If you still have and Antminer S9 or AntMiner L3 series of ASIC miners from Bitmain, or get some used units cheap, then you might want to check out the Hiveon ASIC Firmware for these devices as it will allow you to easily tweak them for either performance or efficiency. There are easy to use profiles to help you run the miner at the exact settings you want to with multiple options in between optimal power efficiency with reduced hashrate or highest possible hashrate. So, you can turn your AntMiner L3+ into a power efficient 500 MH/s Scrypt miner with 660W of power usage, or a 720 MH/s miner at 1300W of power usage or a few more options in between. Then you can head on to dual mining Litecoin (LTC) and DogeCoin (DOGE) for maximum earnings and the same applies to the AntMiner S9 series where you could be mining Bitcoin with a hashrate of 8.8 TH/s at 680W of power usage or up to 19.1 TH/s with 1880 Watts of power if you manage to properly keep the miner cool.

But HiveOn does not only offer alternative mining firmware of these ASIC miners, it comes with a complete management platform ASIC Hub for easier mining with ASIC miners, especially if you have more than just one miner. And there are not only the older S9 and L3 models supported with alternative firmware, newer Bitmain AntMiner ASICs are also available for use such as the S19 models or the T19. The ASIC Hub supports much more ASIC mining devices with their standard firmware from Bitmain, WhatsMiner, Avalon (Canaan), Innosilicon, Ebang etc. So, if you still haven’t checked out what features and advantages you might get with your mining hardware. Then there is also the HiveOS for GPU miners by HiveOn, if you still haven’t checked this one out as well.

– To check out the alternative ASIC firmware available from HiveOn…

Don’t Throw Out Your Antminer S9 Bitcoin ASIC Just Yet

14, May 2020

Prior to the recent Bitcoin block reward halving it was all about overclocking your old ASIC mining hardware such as the most widely used Antminer S9 SHA256 ASIC, so that they can manage to mine as much as possible before the halving. Now, a few days after the halving is a fact people are turning off their old Antminer’s as they are hardly profitable anymore, unless you have very cheap electricity or even free one. Don’t be in a hurry to throw them out just yet, this time however, instead of overclocking them, you might be actually downclocking them in order to get better power efficiency and extend their life a bit more. There are a number of modified alternative firmwares available for the Antminer S9 that allow you to get options for finer tuning for higher hashrate for better efficiency. We personally like to use the Braiins OS and more specifically the newer plus version that supports autotuning.

With Braiins OS+ autotuning feature it is really easy to get optimal results not only for higher hashrate, but for better efficiency at a lower power usage as well. We did a quick test to see how good it works and what results can we get trying to optimize power usage while retaining the best possible hashrate. So in about 3 hours we managed to get about 10.4 TH/s for 800W of power usage from a single Antminer S9. That is about 77 Watt per THS which is not bad result for just setting the 800W power target and let the firmware do the rest automatically, but going somewhere between 700W and 800W of power usage should be the sweet spot of about 75W or even a bit less per Terahash of hashate. Of course results can vary from miner to miner, can also be affected by the cooling and so on, but it won’t hurt to try. Do note however that the Braiins OS+ and the autotuning feature do come at a cost as there is a 2% built-in development fee.

– For more information and to download and try the Braiins OS+ and the autotune feature…

Trying Out the Autotuning Function of Braiins OS+ on AntMiner S9

31, Mar 2020

One of the most interesting features of the brand new Braiins OS+ firmware for Antminer S9 ASIC miners is the auto-tuning functionality that automates per-chip overclocking in order to maximize performance for the available power and temperature conditions in order to increase the performance of your available miners. Since we already had a couple of S9 ASIC miners that used older release on the Braiins OS we did a quick and easy upgrade offer SSH to the latest Braiins OS+ release and decided to do a quick test of the auto-tuning feature. We remind you that the OS+ version is not completely open source and “free” like the normal Braiins OS, but it is the one that features the auto-tuning option. Braiins OS+ has a 2% developer fee built-in as a means to help further development, but thanks to the auto tuning feature you should be able to squeeze some extra performance to cover the fee and still be better than manual or stock settings.

We started our testing by disabling the temperature control and forcing the fans to operate at 100% all the time in order to ensure that the cooling performance will be at maximum level all the time for these air cooled S9 miners. Then we have set the PSU power limit to 1500W and started waiting for the automated script to do its magic in finding what the optimal settings would be for all of the chips in the ASIC miner and what will be the final hashrate we are going to be getting in a while from this stock 14 THS SHA256 ASIC miner. Do note that you are not actually required to specify a power limit of the PSU that the autotuning algorithm can take into account in order to maximize the TH/W produced by the mining device, but that can help to ensure that you will not have problems caused by the miner reaching the limits of the PSU you are using.

The result after leaving the auto-tuning to run a while on the miner showed the following result: 16.5-16.6 THS hashrate within the set power limit of 1500W and operating temperatures of the chips trying to stay below 90 degrees Celsius with the cooling fans operating at 100%. We should also note that even though the firmware may do per-chip optimizations for best results, the web-based interface does not provide you with detailed per-chip information, you still get a somewhat summarized hash chains information. We are not sure how long it may take for the auto-tuning to finish or of it actually finishes or tries to find optimal settings when operating conditions change… it is just not well documented for the moment, but it does seem to be working pretty well based on our first experience using it. Of course depending on a lot of conditions the results you will be getting from the auto-tuning feature may vary from miner to miner, so do not expect to see the same improvement on all of your available S9 miners!

– For more information and to download and try the new Braiins OS and OS+…


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