Posts Tagged ‘Bitmain’

Bitmain AntMiner U1 USB Bitcoin ASIC Thermal Images

11, Feb 2014

antminer-u1-btc-usb-asic-miner-thermal-1

AntMiner U1 is the smaller USB-based Bitcoin ASIC devices made by Bitmain, they contain just one BTC ASIC mining chip (BM1360) and has been designed to be powered by a USB 2.0 port. These devices are rated at 1.6 GH/s hasrate with 2W power consumption and you can downclock or overclock them by software as long as you are able to provide sufficient power and cooling. Bitmain recommends that you provide additional cooling for these devices if you plan to overclock them over the stock 1.6 GH/s performance, but we checked how hot these small USB powered BTC ASIC devices can get and their “default” hashrate and our findings confirm that it will be a good idea to think about using a fan to cool them even at 1.6 GH/s. On the back of the AntMiner U1 there is an aluminum cooling plate and our thermal images show that in just about 10 minutes of use this cooler gets to a temperature of about 68.8 degrees Celsius and that is actually quite hot.

antminer-u1-btc-usb-asic-miner-thermal-2

The other side of the Bitmain AntMiner U1 is more important as there you will find the actual elements of the device on the PCB, including the Bitmain BM1360 chip that does the actual calculating as well as the power elements that also get hot. The thermal image of this side of the USB ASIC shows even higher temperatures – up to 74.8 degrees Celsius maximum measured temperature. And while even at these quite high operating temperatures the AntMiner U1 does manage to work good and stable enough without active cooling, it is a wise idea to keep the temperatures lower especially on the long run if you plan on mining with these USB BTC ASIC devices for months without problems. Of course if you do plan to overclock the active cooling with the help of a fan is a must do!

Download cgminer 3.8.5 with AntMiner U1 Support for Windows

11, Feb 2014

cgminer-3-8-5-antminer

If you have Bitmain AntMiner U1 USB sticks for Bitcoin (BTC) mining you would need to use a special version of cgminer miner software that is compiled to support these BTC ASIC devices. Below you will find cgminer 3.8.5 compiled for Windows that has support for the AntMiner U1 USB ASIC miners along with example BAT files to run the USB ASIC at “stock” frequency for 1.6 GH/s, along with settings for running the device at 1.8 GH/s, 2.0 GH/s and 2.2 GH/s. Just make sure that if you overclock the AntMiner U1 for higher hashrate to ensure that the device is properly cooled – you need to provide additional fan blowing on the device to cool it down when it is overclocked. Do not, and we really mean that you should not overclock the AntMiner U1 without additional cooling or there is risk of damaging the device from the heat generated by it during mining!

– You can download cgminer 3.8.5 with AntMiner U1 support for Windows here…

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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