Posts Tagged ‘Ethash ASIC’

ASIC Miners Getting Advertised as Home Heaters for European Miners

20, Oct 2022

This year the electricity prices in Europe have skyrocketed and at the same time the mining profitability has been going down steadily until things became unprofitable for most miners after Ethereum’s switch from PoW to PoS last month. With the Fall already here and Winter coming soon and temperatures starting to drop outside it seems that some ASIC miner manufacturers are figuring a way to still sell their hardware. Like JASMINER who are making Ethereum ASIC miners that just posted about their JASMINER X4 3U-Q ASIC miner calling it a “small home heater, with secondary income to offset high electricity bills and still keep warm”.

Using GPU mining rigs and ASIC miners at home during the cold months (if you live in a place that has these) has long been a thing to do if you have quiet running mining hardware or can set it up to run quietly. This way even in a non-profitable period like the one now you can still utilize the heat from the miner to keep you warm at home. Even if the miner just manages to pay for the electricity and you use the heat it is still better than to pay just for electricity for heating, isn’t it. So, if you have your mining hardware not running at the moment, you might want to consider turning it off as a heating solution during the coming cold months, you just need to make sure that you can make it run silent or at least with a very little noise.

Back to the JASMINER X4 3U-Q ASIC miner, it is an Ethash ASIC miner that promises a hashrate of about 1040 MH/s with a power usage of around 480 Watts and with a noise level at under 40 Decibels. We haven’t tested that miner personally, although we would love to, but if these specs are true it could easily be used for keeping your home warmer during the cold months of the Winter and since the power usage is quite low you should be able to cover at least the electricity costs with that hashrate of 1 GH/s. Of course mining Ethereum with it is no longer possible, but you should able to mine Ethereum Classic (ETC) and other Ethash based crypto coins. At the moment the breakeven price of electricity for this device is around 0.21 USD or EURO, so while it may not be bringing profit it could still give you free electricity… sort of…

The official Jasminer website lists the device out of stock at the moment with a price of $9099 USD, definitely way too high, though there are some offers for the miner in the $4000-$5000 range with stock available on the internet. Even that price is a bit too high at the moment for something that can barely make a negligible profit or even breakeven in most cases. Even with the free heating you would still need to pay for the “heater” and if the price of the device is going to be higher than what you’d normally pay for regular heating during the winter it might still not be worth it.

Of course, if the crypto market gets another bull run things may drastically change in favour of the Ethash ASIC mining device, but at the moment even getting one with the idea to use it as a “free” heater may not be that good. Of course, if your electricity costs are lower than the breakeven price and you manage to score a good deal on the JASMINER X4 3U-Q miner things might be looking better.

One important thing to note about Jasminer’s Ethash ASICs like the JASMINER X4 3U-Q, JASMINER X4-1U, JASMINER X4 and JASMINER X4 MINI is that all of them do come equipped with 5GB of memory for the DAG. This was more of importance while you could still miner Ethereum with a nice profit as it has passed the 5GB DAG size, but since it is no longer mineable and some other Ethash-based crypto coins do have quite some time before needing more than 5GB RAM you should be safe for the time being.

It is not only Jasminer however that is thinking along the line of using the heat generated by mining hardware for something other than just waste by-product, and heating your home during the cold winter days is one of the options. Still, this is not something that you can do all year round, unless you live in a very cold place that is. So, finding other alternative uses to utilize the waste heat generated from mining hardware is something that needs more work and people are been working in that direction.

– To visit the official website of the JASMINER X4 3U-Q Ethash ASIC miner…

The Upcoming Ethereum ASIC Miners To Offer 2000+ MHS

3, Feb 2021

There is a lot of talk going on around the new generation of Ethash ASIC miners for mining Ethereum (ETH) that are expected to be released for order in the following few months, although nothing is official or really 100% confirmed, but both devices are expected to have hashrate higher than 2000 MH/s. We are talking about the Innosilicon’s A11 ETH miner and an upcoming device from a newcomer on the mining market, a company called Linzhi that has been getting some attention for a while now. Linzhi Inc was founded by Chen Min, the former CTO of Canaan, a popular name for everyone that has been into crypto mining for a while already as this is one of the first companies to be making Bitcoin ASIC miners – the Avalon miners.

Currently the Innosilicon A10 Pro ETH Miner is the best performing specialized non-GPU-based miner for Ethash with 500 MHS hashrate and 950W of power consumption and a price of $4388 USD　(or 0.125933 BTC) as per the official company website (currently all sold out). The alternative is using GPUs for mining ETH and you even might be able to get the same level of performance as the A10 Pro ETH Miner if you go for Nvidia GeForce RTX 3000 series – 8x RTX 3060 Ti or RTX 3070 or 5-6x RTX 3080 or 4-5x RTX 3090 video cards, but unfortunately pretty much all GPUs suitable for mining are currently hard to find and more expensive than usual.

F2Pool did an unboxing and a test of a sample Linzhi Phoenix ETH miner (the video above). The device is supposedly capable of 2600 MHS hashrate for Ethash with a power usage of 3000-3500W. The Linzhi Phoenix E2600M ETH mining devices are supposedly to be up for purchase around March-April this year with a price in the range of 13-15 thousand USD. The main problem with the Linzhi miner is that it has 4.4GB of memory and Ethereum’s DAG file is already over 4GB in size, meaning that the life expectancy of these miners for mining ETH won’t be very long. If they start shipping as announced and you are among the first to get the device you may still end up with just 4-5 months of use for mining Ethereum, though you would still be able to mine other crypto coins with the Ethash algorithm and smaller DAGs. So, maybe everything was great when they started development 2 years ago, but now 4.4 GB is not enough and if they do not manage to increase the available memory by the time of release to the market things might not be looking very good for their sales.

The Innosilicon A11 ETH miner is the other upcoming next-gen ETH ASIC miner. Supposedly the A11 Ethash miner will be delivering 2100 MH/s Ethash hashrate with just 2300W of power usage and should come with 8GB memory. The not so good thing here is that the price will be higher, probably in the range of about 15-16 thousand USD with shipping expected to start somewhere in April-June time. The Innosilicon is probably the better choice if the final end-product specifications turn out to be as the values we are expecting, as even though it may be slower in terms of hashrate, and more expensive as a price, but is also more power efficient and better equipped for long term use with enough onboard memory.

You should also consider the fact that Ethereum (ETH) will be switching from PoW (Proof of Work) to PoS (Proof of Staking) or with other words moving from mining to staking as a model of generating new coins. This transition has already been started, even though mining is still active and will be for maybe 2 years at least, but when looking for a long-term investment in mining hardware you should have things like that in mind. Not to mention that unlike the specialized ETH miners, going for GPUs allows for much better flexibility even though they may not be as efficient in terms of performance for a specific algorithm.

– Build of a 720 MHs Ethereum Mining Rig With 6x MSI GeForce RTX 3090 SUPRIM X 24G GPUs…

Bitmain Antminer E3 Ethash ASIC Miner is Now Official

3, Apr 2018

There were rumors, leaks and information about an upcoming Ethash ASIC miner from Bitmain for months, but now it is official as the company has announced their Antminer E3 device. The first ASIC miner capable of mining Ethereum (ETH) and other crypto currencies using the Ethash / Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm is capable of delivering 180 MHS hashrate at 800W of power usage and will cost you $800 USD. The first batch of Antminer E3 Ethash ASIC miners is scheduled to start shipping 16-31 July according to Bitmain’s website, so the devices should start appearing in the first user’s hands sometime in August, although the devices will probably be up and running on the network before that.

Looking at the specifications, you are essentially getting the equivalent of a regular GPU mining rig for Ethereum in terms of hashrate and power usage, but in a more compact and cost efficient format with the Antminer E3. Unfortunately the word is that besides Bitmain a couple more companies have also been working on Ethash ASIC miners, so soon we may start seeing more announcements with different specs similar to what happened with the recent wave of Cryptonight ASICs. So you should be careful when you are doing the math and considering if you should invest in the first generation of Ethash ASIC miners now, you if you should wait a bit more and see… especially considering they are not shipping immediately at this point. We also need to see what will be the response of Ethereum to the ASIC miners now that they are available as they may decide to follow the same road that Monero (XMR) choose – to fork the mining algorithm with the idea to continue to be ASIC-proof or switch to POS sooner than expected.

– For more details about the new Bitmain Antminer E3 Ethash ASIC miner on the official website…


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