Posts Tagged ‘Gridseed

markets-cx-exchange-rate

It has been about a week already since we have discovered the new Markets CX LTC cloud mining service and have started testing it. We have decided to give it a try as it was new and interesting, so we have invested 5 Litecoins to purchase about 120 KHS worth of cloud mining hashrate at a price of 0.0410 LTC per KHS. Initially we’ve had some concerns about the service that is claiming to be using Gridseed ASIC devices to provide so attractive prices for cloud mining hashrate as compared to other services that are still using GPUs. You can check our first impressions from the MarketsCX Litecoin cloud mining service and see some of the concerns and issues that some readers that have decided to try it out as well have reported.

The good news is that a week later and the service is still here and works and today we’ve got an official reply in the comments section of the article with our initial impressions seemingly from the Support of the service. This is the reason why we’ve decided to give some updates on our experience with the Markets CX service so far and below is a quote of the post regarding some of the issues reported in the comments above:

Guys, indeed there were some technical problems a few days ago. Some user accounts with dots and uppercase characters in their E-mail addresses were affected. We have successfully solved this problem. No LTC, KHS or mining profits were lost.

It is nice that they are keeping an eye on what other people are talking about their service and taking the time to respond to users with issues that are not posted on their website, though their onsite support seems a bit slow in responding apparently. Up until today we’ve had no issues with the service so far, and today was a bit of a delay when we have requested an LTC withdraw – we did not receive a confirmation email shortly after requesting the withdraw (previously we got it in less than a minute). So we’ve sent a support ticket about the problem and have requested multiple times a withdraw to test if we are going to receive an email. A bit more than an hour later we got a confirmation email and the withdraw was completed, so we’ve closed the ticket (we got no answer, but maybe the issues was addressed). So a few more hours later we’ve requested another withdraw to see if the problem with the delay still exists. Again we did not get a confirmation email within a few minutes, but requesting the withdraw again and we got the confirm email in a moment (again just one with two requests made).

Another thing that we did not like much about the service is the rapid decline in price per KHS, we have purchased hashrate just a week ago at 0.0410 LTC per KHS and back then this was very reasonable price and now the price is 0.02442 LTC per KHS. We are not sure if this is because of users that are dumping their hashrate or by the service pushing new hashrate at a lower price, but we are not very happy that in just a week time our hashrate lost almost half of its value (a common problem with cloud hashrate services with trading exchanges). Currently there are more than 34 MHS worth of hashrate available on the exchange, so at the moment you can buy some cheap LTC mining hashrate. We do recommend caution though as this is still a new service and we still do have some concerns, so not a good idea to invest a lot of Litecoins in it for the moment. If you are interested in checking it out you can get with a few LTCs like we did, as it is probably not a good idea to invest in thousands of KHS for the moment!

For more information about the Markets CX Litecoin cloud mining service and to try it out…

gridseed-new-19-mhs-asic-miner

We got a tip from a reader that a new dual mining mode ASIC device based on Gridseed chips might be coming out soon. The device is supposedly capable of providing up to 19.2 MHS Scrypt and 520GHS SHA-256 is listed for with a price of $12888 USD on a Chinese online store and is being sold by a company called EastShore Trade. This is a pre-order and they claim the miner will be available “at the end of March”. The photo above of the actual miner does look Ok, though the photo itself and the claimed specifications do rise some doubts, so you should treat this information with caution for the moment!

This miner is apparently composed of 4 blades (only one blade shown on the photo or all 4 blades together?), each blade can mine at a speed of 130 GH/s for SHA-256 mining and 4.8 MH/s for Scrypt mining. So, the miner can mining at a speed of 520 GH/s for SHA256 mining and 19.2 MH/s for Scrypt mining in total. The total power consumption claimed is just 800W for the four blades and the power supply is apparently a part of the miner according to the information. The miner on the photo does remind us a lot in terms of design to the AntMiner S1 and the device apparently also comes with a LAN port, so it would be independent of a computer.

19.2 MH/s worth of Scrypt mining hashrate is achievable by using a total of 64×5 Gridchip GC3355 processors or a total of 320 chips providing 300 KHS each. With the total power usage of a non-overclocked 5-chip ASIC of about 5W we should be getting about 320W for Scrypt only mining mode if the calculation is correct. The problem comes with the SHA-256 mining part, with a 5-chip solutions needing roughly about 50W in BTC mining mode this would result in 3200W power consumption for the SHA-256 mining only or a total of 3500W without overclock for Dual Mining mode. So how come we see claimed 800W for the device, this could neither be the Scrypt only power usage, neither a single blade one (4 blades shod total in 3200W). And integrating a 3200W or 3500W power supply in a miner so small does not seem very believable (again is the photo of a single blade or of the 4 blades?). So do not be in a hurry with pre-orders at least until there is more clear information about this upcoming ASIC!

gridseed-5-chip-asic-fanless-power-usage

If you are using the 5-chip Gridseed ASIC devices in Scrypt only mining mode you probably already know that they are using about 8W of power when overclocked. But what about optimizing the power usage even more by removing the noisy fan that might be needed for the 60W power usage in Dual mode or the 50 and something in BTC only mode, but you can go without it in Scrypt only mode. So we did just that, desoldered the fan from the ASIC and ran the device in fanless mode. And surprise, surprise the total power usage without the fan gets down to just about 5-6W overclocked to 850 MHz, but what about cooling without a fan?

gridseed-5-chip-asic-fanless-thermal-image

Running for more than 2 hours already the ASIC in fanless mode mining Scrypt has shown that it can do just fine with passive cooling. The maximum temperature was about 36.6 degrees Celsius at the hottest point with an ambient temperature of about 25 degrees Celsius. Don’t get the wrong impression from the thermal images, these temperatures for passive cooling are more than adequate and essentially the cooling radiator is considered cool, meaning that in Scrypt only mining mode you can do just fine with passive cooling at lower ambient temperatures. If you have multiple units together you might want to have a single big fan with slow rpm just to move a bit of air around them you you can be safe even when the summer heat hits.

A word of warning though, if you remove the fan from the Gridseed 5-chip ASIC devices and for some reason you start a miner for Scrypt that does not stop the BTC mining part or you start the dual mining mode you will have trouble with cooling the device and this can lead to a damage of the ASIC caused by overheating of the chips – most likely the first to blow up would be the voltage regulators. So be careful that you run only in Scrypt mode if going fanless and to use miners that do activate only the Scrypt mining mode and disable the SHA-256 one.


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