Posts Tagged ‘power usage’

What is the Power Consumption of the 27 MHS GAWMiners Falcon Scrypt ASIC

13, Jun 2014

gawminers-falcon-power-consumption

We have been using and testing the 27 MHS GAWMiners Falcon Scrypt ASIC miner for a few days already and we did measure the power requirements of the device and are ready to do some recommendations for a suitable PSU to use. On the GAW website the power consumption of the miner is stated as 1040W and since this is essentially a ZeusMiner THUNDER X3 inside, we have also checked the specifications announced on the Zeus website – 920W. Zeus however does recommend a 1200W modular 80PLUS Gold or Platinum rated power supply to be used for this miner, though you can actually do well with a slightly less powerful model if it is a good one.

As you can see from our measurement on the image above, where we are using a Corsair 1200W 80Plus Platinum power supply, the actual power usage of the miner is 916W, so very close to what Zeus has stated on their website. The fact that we are using a more powerful 80Plus Platinum power supply gives us very high efficiency of over 94% at this serious load, so the total power consumed at the wall is roughly 970-975W. This means that even with a good quality 80Plus rated 1000W power supply you should be fine. No need to go for 1200W as recommended, though the higher power model will most likely help you minimize the power wasted as it will be operating at better efficiency when not pushed to the limit. We did a test with a 1000W power supply that was barely managing to work at 78-80% level of efficiency and got a power usage of almost 1100W at the power socket. So if you want to save yourself some heat and waste less power, you better go for at least 1000W power supply that is rated 80Plus Gold.

Testing the 5-chip Gridseed BTC/LTC ASIC in Fanless Cooling Mode

16, Mar 2014

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.

Thermal Images of the Gridseed 5-chip BTC/LTC Dual Mode ASIC

15, Mar 2014

gridseed-scrypt-only-vs-dual-mode

Today we have decided to compare the Gridseed 5-chip BTC/LTC Dual Mode ASIC devices in terms of thermal characteristics when operating in Scrypt only mining mode (~8W overclocked) and in Scrypt/SHA-256 dual mining mode (~65W overclocked). We wanted to see how good the massive radiator and high-speed cooling fan will be able to handle in the two modes and more specifically in the dual mode as it is apparently designed to cool the device properly with the high power consumption that it has when mining for BTC (SHA-256) and LTC (Scrypt) at the same time. So we put two ASIC devices next to each other, the one on the left is running in Scrypt only mining mode and the one on the right in Dual mode mining for BTC and LTC at the same time.

gridseed-scrypt-only-vs-dual-mode-thermal-image

We left the devices to work for an hour before taking the thermal images in order to see what are the temperatures of the two miners. Note that the top of the devices does not seem very hot and the highest temperature is that of the cooling fan’s motor. You can however see that around the device running in Dual mode the temperature is higher due to the hot air that is being blown. Looking at the bottom part of the device however we can see more serious difference in the operating temperatures of the two devices. The highest temperature of the device mining in Scrypt only mode we measured is 32.1 degrees Celsius, the device in Dual mode on the right however shows very different results – the maximum temperature we have measured was 73.5 degrees Celsius. As expected the highest temperature measured is at the part where the 3 voltage regulators are located and while they are probably rated to work at temperatures of up to 100-120 degrees C they still do get quite hot as they do not have direct contact with the cooling radiator of the device. So if you plan on running the Gridseed 5-chip BTC/LTC ASIC in Dual mode you might want to consider adding additional small radiators for problem free operation in the long run. The maximum temperature of the Dual mode ASIC aside from the voltage regulator’s region was 44 degrees Celsius, so the cooling of the Gridseed GC3355 chips is more than adequate.

What we would recommend however if you are getting Gridseed 5-chip BTC/LTC Dual Mode ASIC devices is to stick to running them in Scrypt only mining mode where their real advantage is – high performance Scrypt mining hashrate with very low power usage… and no potential problems with the cooling either. Next up we are going to desolder the fan of the Gridseed ASIC devices to see how they will be handling passive cooling in Scrypt only mining mode.


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