Posts Tagged ‘power usage’

Power Usage and Thermal Images of the 1-chip Gridseed DualMiner USB ASICs

14, Mar 2014

gridseed-dualminer-usb-thermal-1

You can read our first impressions from the DualMiner USB Scrypt ASIC here and now we took some time to take some thermal images of the miner to check the temperature adn what actually gets hot, so you can consider some extra cooling as well as to measure the actual power usage of these small USB-powered devices based on a single Gridchip GC355 processors for mining BTC/LTC. It seems that the DualMiner’s aluminum heatsink on one of the sides of the device is working quite well, the temperature it shows is quite even and goes to just aa bit short of 50 degrees Celsius. That is with the miner running for Scrypt only mining mode at 850 MHz with 70 KHS hashrate, we are not very mich interested in the combined mining mode where the device also mines for SHA-256 cryptos, note though that if you use the miner in dual mining mode it will get hotter.

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The other side fo the device’s PCB is with the chips and the two things that get hotter as expected are the GC3355 processor as well as the controller chip, so you might want to add some small cooling radiators on them in order to get better cooling. Alternatively adding a small fan like a USB one to create a good airflow or combining both things will make sure that the miner will run for longer period of time at its maximum without giving you trouble. Again this thermal images shows the miner running in Scrypt only mining mode with temperature of the chips going as high as close to 53 degrees Celsius. If you run in Dual Mode however the extra 1W of power consumption that is expected from the BTC side might increase the operating temperatures with another 10-12 degrees on top of what we are getting with Scrypt only mode.

gridseed-dualminer-usb-power-usage

What about the power usage? Since these devices are designed to be powered by a USB port their maximum power usage should be no more than 2.5W (0.5A at 5V) and that can be reached in Dual Mining mode. The idle power usage of the device when it is just plugged in and running in Scrypt only mode is a bit high at 0.875W, and it only increases to 1.485W when you start the miner. So getting about 70 KHS of Scrypt mining hashrate for just about 1.5W of power consumption is a great result for the hashrate you are going to get, what is not so attractive is the price that these devices are still being sold for. Nevertheless we are very satisfied from how the single chip DualMiner SUB ASIC devices are made and work, so next in line for similar testing are the 5-chip Gridseed BTC/LTC ASIC miners.

The Power Consumption of a 6-card Mining Rig using GeForce GTX 750 Ti GPUs

10, Mar 2014

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We have already published some interesting findings about the power usage of the new GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics cards when used for crypto mining and recently we have built a 6-card GTX 750 Ti mining rig. We have taken some time to also measure the power usage of the individual cards as well as the total power usage of the whole system in order to give you some additional details about what you can expect in terms of power consumption from such a mining rig. We have used Gigabyte GeForce GTX 750 Ti video cards (N75TOC-2GI) that do have an external onboard PCI-E power connector and we started by measuring the total power that goes to a single video card both trough the PCI-E slot as well as through the external PCI-E power connector with the help of a watt meter that is attached directly to the power lines going to the video card (using a powered extender).

gtx-750-ti-power-usage-pci-e-power

As you can see on the photo the total power used by the video card is about 31W (with the card running at +135 MHz for the GPU and + 610 MHz for the video memory). Note that this power measurement is on the 12V line from the PSU going to the video card, so it does not take into account the power efficiency of the power supply and as a result the total power used by the video card from the mains will be higher by something like 15-20% (depending on the PSU). Note that we have used a powered PCI-E extender with USB 3.0 cable for the data lanes. This extender takes all the power provided to the PCI-E slot of the video card through a 4-pin molex connector and supplies both the 12V and the 3.3V power that the card uses drawing only power from the 12V line (there is a voltage regulator to output 3.3V from the 12V input on the extender’s board). So what the wat tmeter shows is the total power going from the PSU to the video card and in the case of the Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti it was 31W. Again the total power usage from the mains will be higher as this measurement does not take into account the power efficiency when converting 220V/110V to 12V.

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So what is the situation with the total power usage per GTX 750 Ti video card from the mains? The easiest way to check that is to measure using a watt meter connected between a power socket and the power supply of the computer the total power consumption of the system with 6 cards and then disconnect one card and to measure again. The difference we got using this method was about 79W, though this is not for the video card only as it also affects a bit the overall power consumption of the whole system. Also note that the measured 374 Watt for the 5-card and 453 Watts with the 6-card setup are with the video cards overclocked to +135 MHz/+610 MHz. The results we’ve got with the cards running at the stock frequency were 367W with 5-cards and 432W with 6 cards or a 65W difference per card (total power used from the mains). This difference of 14 watts between stock and overclocked frequencies brings roughly about 40 KHS more in terms of hashrate for Scrypt mining (per card). Have in mind that our power supply used had an efficiency rating of about 80-85%, so this means that 15-20% of the total power used at the mains is actually wasted in the conversion between 220V/110V and 12V.

Another interesting thing that we have noticed while testing the power usage and overclocking capabilities of the 6-card GeForce GTX 750 Ti mining rig was the total power consumption that we got for the system with the power target limit changed from the standard setting of 38.5W to the 65.5W. The watt meter showed an increase of power from the 453W with the 38.5W power target limit to 556W with the 65.5W power limit – about 100W increase with the same operating frequencies with a slight increase in performance of about 90 KHS total from the 6 cards or roughly a bit over 1W per KHS and in our opinion this is not worth the extra increase in power usage, so raising the power limit may not always be a good idea!

How Much Power Does the Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC Use

22, Feb 2014

antminer-s1-hashing-chips-sideways

Today we’ve decided to finally do a measurement to see how much power does a Bitmain AntMiner S1 Bitcoin ASIC use both at idle (not mining), at stock 180 GHS and at overclocked 200 GHS mode. We’ve been using Bitmain AntMiner S1 miner for a while now and have already shared our best settings for overclocking AntMiner S1 to 200 GHS as well as some very interesting thermal images that what gets hot and how hot actually gets on the AntMiner S1 board. We are going to be measuring the power consumption (at the power socket) with the help of a very good 80 Plus Gold certified Power Supply (Seasonic SS-400FL) that is able to deliver about 90% efficiency at maximum load. This means that the actual power usage of the ASIC miner is 10% less than what our measuring device shows and the other 10% of power are being lost during the conversion essentially in the form of heat dissipated by the PSU. What you are paying for is the actual power measured by the device we are using for the tests of the power consumption.

antminer-s1-idle-power-psu

The idle power we have measured was 75W (67.5W + 7.5W). This is the power usage that you can expect from the device as soon as you power up the AntMiner S1, it takes some time to start up and to connect to the Internet in order to get work from the pool and the power usage during that time is about 75W. Also should your ASIC miner loose connection to the Internet or the pool it is configured to mine at gets down and there is no backup or the other pools are also not available the device will consume 75W of power doing essentially nothing.

antminer-s1-power-usage-under-load

What you will be more interested in though is the power usage of the Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC when it is working and mining for Bitcoions. At the default frequency of 375 MHz of the Bitmain chips used in this device and a hashrate of about 180 GHs you can expect a power consumption of about 407W (366.3W + 40.7W). And if you overclock the device to 393.75 MHz as per our guide here you are going to be getting 20 GHS more hashrate at the cost of a small increase in power usage. In 200 GHS overclocked operating mode Bitmain AntMiner S1 ASIC will use about 422W (379.8W + 42.2W). So if you haven’t overclocked your Antiner S1 yet, then you should and our overclocking guide will ensure you get low HW error rate, lower power consumption and stable 200 GHS of hashing performance.


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