Posts Tagged ‘Scrypt ASIC’

KnCMiner Titan Scrypt ASIC Miners to Start Shipping Next Week

11, Sep 2014

kncminer-titan-scrypt-asic-miner

Today KnCMiner has announced that the company is ready to finally start shipping the much anticipated Batch 1 of Titan Scrypt ASIC miners to the customers that have preordered the devices. The pre-order price of the 300 MHS KnCMiner Titan Scrypt ASIC miner was $9995 USD without VAT (initially it was just 100 MHS) and when the preorder was announced earlier this year this may have looked like a good deal. Now however the situation is not so good and the 300 MHS units that are about to start shipping in Monday next week, according to KnC, will need quite a lot of time to just even ROI in the current market conditions. If the difficulty remains at the current level as it is at the moment you would still need about half a year just to ROI what you have paid for the miner and we know that once these ASICs start shipping we are going to see a serious increase in the total network hashrate and difficulty for Litecoin…

In fact the people that have pre-ordered or are considering pre-ordering the Batch 2 KnCMiner Titan Scrypt ASIC miners might have more luck and get faster ROI time as their units that are supposed to start shipping sometime next month will be upped to 400 MHS hashrate and cost $6995 USD without VAT. Even though these miners at that price are also not so attractive in the current market situation, so the interest in them will probably not be that high now, especially when the competition is also preparing interesting and more affordable products with higher hashrate and lower power usage.

But back to Batch 1 miners, these 300 MHS Scrypt ASICs will be broken down to 4 separate cubes using the design that the company’s 3 THS Neptune Bitcoin ASCI miners relied upon and will have a total power consumption rated at 1160 watts. This also means that each of the cubes will use almost 300 watts of power, so hopefully KnC will equip these with two PCI-E power connectors instead of just one like on the Neptunes. The announcement from KnCMiner that they are ready to start shipping the Titans did contain something interesting as well, namely the following “The Titan was designed for several variants of the Scrypt algorithm, including Scrypt-N”. This suggests that the Titan will also be capable of mining Scrypt-N coins at a lower hashrate than that available for Scrypt-based crypto coins.

New 300 MHS ZeusMiner Volcano Scrypt ASIC Miner Up for Pre-Order

4, Sep 2014

zeusminer-volcano-scrypt-asic-miner

Zeus has just announced their third generation of Scrypt ASIC miners and has started taking pre-orders for end of Q4 delivery. For the moment the only Gen III miner is the ZeusMiner Volcano that should be capable of 300 MHS with just 1000W of power usage. The next generation of Scrypt mining chips should be capable of 1.2 MHS per chip and with a per chip power usage of less than 4 Watts, so a 256-chip device should be capable of providing the advertised 300 MHS hashrate. The standard price for the new ZeusMiner Volcano Scrypt ASIC is $1699 USD, however the first 500 units will be sold for a discounted price of $1599 USD and existing customers also get a $50 USD discount code in their accounts for use on Volcano orders. Furthermore if you use BTC or LTC for your payment, then you will get an extra 5% discount from the price of the miner.

Zeus does provide a guarantee that they will deliver the Volcano by the end of Q4 2014, and they even back that promise by offering the customers to give an extra Volcano miner if the shipment is delayed by 1 moth or the power consumption is 50% higher than initially promised. Not a bad offer for something that you need to pre-order and pay in advance, but you should still be careful and consider well should you decide to pre-order mining hardware. As we’ve seen with the more recent pre-orders for Scrypt ASIC miners offered by companies such as KNCMiner or Alpha Technology by the time these are shipped there is a high probability that they will not even be able to ROI let alone make profit and the reason for that is the very long time it took from announcing pre-orders to the release on the market. The case with the ZeusMiner Volcano is not such however as the hardware is not so expensive and the time for delivery is not that far, furthermore Zeus has already delivered Scrypt ASIC miners. Nevertheless be careful with pre-orders and do the math carefully when deciding should you invest in a Volcano miner or not.

Innosilicon A2 Terminator Scrypt ASIC RPi OC Mod

15, Aug 2014

a2oc-modified-web-interface

Innosilicon still has not made any release of the source code of their cgminer fork with support for the A2 Scrypt ASIC chips, what you get with their A2 Terminator Scrypt ASIC devices is a Raspberry Pi with a preloaded cgminer and simple web interface to control the device. The standard web interface however is a bit limited in the supported operating frequencies – 1000 and 1200 MHz. The recompiled cgminer does allow for a few more operating frequencies to be used, however they are not selectable by default through the web interface of the miner. Some time ago there was a modified image released by a user called Emdje that supposedly allowed more overclock options. However it has turned out that it was not really functional as even though you could select operating frequency at steps of 5 MHz the cgminer did not accept these values and instead defaulted to some of the supported frequencies.

Back when we first had the chance to do a remote test of a A2BOX Scrypt ASIC miner we have discovered that the only supported operating frequencies by the Innosilicon A2 Terminator Scrypt ASIC miners are: 1000, 1080, 1100, 1200, 1280, 1300 and 1400 MHz. This is why we have made a modification to the standard RPi image that ships with the A2 miners, so that you can quickly and easily add the supported frequencies to be selectable from the web interface of the miner. This should allow you to squeeze some more extra performance from your device, regardless if it is the smaller 2 module or the large 6 module ASIC model, as our tests have shown that most of the miners should be able to work pretty well at up to 1280-1300 MHz up from the maximum of 1200 MHz that you have by default. Below you can download the modification we have prepared along with the instructions on how to update your miner, so that you get the extra OC options available.

How to login to your miner via SSH/SFTP using putty/WinSCP:

– username: pi
– password: innosilicon

Where to find the miner and web interface:

/var/www

Replace the index.php file with the following modification:
– modified index.php

All that is left is to refresh the webpage with the miner interface and you should see the new options for operating frequencies available in the dropdown boxes for the A2 modules. For the smaller miners you need to select just the first two frequencies as you can see on the image above, for the large A2 miners you need to set all of the six frequencies. Do note that each of the modules can operate at a different frequency, so experiment and set the best frequency for each one that gives the lowest HW error rate and optimum performance.


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