Posts Tagged ‘Zeusminer’

What is the Power Consumption of the ZeusMiner Blizzard Scrypt ASIC

15, Jun 2014

zeusminer-blizzard-scrypt-asic-power-usage

We’ve read some comments about people complaining from the stock ZeusMiner Blizzard Scrypt ASICs’ like them being crappy and getting too hot. From our personal experience we can also confirm that the 60W power adapters provided with the miners do get hot, but this is to be expected with a power draw of the device of about 44W at 300 MHz and 48W at 328 MHz. Our unit that we are currently testing is hot to the touch, but only using that to judge can be misleading as any temperature higher the one of our body is perceived as hot. Anyway, we did decide to try using the Blizzard miner with a high-quality ATX power supply and measure the actual power draw we are getting…

We have attached the ZeusMiner Blizzard to an 80Plus Platinum power supply and the result was a bit surprising – very low efficiency of the power supply due to the low load. Clearly the 1200W Corsair power supply is not designed to be very efficient with a load of just about 50W, actually 48-49W measured as used by the miner, so not much different than what we got from the standard PSU. The difference here however is that due to the low efficiency that the PSU is running at the actual power consumption of the miner off the power socket is about 64W. We did measure 48W of power usage with the stock power adapter supplied with the miner at the power socket, so it seems that these 60W power adapters are quite efficient in converting the 220V power to 12V. Of course by increasing the number of miners connected to the power supply and raising the load to at least 10% or more the efficiency should increase and make things right, though no point in running just a single Blizzard off an ATX computer power supply – better stick to the power adapter supplied with the miner.

What Performance to Expect from the 27 MHS GAWMiners Falcon Scrypt ASIC

14, Jun 2014

falcon-cgminer-performance-results

Our testing of the 27 MHS GAWMiners Falcon Scrypt ASIC continues and in the last few days we’ve been moving the ASIC miner through different pools in order to check what is the actual performance that you can expect from it. If judging the performance based on what cgminer reports you should be looking at the WU reported speed as the actual one and not the one for the last 5 seconds or the average reported by the software. Though do note that the WU reported speed is for the last minute based on the shares submitted. To get a more accurate result we need an average that covers longer period of time such as an hour or even a day and you can easily get such results from a pool monitoring and reporting not only your current hashrate again based on the shares submitted in the last minute for example. Do note that the Falcon Scrypt ASIC from GAWMiners is essentially the same in terms of hardware inside as the ZeusMiner THUNDER X3 and should produce the same hashrate. So far the recommended operating frequency of 328 MHz seems to work very well, though the standard rating of the ZeusMiner ASIC chips seems to be 300 MHz. The results you see here are made using the 328 MHz operating frequency with a HW error rate hovering around 5%, slightly higher than we would want, but still acceptable and apparently the normal one for the Zeus chips.

falcon-24-hour-hashrate-ltcrabbit

Here you can see a 24 hour chart with the hashrate reported by the LTC Rabbit mining pool. The minimum average hashrate per hour we got at the pool for the 24 hour test period was 25674 KHS and the maximum was 29332 KHS with an average across the 24 hour period of 27882 KHS. A very good result and with that hashrate you can currently get about 2.5-2.6 LTC mined a day, not too bad with the difficulty recently going past 10 thousand, but not that great either with the current exchange rate for Litecoin. So mining LTC now and not selling it immediately seems like the smarter choice if you have decided to invest in larger Scrypt ASIC miner such as the GAW Falcon.

falcon-scryptguild-average-speed

Trying out the Scrypt ASIC miner at the ScryptGuild mining pool where you mine altcoins and get payed in BTC has shown us very similar performance. The average hashrate poolside was 27738 KHS and with it the expected payout for 24 hours of mining could get you around 0.05 BTC at the moment. So poolside we are actually getting a bit more than the 27 MHS promised by GAWMiners, though we are a bit short from the 28 MHS that Zeus claims for the THUNDER X3, but it is still acceptable. It is possible that with some tweaking that we can get slightly better results by lowering the HW error level. The quite high power usage of the miner however does not leave that much room for optimizing the cooling and squeezing some more MHz from the miner. We are not ready to give up, so stay tuned for more information as we continue to play around with the miner. It will be interesting to compare this miner with the A2-based 27 MHS mini miner that uses Innosilicon A2 Scrypt ASIC chips and we are hopefully soon be able to compare the two devices.

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.


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