Mining hardware

What to choose for mining cryptocurrency: ASICs or video cards

During the Spring - Summer of 2019, everyone can observe an intensive recovery of the cryptocurrency market, and along with the rising cost of crypto assets, the interest in mining cryptocurrency is growing. Therefore, many novice miners are increasingly beginning to wonder: "Where to start?". If we consider classic POW (Proof-of-Work) mining, then today the main tool for POW mining is video cards and Asic devices, since CPU mining is of little relevance and expedient  only for botnet networks, and FPGA miners are extremely expensive and practically inaccessible to the average customer. Therefore, all who are going to engage in mining cryptocurrency stop on the choice of these two options - Asic or video card. And this choice is not as simple as it may seem at first glance, and will depend on many factors, which we will try to make out below. Also at the end we will consider the payback factor of equipment, which many mistakenly put in the first place in the choice of mining hardware.

Bitmain Antminer S9 SE 16TH and 1280W - the next reissue of the 2016 model

Bitmain does not seem to be embarrassed in front of its customers and Apple has once again put on sale its bestseller 2016 Antminer S9. Bitmain, by analogy with Apple and its tradition of selling outdated products with slightly improved performance, adding the mysterious letters SE to the name (which can be translated as Second Edition or Speed ​​Edition), also introduced a novelty with the SE index. Compared with the original, the Antminer S9 SE received an increased hash rate on the SHA-256 algorithm (16TH instead of 14TH) and at the same time the power consumption turned out to be less (1280W instead of 1375W). Those. energy efficiency increased by 20% (from 96J/TH to 80J/TH). The novelty is still far from energy efficiency of the latest generation Antminer S17 (40J/TH) , but considering the price of 351USD together with the power supply, this will be a rather interesting offer for owners of cheap electricity.

[UPDATED] Choosing a graphics card for mining cryptocurrency in 2019

We continue our annual analysis on the market of video cards and their use in mining cryptocurrency for 2019. Compared with the previous analysis at the beginning of 2018, the cryptocurrency market has undergone strong changes associated primarily with a decline in cryptocurrency prices to 90% from last year’s values. Against this negative background, specialized ASIC and FPGA devices form an increasing competition in the mining of cryptocurrency to video cards, which further worsens the situation for the owners of mining farms on video cards. The release of a new generation of Nvidia video cards at the end of 2018 had virtually no effect on the alignment in choosing the best video card for mining. we did not see a sharp decline in prices for video cards of the last generation of the GTX10xx series, moreover prices for video cards continue to remain higher than they were before the mining boom in 2017-2018. Despite this, the mining on video cards in 2019 continues to be relevant, but already at the expense of the used video cards market and new asicresistant mining algorithms. These arguments were in February, when the cost of cryptocurrency was at the bottom. Now in June 2019, the year when the cryptocurrency went up by 2-3 times and new video cards came out, we completely recalculated the payback of the GPU in the mining at the moment.

AMD Radeon RX 5700XT and RX5700 graphics cards versus competitors in mining cryptocurrencies

Today at E3 in Los Angeles on June 11, 2019, AMD held a full-fledged presentation of its new generation NAVI video card called the Radeon RX5700XT and RX5700. Compared with the first announcement at the end of May at Computex 2019, AMD has provided full technical specifications of its new video cards. Therefore, it will be interesting to compare the new products with competing products from the Nvidia company and AMD video cards of the previous generation and try to make a forecast of the performance of the Radeon RX5700XT and RX5700 in cryptocurrency mining

Bitmain Antminer S9 - official firmware available with overclocking capability at 2TH/s

ASIC Bitmain Antminer S9 for mining Bitcoin cryptocurrency has become one of the most popular models. It was produced for more than two years, and in addition to this, the life cycle of the S9 fell on the mining boom of 2017, when ASIC sales beat all conceivable and inconceivable records. During this time, several models of Antminer S9, S9i, S9j, S9 Hydro were released. Each new modification offered a slightly higher hashrate compared to the base S9 with 14TH/s hashrate. The most advanced version of the liquid-cooled Antminer S9 Hydro offered a hash rate of 18Th/s. On May 31, 2019, the manufacturer Bitmain released the official firmware for the entire S9 series with overclocking, which will increase your rate by an additional 2 TH/s. How to do this, read further in this article.

Testing Gigabyte Geforce GTX1650 OC 4Gb in mining cryptocurrency

In the current line of Nvidia video cards, the GTX1650 model occupies the lowest position, replacing the Pascal Geforce GTX1050Ti video card, which in turn is now quite popular among miners. If we consider that the GTX1650 has more Guda cores and a more productive memory subsystem, then the novelty has every chance to become a popular solution for assembling  mining rigs. In order to finally decide on the purchase of a particular video card for mining, you need to know its capabilities compared to other models, so you can familiarize yourself with the actual tests of the Gigabyte Geforce GTX1650 OC 4Gb video card in the mining on various current algorithms.

A new generation of AMD Radeon RX 5000 (Navi) graphics cards introduced

Today, on May 27, 2019, Lisa Su, CEO at Computex 2019, presented to the general public the long-awaited video cards, codenamed Navi, which received the trade name Radeon RX5000 in honor of AMD's 50th anniversary. But unfortunately, the full-fledged technical characteristics of the RX5000 line of video cards from this announcement were not announced, which will force many fans to wait even more eagerly on June 10 when, during the E3 exhibition, AMD will fully disclose the technical features of the new Radeon. From what has already become known, a new GPU architecture called RDNA can be distinguished, which in turn has become a profound rethinking of the previous GCN solution.

Z-enemy 2.0 - global update with the addition of web monitoring

The popular multiminer (16 algorithms) for Nvidia video cards Z-enemy received a global update to version 2.0, which added the ability to monitor mining status through a real-time Web interface or Telnet. Web interface is optimized for the use of mobile devices: tablets and smartphones. By default, access to the web interface is configured on port 4067. There are no other changes from the previous version of Z-enemy 1.28, released in December 2018, by the developers. Therefore, if you do not need a convenient remote interface to control your mining equipment, the transition to a new version of Z-enemy will not be necessary. As before, the miner is distributed with closed source code and a commission of 1%. Download the latest version of Z-enemy on the Bitcointalk forum.

Mini computer Nvidia Jetson Nano - 128 Cuda cores, 472 GFLOPS for 99USD

In June 2019, Nvidia will launch its mini computer in the image of the Raspberry Pi, but only with much higher performance. Because on board, in addition to the 4-core ARM Cortex A57 processor, there will be another GPU chip with 128 Cuda cores with an estimated performance of 472GFLOPS. The retail price of the novelty is 99 USD, which is almost twice as expensive as the Raspberry Pi, but it also opens up much more opportunities due to the use of the Nvidia GPU. Basically, this is image processing (encoding, decoding), artificial intelligence and many other things that use the work of the company Nvidia. First of all, Nvidia Jetson Nano is intended for use in robotics, video recorders, Internet of Things (IOT). For us, Jetson Nano is more interesting as a complete device for mining cryptocurrencies, for which motherboards, processors, etc. are not needed. Those. in the face of Nvidia Jetson Nano, we get a device for mining cryptocurrency using a GPU, similar to how it is implemented in Asic miners, where Raspberry Pi mini computer manages specialized Asic chips.

Comparing Nvidia Geforce GTX1660Ti and GTX1660 in Ethereum mining

In March 2019, Nvidia introduced a line of GTX16xx video cards instead of low-cost and mid-range Pascal (GTX1050-GTX1060-GTX1070) video cards. The GTX1660Ti video card with GDDR6 memory is close in performance to the previous generation GTX1070, but with significantly higher energy efficiency. GTX1660 with GDDR5 memory in turn is the direct heir of the popular model GTX1060. It is possible to say with great confidence that it is the GTX1660 and GTX1660Ti that will become the new favorites for assembling mining rigs in 2019. Therefore, let us compare these two options in more detail in terms of technical characteristics and opportunities in Ethereum mining and determine which of the budget video cards will be the most optimal choice in terms of return on investment.

Bitmain ANTminer T17 - 40TH and 2200W Now Available

Bitmain company has been selling its new S17 and S17Pro asic miners for the SHA-256 algorithm since the beginning of April, and for some reason, the simplified version of the ANTminer T17 just went on sale now, almost a month later. As in previous generations, the T17 has a lower energy efficiency of 55J/TH instead of 39J/TH, but the cost of such an ASIC is much cheaper than full-fledged models.

Asic GoldShell X6 - 1730Mh/s at 2000W on the Scrypt algorithm

A little-known Asic Miners production company Goldshell has launched a new ASIC mining model for Litecoin (Scrypt algorithm) - GoldShell X6. This is not the first model of ASIC from this company.

There are still models X5 and X5S with a smaller hashrate and with slightly worse energy efficiency. For the manufacture of GoldShell used Asic chip ICQ550 instead of ICQ510 in previous models.

Unfortunately, the manufacturer does not specify the technological standards for this chip.

  ASIC GoldShell X6 specifications:

Asic MicroBT Whatsminer M21 - 30TH/s at 1800W, dubious novelty

MicroBT, a month ago in March 2019, announced a new line Asics for Bitcoin - Whatsminer M20 with energy efficiency of 48J / TH. Now on sale on the website of the companyyou can find an asic called Whatsminer M21, but if you compare the technical characteristics of the M21 and M20, the comparison will not be in favor of the new product. Because M21, although it has a higher index, but its energy efficiency is much worse than 60J/TH, which is close to the indicators of the previous generation M10 (energy efficiency 65J/TH). It seems that MicroBT, having released the Whatsminer M21 for sale, followed in the footsteps of Bitmain, which for more than two years launched one of the same product under different names (ANTMiner S9).

Innosilicon G32 - Asic Miner for Cryptocurrency GRIN

Innosilicon, the oldest Asics company, also introduced its first asyc miner for the cryptocurrency GRIN, but more versatile. supports the mining of two algorithms at once Cuckatoo31 + and Cuckatoo32 +, with backward compatibility with Cuckatoo29 / 30 algorithms, but the predicted hashrate for these algorithms is not indicated by the company. Just like Obelisk  in the Innosilicon Asic lineup there will be 3 models with different performance. The simplest model will be called Innosilicon G32 Mini Miner, and it will be executed in the form factor of expansion cards for the PCIe slot, i.e. very much like a video card. The rest of the G32 500 Miner and G32 1800 Miner models will be in the cases already familiar to us.

Asic Obelisk GRN1, GRN1 Mini and GRN1 Immersion - from 70 to 840 GPS using the algorithm Cuckatoo31 (GRIN) already in October 2019

Obelisk company announced its ASIC for GRIN cryptocurrency back in January 2019, almost immediately after the announcement of the GRIN cryptocurrency itself. In January, it was proposed to purchase an asic with a 100GPS hash rate with a consumption of 400W at a price of 3000USD. If you now go to the Obelisk website, you can already see 3 options for ASIC: GRN1, GRN1 Mini and GRN1 Immersion, and not one of them does not match the characteristics of what was announced in January 2019. What the company will do with previous pre-orders and its data promises in January is not entirely clear. Today, the first batch is sold in 2000 units of Asics, which will end on May 3, 2019. In October, when the first deliveries begin, 500 additional ASN GRN1 units will go on sale.

Why the Serial ATA power connector (SATA) is so dangerous for assembling mining rigs

In the last article, we looked at various options for USB risers to assemble mining rigs. In most of them, at this moment, you can find various connector options for organizing additional power on the 12V line. The most widely used connectors are PATA Power Connect (4 pins per line), SATA Power Connect (15 pins in two lines) and PCIe Power Connect (6 pins in 2 lines). Moreover, in recent models of USB risers, several connectors for additional power supply are installed at once, or only one 6-pin PCIe. In addition to all this, the Sata Power Connect to PATA (PCIe) adapters are bundled with the risers, or vice versa, depending on the add-on connector installed on the riser. power supply. If, when assembling your mining riga, you plan to use or already use Sata Power connectors from your power supply, then you have a great chance to remain without equipment as a result of a short circuit or even the entire room where mining mining is located. Why this happens and how to avoid it, read on.

StrongU Miner STU-U8 - asic for mining Bitcoin 46TH/s at 2200W

StrongU Miner, a little-known Chinese cryptocurrency mining equipment company, has completely updated its asic miner's lineup for the X11, SHA-256 and Blake256R14 algorithms. Let us consider in more detail the STU-U8 model for mining Bitcoin cryptocurrency on the SHA-256 algorithm. From the technical specifications, unfortunately, it is not indicated for what standards this Asic miner is made, but given the 46TH/s hashrate and 2200 watt power consumption, it is not much inferior to the recently announced new products from the market leader Bitmain - ANTMiner S17. Therefore, we can conclude that the STU-U8 is also made according to the norms of 7nm, as well as its main competitor.

The evolution of the development of risers for mining. Which USB riser to choose for mining cryptocurrency

With the advent of mining cryptocurrency on video cards, the first crypto enthusiasts had to solve a lot of technical and software problems, one of these tasks was to use the maximum number of video cards on a single computer platform or riga. Because in 2010, there were no special mining motherboards, the maximum number of installed graphics cards per motherboard rarely exceeded 2 units. Those. the number of installed video cards directly depended on the number of PCI-Express x16 connectors on the motherboard. In addition, due to the close proximity of the video cards to each other and the work of mining rigs in 24/7 mode, there was a real problem with the cooling of video cards. It was at this time that tips to increase the distance between video cards with the help of a special PCI-Express X16 connector extender, which had to be soldered   the connectors and cable, began to appear on the specialized forums. Such a device was later called Riser PCI-Express 16X - 16X.

Asic Bitmain ANTminer S17 and S17 PRO - from 50TH/s to 62TH/s on the SHA-256 algorithm (Bitcoin)

The emergence of Bitmain's new ASICs under the SHA-256 algorithm has been discussed for a long time, especially since even the company itself at the end of March announced the launch of sales of a new generation called Antminer S17 on April 9, 2019. On the eve of the start of sales on the official site Bitmain detailed technical information appeared on the Asic miner Antminer S17 and S17Pro.

The main difference between the PRO version and the usual S17 is the presence of three modes of operation (Low Power, Normal and Turbo).

FPGA miner Hash Altcoin Blackminer F1 Mini

About the company Hash Altcoin, which produces miners on FPGA chips, we previously wrote when the production version of Blackminer F1+ was introduced. If the previous FPGA miner is designed more for industrial use, the new product called Blackminer F1 Mini is more suitable for home conditions. because for the cooling system, you can use a variety of ready-made solutions for Intel processors under LGA 115X socket. This approach will allow you to maintain in the room comfortable acoustic living parameters, which cannot be said about his older brother, Blackminer F1 +. Mini version is sold for only 179 USD, but without power supply and cooling system, which would reduce the cost of delivery. You can purchase all missing items in any computer accessories shop.