Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,

I have friends that have electricity included in their rent and I want to host some older, quieter miners there.  It would be awesome if I can run 2 older miners off 1 EVGA G2 1600 watt PSU.  Something that can run in apartment at below 3300 RPM.

Antminer S2 was reasonably quiet at 1TH and reliable as tank, S5's with swapped fans, but quality is crap

S4 can be underclocked to pretty quiet and still around 1.6TH or so. S7-LN is fairly quiet and with an undervolt mod can be made not quite S3 silent but pretty close and still see upwards of 2TH. The same mod can be done on an S7 which, with 3 boards instead of 2, is more dense and so will require higher fan speeds for the same level of cooling.

S3 and Avalon 4 were the favorites among college students back in the day. But nowadays, GPU altcoin mining looks a lot more attractive.

Sure if you support a viable altcoin, or don't care about anything except profit, but then you belong on a different forum.

S7LN and R4 are reasonably quiet and can possibly make ROI depending on purchase cost and electrical rates. S7 and S9, as you probably know, are extremely loud and even at the lowest fan settings will be very loud.

Some guys say the Avalon 4 was rather quiet but I do not have very much knowledge on that miner. They are also fairly rare and I do not see them being sold much anymore these days, with efficiency comparable to the Antminer S5.

Avalon 4 at its default 1TH/s is similar noise wise to a common "white box" refrigerator. It is capable of going up to 1.3TH/s with a large increase in noise.

R4 (and to a lesser extent, S9) seems to have a lot of reliability issues. An underclocked S7 might be the best bet if you can find one cheap enough.

Thx all, I'll look into A4

No man. This will never be quiet even if underclocked and undervolted.

For starters the PSU fan is very noisy.

The S4 industrial fans you can hack the fan controller in the software but at the very min speed it will still be crazy loud.

I even hooked a pair of the stock S4 fans in series so 6V going into each fan and it was still loud.


Quietest is probably the S3 will swapped case fans.

The S5 will overheat with case fans, and the S7-LN undervolted is also kinda loud.

Why swap S3 fans when stock is already pretty quiet? S5 with an actually halfway decent static pressure fan sure will work. Other models newer than that are just plain loud no matter how you set them up, there's no way around it.

All I'm saying is, I've used an undervolted S4 as a space heater in my living room the last two winters. Nothing crazy loud about it. Not "you won't notice it" loud, but not "crank up the volume to drown it out" loud.

When I field-tested my undervolted S7LN, it was no louder right next to my seat than the case fans in the computer across the room.

I use an S3 as a heater right under my desk at work, full stock, and I forget it's even there most of the time because it's almost dead silent.

If you can get your hands on it the bitmain R4 is a great space heater and it's profitable. Hoping they make another batch this winter or that another company will make something similar, quit and powerful made for indoor mining. Love to heat my house with them rather than GPU rigs like I did last winter. Plug and play a lot easier than GPU mining.

I think the R4 issues were fixed in later batches, only early batches had problems at least in my experience

I got a friend running a pair of slightly under clocked Avalon 4.1's under his desk on an EVGA 1300g2. You wouldn't even know it was there unless you moved the desk and looked.

between that and the ant miner S3 not much else is going to be quite. they don't make much now days but with power being included in the rent like you said  they will still get something.

It's still a pretty prominent issue nonetheless and according to many members here they stil have pretty bad reliability issues between batches. It's pretty hard to have a reliable miner when Bitmain uses the cheapest parts and tries to shove them together in an R4 chassis.

Well, I have 3 of the R4's: 1 is from batch-4 and the other 2 which were ordered together are from batch-6. Not sure but AFAIK b-6 was the last batch they've made to-date.

The batch 4 and 1 of the batch-6 run perfectly with zero issues. The 2nd batch-6 had its top hash board die just after 25hrs of running. Looking though the posts when mentioned it has always been the top board that fails - less cooling? Thing is the working ones report pretty much same temps on top/bottom boards....

Just putting that out there ;)

Plus when's the last time they've announced a new R4 sale?  Not in a long time, while S9 and T9 sales continue for sha256 miners. I contend they won't be selling any more, and those of us that got a good one - like my R4B2 that's been running just fine for about a year now - should consider themselves lucky for getting a bit of the proverbial unobtanium!