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BITMAIN IS NOT YOUR FRIEND
ACTUALLY, PRETTY MUCH ANY COMPANY YOU BUY THINGS FROM IS NOT YOUR FRIEND
FRIENDS BRING PIZZA
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Did anyone success in reducing FAN speed?
I tried to edit bmminer.conf directry.
However it didn't make sense.
Isn't there a static option on the settings page? |
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Damn, wish I'd gone that route. Energy wise that is the second most energy efficient monero stat I've seen (affordably, anyway).
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What I do not understand is why these Asic manufactures have to only offer these noisy machines that require a separate power supply. I would be very happy if they offered a small miner that does the same hashrate as my 1070 and only uses 12 watts. I miss the USB stick miners.  Because they are not designed for home use, they are designed for industrial use, so efficiency is the engineering focus, not noise. For as many of us home miners are out there, if NONE of us bought another ASIC? The manufacturers would likely barely notice the sales dip. |
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Does anyone have it now? With an approximate price of about $ 2,000 USD, shipping costs from China and $ 120 USD daily earnings and electricity usage costs, are they worth it?
Honestly? Nobody really knows yet, but most of us who have purchased are clearly betting on "yes". |
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Well. I guess batch 2 arrived today. Ouch!
(Still, profit vs electricity, I don't regret my purchase, but wow)
Is it better to mine a single coin, or mine thru a pool? Is there a difference? You're still mining a single coin when you use a pool. I almost always use pools, consistent payout means more to me than the thrill of finding a block (my only exception is Verium). Considering the current network rate, I wouldn't solo mine anything with the X3 unless you have like 20 of them. |
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Any idea how noisy would the Z9 miner be?
Single fan and running 300W shouldn't be any louder than a small GPU rig. Most of the noise from other ASICs are from cheap vacuum cleaner sounding PSUs. I don't know about other companies, but almost all Bitmain ASICs don't have built in PSUs, so that's down to what you're buying. The ones they provide aren't very loud, and neither are the fans themselves; the noise comes from the chip/heatsink configurations, it's the sound that high pressure air running over a bunch of jagged edges of metal makes. The higher the power output, the more heat generated, the faster the fan, the louder the noise. Due to the space in the miner, any miner with 3 or more cards is going to be loud as heck at higher hashrates (and usually stock), because they're packed in pretty tight and the air is being pushed/pulled through constricted spaces. On some of the older lower powered models you could solve this by replacing the single fan with a pair of low noise, lower powered fans. That worked on, say, the S5, partially because the draw was so low (under 600W) and partially because of the type of heatsink the early Bitmain ASICs used, which filled the middle compartment in an extremely long and thin metal strip config that filled the center between the pair of cards. Having only two allowed them to face each other and create a huge radiator compartment the fan cools. Newer Bitmain ASICs aren't configured like that, or at least the ones I have aren't. I have an X3, B3, and Z9 on order, so we'll see how those end up being (I'm hoping the Z9 and/or the x3 are easier to quiet than having to build a box). Another option on a lower powered ASIC would be to remove the casing, lay the boards out, and run fans over them, but I'm honestly not sure how well that would work. In theory it should work fine. |
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Well. I guess batch 2 arrived today. Ouch!
(Still, profit vs electricity, I don't regret my purchase, but wow)
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So why hasn't this sold out yet?
They must have a lot available.
I am guessing that not being able to buy more then one per customer miight have so affect on it,other reason is that people are still carefull seing how those who ordered cryptonight asics ended with 12k$ worth paper weight/room heather.Everyone is waiting to see if there will be fork or not-eth asics sold out when vitalik said that there wont be fork Nobody lost $12K. The miners were repriced when Monero announced the intent to change algos, and Bitmain issued refunds to equal the adjusted prices. |
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Whats the best idea?  Get one more B3 or a X3? Same questions here. X3 can still hit it's ROI pretty soon (60d) even ETN is forking. It's all down to risk. Bytom isn't proven to be anything yet, but it MAY end up being quite valuable. X3 is a good call while ETN is still on the algo, after fork if it isn't picked up for Nicehash I'm not sure you'll be making much, I'm not overly interested in any of the other coins it mines personally. If you're cashing out daily I think the B3 is earning more right now, but not sure. I don't have either (yet, both are arriving in the next week or two). |
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Even though ZEC is 50-60% of equihash revenue, this is a very diverse algo. I think it is inevitable that some coins simply will not fork or will not fork in time.
If ZEC so happens to be one of them, then this is a great buy?
Monero's team prepared their fork before release of the ASICs and even it was possible to ROI the Giant N, Electroneum not and their hashrate is huge now. Not sure that BTG and other coins developers are prepared for that (they still didn't give a date for the fork), i think if you buy the first batch, you will ROI easily even if all coins fork. Z9, it's only 300W so all shitcoins can help you to ROI. Plus, you know, it's just 300W. If you have any need for heat (grow room, office space heater, etc), it is ALWAYS worth using since even if it loses money it still loses less than just a heater. I still use my S5 when it gets cold enough. |
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Regarding the question about bitstream compatibility, the answer is no, a bitstream built for VCU1525 will not work on the XUPP3R. The clock & USB UART are on different pins, so I must 'build' two versions of the bitstream, one for each card. Although the change in the code is tiny, it still takes the tools 5+ hours to re-run place & route, with multiple runs needed to get a success.
Can you inplement a double set of interfaces to support both boards by the single firmware? BUFGMUX_CTRL can be used to select the clock signal, if clocking assignment is different. It is probably possible to build one firmware for both board. I get the general idea but I still have a hard time seeing how to do that with the USB-UART pins. As far as 'resale' of these FPGA cards, there is also a tremendous future for AI mining. In fact, if tens of thousands of people were mining crypto with these boards, and an AI mining server became available, they are so powerful that you might end up with a 'Skynet' type superintelligence, or the Kurzweil 'singularity' event. My point is that if, for some reason, mining crypto became unprofitable, someone could re-sale access to the FPGA hardware for AI, weather prediction or any other compute-heavy tasks. I also think so, building a Skynet, making huge energy consumption a meaningful thing. Part of the point of FPGAs and AI specific chips is energy efficiency, but yes. |
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Both will do better so that is a moving target.
The MINIMUM efficiency increase over GPUs I've ever had was 3x (and that was for a completely unoptimized hastily written code). The largest I've had so far? Around 100x. Average seemed to be in the 30-50x range. They offer a greater level of configuration that is not possible on GPUs. It'll be a good time soon to short nvidia and amd stock. 2019 is going to be a bad year for both of them. Not only are they going to lose mining market share to FPGA; they will also be losing scientific (uni, govt, corporate) research into AI, genomics, etc. Xilinx and Altera both are starting to reverse their archaic sales practices and mentality. They've realized they're losing out on a market segment that is multiples larger than the ones they've historically sold to. Intel with altera is planning on putting FPGA chips directly on the motherboard and having a fiberoptic path on the motherboard between the FPGA and CPU. The bus width will be a high multiple of the PCI-E bus speed. Oh ya, and people can compile their existing opencl gpu code to the fpga. This allows them to get up and running quickly with their existing code until they migrate over to a full RTL design. Welcome to the future. My trade, what i've done my entire life, has primarily been sys admin, network admin, coder, etc. Once someone offloads apache, mysql, nginx, etc processing to a FPGA co-processor... It will allow applications that had historically needed huge clusters to operate; to operate with a fraction of those servers and offloading tasks to the FPGA. Power consumption for application processing will drop by 10x or more. (with the exception of data storage servers and clusters). FPGA are also significantly more stable than GPUs. The only thing anyone should really be using a gpu is for video, and graphic acceleration. Ya, they can do other stuff, but they're not really that suited to it. RTL development for fpga coprocessing is going to be a big business in the future (5-10 years). I don't necessarily disagree with this forecast, but Nvidia and AMD are big companies with a huge growth in income the past few years. They've already announced mining-focused gpus (which are, granted, just slightly modified versions of their higher mid range cards), but I sincerely doubt at least one of them doesn't have a plan to compete, whether that's entering the AI market or shifting to/adding a line of FPGAs to straight up releasing ASICs themselves. I wouldn't count wither of them out from a business standpoint (though if they don't adapt their model, I 100% agree). I own a small amount of stock in both, by the way. Just for full disclosure. |
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Yeah, but we're the ones that took the chance that this would work. Look at what happened with X3.
What, earning $35-40 currently on minimal electricity? |
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From my practice there are simple measures to avoid failures.
Do not place these boards in the closed case, setup the fan to cool the bottom layer of PCB.
Do not allow the local overheat of any component like DC/DC or external power connector.
Turn on the overtemperature shutdown in the bitstream, and control the temperature in the mining software. It is easy.
Then the FPGA board will work for years.
“Turn on overtemp shutdown in the bitstream” AFAIK there’s no such magic button. If you want temp monitoring and thermal limits with an FPGA you have to include them in your design logic. Same as an ASIC. Otherwise you very much can exceed junction temps and damage the hardware if you have enough power going into the board to begin with. This is also possible on some GPUs with poor drivers. A few of my old Titan Blacks from HPC work had power stages for memory that would overheat if the memory was trashed too much for too long, and the mosfet would slip down on the boards till they caused a short. Actually caught a entire server on fire that way once... /\ This right here. You're starting from scratch with an FPGA. |
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I'll roll if he releases a firmware that bricks the fpga cards. That would be the most epic trolling of all time. Give out some really high figures, get a bunch of people to spend a ton of money on hardware, then release a firmware that destroys the fpga  I've destroyed an amazon node or 2 accidentally with power draw. Mining is the reason the shell now has that 150A limit. nice FUD It's a completely realistic scenario. No, it's not. Unless you physically start smashing an fpga, you are not going to brick it, it's not a consumer product you just run xyz miner you downloaded odd the internet. Total fud. What's a fud? Also you can very easily brick an FPGA if you don't know what you're doing (or do, and are trying to). One in a data center owned by Amazon? I don't know about that, I would assume they have safety measures in place, though as the OP says, they now have a power limit to prevent it... |
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Can you quickly explain me what this FPGA cards are? Im new to the subject.
Are they advanced GPUs for DC or VDI usage or are they something else?
-Is the mobo a especial kind of mobo or you can use any other components as normal Rigs?
-Do they use Win10 and any other normal driver/miner ?
Sorry for the noob questions!
FPGA=Field Programmable Gate Array Put simply, they're somewhere between a gpu and an asic: they are application specific, but you can code the program, so basically you can use it for anything you can get it to do. It's more akin to a gpu in mining terms, but instead of specifying a miner and letting existing drivers and software to do the work (which includes powering and running aspects that aren't needed for mining, much less efficient as gpus are designed for, well, graphics, etc), you have to program the gates to do what you want. Which is why it can be far more energy efficient. Sort of. This is a really basic breakdown from a slightly-more-experienced-than-amateur coder who has only been reading up on FPGAs for a few months (and has only played with Intel test boards). If you're interested in learning more, Intel actually has some really good basic guides available for free if you go to their FPGA product support pages (I think they even have FPGAs for Dummies linked there). It's a lot to learn. They're really, really fun, but there's a huge learning curve for programmers, much less for someone like me who is Linux proficient and knows a little C... |
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Just a quick question--I just swapped some Odroids over to Verium for a bit (don't need them for the next month so figured I'd put them to work). I have 5kh/m roughly (up to 100h/m variance) solo mining 24/7 to my wallet (on a pi). Just curious, I know how to check each individual miner, and know that it's connecting to the pi at least through the port, but is there any way to know that it's mining properly before you find a block? I've done the math and it's about a week+/block. Not looking to get rich, just learning about solo mining with this one, so if there's any way to monitor/check that'd be nice as I'd rather not waste a couple weeks before figuring out I set something up incorrectly...
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I know right? I finally get in early on an deal like the SIA miner and it's completely jacked. Kinda need a win to pay for the $4000 L3+'s I bought...lol
Keep those L3+s running! Depending on your electric rates, they're still paying out pretty decently (for me, at .11/kwh, it still brings in more than double). I'm a big believer in Litecoin, though, and I think it's going to get back to the $250-300 range before the end of the year, so... |
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Can someone clarify this for me since I was so gravely misinformed? I thought Equihash uses a great deal of memory and that it was supposed to deter ASIC manufacturing since the ram requirements would make the machine uneconomically. Did Zooko lie to us, or just didn't really think this through?
Ethash is the most mem heavy afaik. I think it's a heavier one, but I would assume they've figured out a workaround of some sort... Are we even sure the new Z9 miner is really an ASIC and not a FPGA? If it is an FPGA, this would thwart any efforts that coins made to slightly modify the algorithm. All Bitmain would need to do is update the firmware. The adverts called it "The Antminer Z9 mini, an Equihash ASIC miner!". That was the subject of the announcement email. So I'm going to go ahead and guess it's an ASIC. |
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