Greetings, miners!
Well, at last I have free time to create a more detailed post with review of
Hotmine X6 upgrade kit for Antminer S5 (and
looks like for S3 too).
A brief description of what does this kit (and the miner based on it) looks like has been posted
here, so let's go into details.
The X6 miner is hashing at 6.1 Th being powered with 12V ATX PSU Hipro HPH850W. This PSU was included in that test setup for the conference. The web-UI is looking similar to Antminer's UI. The same root/root for username and password, the same pools configuration tab, the same miner status tab... Even the firmware upgrade process is the same. There's almost nothing new I can say about it.
My miltimeter showed 11.8 V at PCIE power connectors while the miner was hashing. In the UI you can see almost the same value. So here and below we can see that the miner is measuring the input voltage in a more or less precise way.
The miner is "rock solid" at this voltage:
We can see that the hashrate at the pool is the same as in UI:
Me and devs have discussed the suitable temperature mode for the Bitfury BF16BTC8162 chips. Briefly, the owner of the miner based on these chips should strive to maintain the temperatures around 60 degrees. At higher values there starts a degradation of usable performance, although the chip itself will hash even at 100-120 C. Take a look at the temperatures in web-UI. Note that there has been used not the most conducting
thermal grease. It's cheap, but not so good (as usually). My IR thermometer showed that the chips placed far from the fan are hotter than those placed closer to the fan for a 2-3 C.
So if you plan to achieve higher hashrate better equip this miner with second fan. The connectors for fans are present at each hashing board.
Note that the temperature you see in "Miner status" tab is received with a thermistor placed in the middle of the PCB.
The power consumption "at the power socket" in this mode is about 716 Wt (keep in mind what kind of PSU was used). So the power efficiency at the power socket level is about 0.117 Wt/Gh. In web UI you can find the "Efficiency [J/Gh]" value. This value is calculated from voltage and current measured on hashing boards considering the consumption of the fan (which may vary depending on it's speed) and the consumption of the BBB controller. So it's like the efficiency at the PSU's output.
The noise level is about 59 dB. The noise (subjectively) probably will not annoy you if you keep the miner in the next room, but you definetely won't to sleep with this miner on your bedside table.
Since the developers was talking from the beginning that the hashrate of this miner is mostly depends on voltage rather than on frequency I was not trying to achieve higher hashrate rising the frequency (at this stage). In addition, the ATX PSU was just 850 Wt. So I have powered the miner from the server PSU PS-2142-1D1 (1470 Wt) prepared for mining by my own hands. This PSU was tuned to 12.7 V in advance.
Note that this case that you see on the photos will not be included when you decide to buy these upgrade kits. It's just a case in which the
51ASIC company demonstrated this test unit at the Blockchain & Bitcoin Conference in Moscow.
So the miner was hashing at ~7.52 Th:
Take a look at the input voltage value in the UI. And that is what has been measured by the multimeter:
The power consumption was around 965 Wt:
So the efficiency at the power socket is around 0.128 Wt/Gh.
But devs told about 13 V and even 13.6 V, which is also OK for these miners, so I set 13 V at my PSU. Here is the screenshot at 13 V:
The power consuption at this voltage is about 1053 Wt, so the efficiency is 0.134 Wt/Gh. The batteries in my camera has discharged at this moment so I have no photo of my power meter.
Later I updated the firmware:
And at the pool's side it looks like this:
Well, the miner is solid even in this mode (at 13 V). But the temperatures are getting higher, so it's better to replace the thermal grease and to add second fan. Especially if you plan to run it at more that 13 V input voltage. Cold air from outside is OK too.
At 13.6 V miner should be hashing at 8.9 - 9 Th/s.
"Overclocking" the miner at 13 V with higher frequency values gives nothing that we could expect or desire:
Devs said that at 13.6 V the frequency can be higher than default, but we should ensure that heat dissipation is good enough. May be I'll try ti rise the voltage later.
You may have noticed that one of the "o"s in ASIC status field is in capital. It's not a mistake of bug. It's a designation for chip selected by the system for so-called "renonce". This chip is not hashing, it assigned to recover some kind of "wrong solutions" generated by other chips. You can choose whether to use one chip for "renonce" or to use one chip per hashing board in the "Advanced" settings.
I was trying to mine with this miner on p2pool using different nodes with lowest possible in my case latency. DOA hashrate is about 10%...
