TECHNOBIT's HEX16A in hand - first impressions / mining software

[2GOOD]

About 4 months after marto74 announced his assembly service for avalon chips I've got my fully assembled bitcoin miner called HEX16A.
The board is based on TechnoBit's design for 16 chip miner, ordered first week of August for 49,30€ from their online shop.



My first impression of the board is the massive heatsink that covers the entire backside of the board, together with the huge filter capacitors close to the chips. Those two factors and the improved power supply module helps for the great overclocking capabilities that HEX16A provides. It can easily be clocked to 500Mhz with less than 2% HW errors, that makes the board one of the best on the market.



TehcnoBit provide their version of cgminer with support for the board and adjustable core frequency and voltage.



Here is a chart with the performance of HEX16A, keep in mind that the consumption is at the wall and includes PSU CM RS450-ACAA-D3, measured with APC SmartUPS.
  


Even that 500Mhz per chip is a great achievement the power drawn by the board is quite serious. If we take into account the PSU's efficiency of 85% it turns out that the board consumption is around 105W or a current of ~8.75 A. In my opinion this kind of amperage is too much for a single wire and a molex connector which by the way according to wikipedia has a max current of 11 A/pin (30 °C rise).
For comparison, ASICMINER's Blade (old version) overclocked to 13GH/s drawns 115W at the wall with the same PSU, that makes 8.84W for GH  



HEX16A is equipped with 92mm cooling fan but it is lacking temperature control for it. If you value your comfort you can easily switch the fan's connector from 12 to 5V. Of course speeds higher than 400Mhz it is recommended to leave the 92mm fan at full speed. The fan itself is a SUNON EE92251S1-0000-A99 and has a great air flow of  51.5 CFM with low noise levels even at full speed: 34 dBA



At their online shop TechnoBit offer a preflashed TP-Link TL-MR3020 with the special version of cgminer ready to use with HEX16A.

 

The router is based on OpenWRT firmware and provides easy to use interface to setup your mining parameters. The limited amount of RAM on the TP-Link has forced TechnoBit's developers to turn off the WiFi completely. Marto confirmed that the firmware will be open source and ready for download on their support site, so it would be great if we can manage to turn WiFi back on and use it as a client for a wireless connection.



Since this is a linux based router you can SSH into it and access the screen of cgminer with screen -r

Pros:

• Price
• Overclockable to 500Mhz
• Stackable
• Cooling
• did I mentioned price

Cons:

• Single molex connector, even that it's not a problem at lower clocks

Conclusion:
I'm very pleased with this board, it has great overclocking potential at affordable price which can help for a faster ROI in the first months. I'm looking forward to see other products from the based in Bulgaria company TechnoBit, they are already working on BitFury and BFL based boards .

All pictures can be found here: http://imgbox.com/g/eG0aq12mlq

best
2GOOD


Edit:
cgminer / hexminer tutorial: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=303538.msg3371198#msg3371198

[Digi128pci]

Nice!

Where did you get the CGminer or a plugin for CGminer?

[JLM]

Nice post.
Great evaluation!!!

[2GOOD]

Nice!

Where did you get the CGminer or a plugin for CGminer?

It is build in the router's firmware, AFAIK the sources will be available for download on Technobit's support site.

Nice post.
Great evaluation!!!

Thank You

[dnaleor]

Is there a setup guide for these miners directly without the modem?

i would be happy to donate some mBTC for the guy who does this (my HEX16A will arrive next week probably)

[DyslexicZombei]

Thanks for sharing! Now, I regret not buying when they were available.

Ah, well: 6 different pre-orders from 3 diff. mfgs. should be more than enough for now, right?

[nick0016]

Very good looking!

[fractal02]

Thanks for sharing! Now, I regret not buying when they were available.

Ah, well: 6 different pre-orders from 3 diff. mfgs. should be more than enough for now, right?

Still avalaible on : http://technobit.eu/index.php?id_product=21&controller=product

But you need avalon chips...

With all the refunds...seems pretty hard to find now.

[2GOOD]

Is there a setup guide for these miners directly without the modem?

i would be happy to donate some mBTC for the guy who does this (my HEX16A will arrive next week probably)

It will be straightforward  when the cgminer version for windows is ready for download, no need for tutorial. I'll update this topic with more info when available.

[kwilliams]

This is actually the first Klondike - based design to be fully confirmed working with 16 chips & 400Mhz. Great job Marto & team

[loshia]

Nice review

[loshia]

This is actually the first Klondike - based design to be fully confirmed working with 16 chips & 400Mhz. Great job Marto & team

Wrong!
look deeply into cgminer shot it says 500 so fully confirmed it works even better

[2GOOD]

playing around with the overclock
480Mh/z @ 1440mV - 7.50Gh/s - HW: 1.63%

[hf_developer]

This is actually the first Klondike - based design to be fully confirmed working with 16 chips & 400Mhz. Great job Marto & team

Wrong!
look deeply into cgminer shot it says 500 so fully confirmed it works even better

Impressive work! Yet the best Avalon based miner available.

[ScaryHash]

Very nice !

Hopefully, this spells good news for the Klondike and derivative designs that sprang up from it.

Looks like the various problems are on their way to being solved.

[Bogart]

In that vein, is the source code available that the firmware image was built from?  In particular I'm after the changes to cgminer.

I already bricked a WR703N somehow trying to flash the image onto it.

[2GOOD]

The patch for cgminer is available for download from the technobit's web page.
link

I've done it for Windows, but the there are some problems with the USB driver and the device is not recognized by the cgminer.

[dnaleor]

I repaet.

If anyone can create a manual for the technobit HEX16A, he will get some donations

needed manuals:

*How to let a windows PC recognize the HEX16A
*Mining with TechnoBit HEXminer Windows software
*Mining with CGminer and patches
*Mining with a raspberry pi

[2GOOD]

Tutorial:

Ubuntu 12.04 x64
============
1. Download my build from here: cgminer-hex16a-3.6.1.tar.gz
2. Extract the archive: tar -xvf cgminer-hex16a-3.6.1.tar.gz
3. Edit cgminer.conf - it is preconfigured for speeds 480Mhz @ 1440mV
4. Run cgminer with:

Code:

sudo ./cgminer -c ./cgminer.conf

How to apply the patch for your distro and compile cgminer
=======================================
Requirements

Code:

apt-get install autoconf libtool libcurl4-openssl-dev libncurses5-dev pkg-config yasm make

Code:

wget https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/archive/v3.6.1.tar.gz
tar -xvf v3.6.1.tar.gz
cd cgminer-3.6.1
wget https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8082585/cg/cgminer_3_6_1_rev_fe5da9672767e18116444dad18db54638936490a.patch
patch < cgminer_3_6_1_rev_fe5da9672767e18116444dad18db54638936490a.patch
./autogen.sh --disable-opencl --disable-adl --enable-avalon --enable-hexminer --enable-bflsc --enable-icarus
CFLAGS="-O2 -Wall -march=native" ./configure --disable-opencl --disable-adl --enable-avalon --enable-hexminer --enable-bflsc --enable-icarus
make

Code:

sudo ./cgminer -n

to check the HEX board is detected

Have Fun


raspberry pi Debian Squeeze Linux
========================
Requirements

Code:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install autoconf yasm pkg-config make libusb-1.0-0-dev libusb-1.0-0 libcurl4-openssl-dev libncurses5-dev libudev-dev 

Then follow the Ubuntu guide above to build cgminer.

Don't own one but it should work


Windows
==========
1. Connect the board - Windows 7 has build in drivers, You need .Net to run the program
2. Downlaod HEXMiner: http://technobit.eu/index.php?controller=attachment&id_attachment=7
(will finish the guide with screenshots)
hint you need proxy

Edit:
Please follow this great video tutorial for Windows 7 All credits to nemercry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9SgoVm16Sw

no cgminer for windows or at least I can not make it work (4 now), there is a bounty for cgminer for Windows on the Bulgarian Bitcoin forum: http://bitcoinbg.eu/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=377

Happy Hashing

[loshia]

I repaet.

If anyone can create a manual for the technobit HEX16A, he will get some donations

needed manuals:

*How to let a windows PC recognize the HEX16A
*Mining with TechnoBit HEXminer Windows software
*Mining with CGminer and patches
*Mining with a raspberry pi

I will join in the donation!

Guy's,
Is the 2GOOD howto usable for you?