Technobit HEX16B - Bitfury based miner in hand

[2GOOD]

The second HEX board from Technobit is ready and hashing. I had the chance to get one of the boards so here is a short summary of the miner.

Recently I presented you the first bitcoin miner from Technobit: HEX16A - avalon based board with a great pricetag. The board in focus today is very similar and shares the same concept. HEX16B is a 16 chip, BitFury based miner with hashing speed of over 40GH/s



Technobit already had a BitFury solution, but it was based on c-scape design with stand alone miner and direct LAN connection while HEX16B relies on USB connection and simplified design. The main advantage of HEX16B to S-HASH is the price.
Here is a comparison of the recent products from Technobit along with November batch pricing from KnC:


*yes = December delivery for HEX16B



As you can see from the chart above HEX16B offers a very good price/performance ratio. Just a few weeks ago this offer did not look so appetizing, but with the crazy rally of bitcoin and prices of over $700 the only chance to get on that train seems to be mining.

 

The board is advertised with hash rates of 40GH/s which is by itself a good result compared to the "original" BitFury boards and their 25GH/s. With the stock settings for the board (540/835mV) the hashrate is exactly 40GH, however the Burnin's Fury is capable of speeds upto 52GH/s. So I gave it a try and with a simple raise of the voltage HEX16B reaches 44GH/s






Keep in mind that the consumption is measured with NoName "Kill-A-Watt" device.

I don't recommend changing the bitrate, the results are unstable and sometimes the board "hangs" at 20-25GH/s rates. It needs full power cycle to recover.

 

You can order the miner either with terminal power connector or with a standard molex one. The board is consuming around 50 watts, almost half of what HEX16As, so no problem with the molex connector for this HEX board.

 

Cooling:
HEX16B is equipped with the same cooling solution as it's predecessor. If you need quiet miner you can easily switch the fan's connector from 12 to 5V, the massive heatsink is more than enough to cool down the board even at low fan speeds. However I'm planing to change the fan with Arctic F9 PRO TC and forget the money maker under the bed

Software:
Technobit's HEX line still lags proper mining software for Windows. You can only mine with their special HEXMiner, which has some improvements in the latest version 1.0.0.3 such as the automatic connection restart - that compensate the memory leak. But still if you connect more boards to the PC you need a lot of CPU power to handle board's work requests. I don't know the exact reason for that, but there are reports that with a slow Atom and 2+ boards you can only get around 30GH/s. For whatever reason you choose to mine on windows host, you'll need  thedriver for the board and HEXMiner. The setup is similar to HEX16A so you can check nemercry's video tutorial for Windows.

As with the previous HEX board I highly recommend that you get one TP-Link TL-MR3020 and flash it with the firmware from Technobit's website. You can also order it directly from them at slightly higher price, but pre-flashed and ready to rock. Of course if you have a linux host it will best to just compile cgminer with the latest patch from Technobit or download my build for Ubuntu x64.

Pros:

• Price per GH
• Software voltage control
• Cooling
• Stackable

Cons:

• no cgminer for Windows
• no CAN-Bus

Conclusion:
Apparently Tehnobit's trend is to continue the HEX series, as to offer competitive products in this wild race for hash power. Hopefully in the near future they will solve the problem with the software under Windows. I've been told that luke-jr is working on implementing HEX support to bfgminer. In conclusion I can say that we have a great digger, which could be easily put in the bedroom

Full gallery can be found here: http://imgbox.com/g/F4zzYCxUZZ

best
2GOOD

[1715229751]

1715229751

[1715229751]

1715229751

[loshia]

Beautiful
 
Nice review. Thank you!

[volosator]

Looked up the fan. Awesome idea! Do you know the place to get them cheap?

[Sitarow]

Thats a great review. The photos are great.

[MrZambonie]

Good Info! Thanks!  Does Technobit accept Bitcoin?

[2GOOD]

Thank you all for the good words

Looked up the fan. Awesome idea! Do you know the place to get them cheap?

Link updated in the OP

Good Info! Thanks!  Does Technobit accept Bitcoin?

Yes - BitPay

[SpAcEDeViL]

i have order this miner too, but its not delivered yet...

Ref was 1/2 of Nov.

Now we have 3/4 of Nov. and no update on shipping status.... so i dont can write a comment on my blog....

[Gator-hex]

However I'm planing to change the fan with Arctic F9 PRO TC

Will that work? It's a 4 pin PWM fan.

Nice review. Thanks.

[2GOOD]

However I'm planing to change the fan with Arctic F9 PRO TC

Will that work? It's a 4 pin PWM fan.

TC stands for Thermal Control, only the PWM version of the fan is with PWM control

best
2GOOD

[bclcjunkie]

nice review and thanks for the great effort! these boards are the only ones i saw without HW errors... must be pretty good workmanship...

[Gator-hex]

nice review and thanks for the great effort! these boards are the only ones i saw without HW errors... must be pretty good workmanship...

I think I read somewhere the HW errors are a dissabled metric it's not really zero.

[loshia]

nice review and thanks for the great effort! these boards are the only ones i saw without HW errors... must be pretty good workmanship...

I think I read somewhere the HW errors are a dissabled metric it's not really zero.

Yes that is correct

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=307897.msg3623406#msg3623406

[MagicMan187]

I'm thinking for buying one of these, to replace some fury's,

What type of power adapter does it use?
Can you post a link?

[2GOOD]

I'm thinking for buying one of these, to replace some fury's,

What type of power adapter does it use?
Can you post a link?

The board comes in two wersions:

1. As shown in OP - with terminal connector, i.e. you have to connect two wires to the board 12V and Ground - directly from you PC PSU. You can cut some Molex to Sata power cable
2. With standard molex connector - just plud it in your PC PSU

[Pentium100]

I have found a big problem with my HEX16Bs (or at least one of them, I did not investigate further - didn't have the time).

The USB connector is powered from the board, which means that it is always at voltage and can feed 5V to the USB port if the PC is off. This can cause a lot of problems (depending on the motherboard design). A single diode is not expensive, especially for a ~500EUR device.

Maybe one one of my boards act like this - one seems to be tweaked after manufacturing (a diode soldered on the power connector etc), so maybe it is the one that provides power to all the rest.

Still, they hash just fine, as long as the control PC does not try to power its CPU from the 5V coming to the USB port, it should all be fine...

[Gator-hex]

OK, this is my review of the Hex16B and ordering from Technobit.



Shipping / Ordering
19th Nov 2013, 1x Hex16B + TP-Link Router, for December Batch 1, was delivered Dec 13th, Paid PayPal, Shipping DPD €32
22nd Nov 2013, 1x Hex16B, for December Batch 1, was delivered January 22nd, Paid BitPay, Shipping €4 "larger order"
23rd Nov 2013, 4x Hex16B, for December Batch 1, was delivered January 10th, Paid BitPay, Shipping €4 "larger order"

PayPal order arrived on time, BitPay orders were late. Suggest paying the extra 5% for PayPal to get order early.
Combined shipping for "larger orders" does not work, and may delay your order, suggest adding shipping to each order.
There was no tracking number but all arrived in the UK around 7 days after the ordering system went from "payment accepted" to "shipped".

The TP-Link router did not arrive pre-flashed, but it's not hard to do it yourself.
I suggest using one because it becomes a 2W mining PC. If you want to know how to set one up check my old posts here...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=307897.msg3948133#msg3948133



It's not a standalone device you have to set it up with a PC PSU by shorting the green and black wires on the motherboard connector.
My Hex16B is hooked up to a molex connector for power, unlike the first one on this page, which is wired into the yellow/black wires.

 

The 6x Hex16B I have + TP-Link (running at 540/900) are pulling 415W at the wall for 270GH/s return.
That's a very impressive 0.65GH/W or 1.54W/GH at the wall!
I'm using 2x Enermax NAXN 350W (2x 150W +12v rails) PSU because they split all the molex out to 3 separate wires and are cheap < £30/$40.
Beware of putting too many units on the same wire as it could melt the cable!
These PSU are only 83% efficient so that makes my Hex16B miners around 56.44W at the board.

Instructions for bringing up the cgminer screen are here...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=307897.msg4448429#msg4448429



The chips on my Hex16B are Bitfury clones they say "BioInfoBank" on them. http://bioinfobank.com/
I tracked the origin of these chips back to the BioInfoBank 100TH-mine project https://picostocks.com/businessplan/19.pdf
Then found out that http://www.bitfury.org was in England! Nice work guys on making 55nm as efficient as KnCs 28nm!



I too have problems with power leaking out of the USB port. USB hubs with power/surge protection may refuse to work with some units!*
I have the molex versions and there is a resistor between the +12v and Ground, is this to stop 12v leaking out I wonder?
I just bunged the problem unit on a cheap $3 ebay hub without surge protection and it works okay.*
I'm using a cheap TP-Link router for mining, so it don't worry me, but I wouldn't risk connecting this to my PC/Laptop.

I'm happy with them, they're really well made, they are twice as efficient as the Avalon and BFL, but possibly there is a problem with Bitfury chip shortages at the moment and a miner that's not mining is just losing money, no matter how efficient it is.

* There's an update to my power leakage issue here later in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=338790.msg4642613#msg4642613
The other 5x Hex16B I got didn't leak power but the one that did caused issues when I tried to use 2x PSUs. This is how I solved it.

[Pentium100]

I'm using a cheap TP-Link router for mining so it don't worry me.

And I can just splice the diodes in cables or the hub. But other people may just connect it to a PC and not figure out that it could cause problems because no other device does this.

[MagicMan187]

Sorry, I'm a little noob to this, Am I right in thinking I just need a PSU unit (out of a old computer for example), and use the molex connectors on the end (which are male) to power the HEX16B boards? I presume you could power about 4 of the boards from one 250w PSU?

Also, I'd probably want to overclock, how is this done on these boards? How do I change the voltages?

Finally, does this have its own controller on it, so I can setup my pool through my lan connection to the board
or does it need to have a host computer (windows/linux)?

Thanks

[Pentium100]

Sorry, I'm a little noob to this, Am I right in thinking I just need a PSU unit (out of a old computer for example), and use the molex connectors on the end (which are male) to power the HEX16B boards? I presume you could power about 4 of the boards from one 250w PSU?

Yes, you need a PC PSU. However, I would advise you use a relatively modern PSU because old units behave weirdly if they do not have load on the +5V line. Modern PSUs use the +12V line for regulation so they behave correctly when only +12V is loaded.
Also, the power of a PSU is specified as maximum power from all lines. The 250W PSU may only be able to do 100W on +12V (and 100W on +5 and 50W on +3.3). Some cheap PSUs have artificially increases ratings written. All power supplies have the maximum current for each line specified. Consider that HEX16B uses 5A and plan accordingly. A PSU is most efficient when it is loaded to about 50% of capacity.

Also, I'd probably want to overclock, how is this done on these boards? How do I change the voltages?

just run cgminer with --hexminerb-voltage 900 option

Finally, does this have its own controller on it, so I can setup my pool through my lan connection to the board
or does it need to have a host computer (windows/linux)?

You need a control PC with this. It can be Windows, but the software for Linux is better. You can also buy a TP-Link TL-MR3020 router and flash it with custom firmware to use the HEX miners.

[Gator-hex]

Also, I'd probably want to overclock, how is this done on these boards? How do I change the voltages?

It's done through the TP-Link or HexMiner interface (which is basically a GUI for a cgminer command line)

It comes pre-set at 540/900 and that should give you 44.2GH/s

540 clock is a high as it goes without crashing.
The power inductor in the center of the board is pretty hot already at 900mv.
http://katalog.we-online.com/pbs/datasheet/744355122.pdf
Not sure how far you can push it, the font in that specs PDF is messed up for me.
Looks like upping volts may be the way to go, might want to put a heatsink and fan on the bottom it so it don't melt though.
At your own risk, etc!