The first ever board form Tehcnobit was
HEX16A - 16 Avalon chips making 7-8GH/s, prety good miner with a great price tag. The HEX16A's successor is here, the new board is codenamed HEX16A2 and is populated with 16 Avalon Gen2 55nm chips. The
design of the board is open source and compete for Avalon's design contest.
The miner looks identical with the other boards from the HEX line, no surprise here. That concept proved to have several advantages like stacking, decent cooling, great power module and 16 chips board is great for the customer as a price point, especially for newcomers that don't have or willing to risk a lot of money for mining equipment.
Performance:At the Technobit's
site, HEX16A2 is advertised as 24GH miner, let's see how it handles varius settings.
@eligius
Here is a chart with the performance of HEX16A2, keep in mind that the consumption may not be very accurate:
- 1000/0900mV ~24W - 15.86GH/s - 1.51W/GH (less than 1% HW)
- 1300/1020mV ~56W - 20.30GH/s - 2.76W/GH (less than 2% HW)
- 1400/1060mV ~74W - 21.28GH/s - 3.47W/GH (less than 2% HW)
- 1500/1120mV ~92W - 22.85GH/s - 4.03W/GH (less than 2% HW)
- 1600/1160mV ~108W - 24.15GH/s - 4.47W/GH (less than 3% HW) - hot
As you can see the efficiency drops dramatically when overclocked. The power connector of the boards is a standard molex which is rated to deliver upto 132W at 12V, HEX16A had similar power consumption and that was not an issue. However I recommend you to stay bellow 1500Mhz, the hashrate gain just ain't worth it.
Cooling:HEX16A2 is equipped with the same cooling solution as it's predecessor. At higher clocks it runs pretty hot, but nothing to worry about. If you need quiet miner you will have to lower the clocks and switch the fan's connector from 12 to 5V. At 1000mhz the massive heatsink is more than enough to cool down the board even at low fan speeds.
Pricing:HEX16A2 is selling for 299,30€ chips included, which is a good offer for a starter. Compared to the bitfury based
HEX16B, they have identical price per GH ratio, but the Fury is more efficient. With the bitcoin price of over $1000 both miners are bargain.
Here is the updated comparison of the recent products from Technobit along with new 20nm product from KnC:
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. For whatever reason you choose to mine on windows host, you'll need the
driver 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 cheap 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 tag
- Availability
- Software voltage control
- Cooling
- Stackable
Cons:- no cgminer/bfgminer for Windows
- no CAN-Bus
Conclusion:Yet another great product from Tehnobit, even that I would recommend the BitFury based HEX16B. To be honest I'm not very pleased with the new Avalon chips. The efficiency is far from great but still better than BFL 65nm. Don't get me wrong, the Bulgaria based company once again did a great job with this challenge. Hopefully in the near future they will solve the issues with mining software under windows.
Full gallery can be found here:
http://imgbox.com/g/e2s0BXsxrfbest
2GOOD
