The first Coincraft miner from Technobit was
HEX8A1 260GH populated with 8 A1 chips. Even though it's a good board, the cooling is very loud and in my opinion this device is not suitable for home usage or at least not with the stock fans. Apparently Marto & the team acknowledged the need for a quieter solution and since the A1s are very powerful the only way around seems to be cutting their number in half, so here is it the
4 chip version of the board.
The board itself is identical with the 260GH model, the only difference is the main heatsink and the fans.
HEX8A1 260GH and 130GH versions side by sidePerformance:At the Technobit's site, HEX8A1 is advertised as 130GH miner in turbo mode, so let's see how it handles various settings.
Indeed with moderate overclock aka Turbo mode the board is hashing with 130GH/s. Let's focus on performance and power consumption. According to Bitmine's pre-production specifications, the chip can deliver 40GH in Turbo mode with power usage of 1W/GH as you can see from chart bellow that is not the case.
The power supply used for the test is
FSP600 50ARN 88+, it is rated to "reach up to 88% efficiency" that's what the second power column is representing Wall power consumption minus 12%, the efficiency of the board is calculated with these numbers. I tried an CoolerMaster B600 (85%) for comparison but it draws more power and was unable to start the board at low 220/850mV. I had similar problems with the 260GH version so it depends on the chips and PSU.
It is also important to mention that the real chip freq is multiplied by 4 so when you say 250 it's really 1000Mhz core chip frequency.
The board comes with 2 x 6 pin PCI-e power connectors, but according to Technobit's
site there maybe versions with only one which seems reasonable.
Each chip has 32 Engines, you can have 1 or 2 faulty per chip but thats not a problem. If you try to "undervolt" more keep an eye on the Engines if there is not enough juice you will get lower engines which is a good indicator together with the HW errors. In the end it's all about finding the right ratio for your device - freq/voltage. I recommend 960/1000 it's very stable and you will get results from 128 to 132 GH/s depending on your chips, @ 258/1000 you'll get similar results.
Cooling:Compared to the 260GH board I can only say: Blissful silence !!!
The fans:
Evercool EC9225M12SA
Dimensions: 92x92x25 mm
Power: 1.8 W
Speed: 2200 rpm
Air Flow: 40.9 CFM
Noise: 25 dB
If you are planing on replacing these with Arctic Cooling F9s I recommend lower settings ie 230-240Mhz. This board is slightly hotter than the 260Gh model, at 260/1000 the temperature of the main heatsink is 55C (close to the chips) at 26C room temperature.
Mine board comes with rather short treated rods and it is not suitable for stacking, you'll have to replace them with longer so there is enough space between the two back to back fans.
Note: According to Coincraft A1 specification about 70% of the power is being dissipated through the ground pad and about 30% through the top of the package.Pricing:With the latest GOX problems the bitcoin price is down. As always investment in bitcoin equipment is risky but let's see what can you order/buy from various mining manufactures. Technobit are selling HEX8A1 for 499 Euros full price which seems normal to me.
As you can see from the chart the main competitor to HEX8A1 is Bitmain's AntMiner, especially if you live in a country where Customs are not a problem for the rest of us importing an Chinese miner can be a hassle. On the other hand Bitmine are selling fully equipped miner with PSU and everything you need. Even more interesting is the newcomer - The UK based company BitcoinUltra, they have good price and ETA, but no working prototype. The race is on and much more to come from BitFury 2 and ASICMINER with their crazy low price per GH, even BFL can ship something soon - doubt it
Software:Technobit's HEX line still lags proper mining software for Windows where you can only mine with their special
HEXMiner, the driver is in the inf folder. 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. In the end you are paying a thousand euros for the miner, so 30 more for the router is nothing. 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
cgminer4_0.2.2Here is how to compile
git clone https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer.git
cd cgminer
wget https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8082585/cg/2786526d9f1acb7bd903ece3c822c2c9203aa0b7.patch
git checkout 2786526d9f1acb7bd903ece3c822c2c9203aa0b7
patch -p1 < 2786526d9f1acb7bd903ece3c822c2c9203aa0b7.patch
./autogen.sh --enable-hexminer8
make
I start cgminer with the following line:
sudo ./cgminer -c ./cgminer.conf --hexminer8-set-diff-to-one 0 --hexminer8-chip-mask 255 --hexminer8-voltage 1000 --hexminer8-options 8:260
where cgminer.conf is in the same folder and with your regular settings.
Pros:- EU Based
- Efficiency - 28nm
- Availability
- Software voltage control
- Half the price, half the performance compared to the 260GH model
Cons:- No thermal sensor
- Difficult stacking
- as usual no cgminer/bfgminer for Windows
Conclusion:The efficiency of the board is good, not as good as promised by the manufacturer but still better than most of the miners on the market. I'm pleased to see that Technobit decided to make this version of the board it's a lot more environment friendly. In the end the Bulgaria based company once again did a great job with this challenge and what surprises me the most is that Technobit are shipping before Bitmine.ch
Full gallery can be found here:
http://imgbox.com/g/I9gXuWFlZibest
2GOOD
