[Review] GekkoScience Terminus R909 home miner

[n0nce]

GekkoScience Terminus R909 Review

	The Terminus R909.		Cooling solution viewed from the back.

TL;DR

• Pros
  • Very energy efficient home miner.
  • Affordable to buy (and run - see above).
  • Integrated cooling solution.
  • Basically silent after fan replacement.
• Cons
  • You need a separate computer to control it.
  • You need to own or buy a 12V power supply.
  • Somewhat loud stock fan.
  • You need to set up the software yourself (guide coming up). ^{[link here when published]}
    
• Official forum thread: [link]

​
Hardware

• Hashboard with 6x BM1397 ASIC chips.
• Beefy, double-sided heatsink.
• Arctic Cooling F8 80mm axial fan.
• High quality USB Mini-B to USB-A cable.

	Complete setup with Raspberry Pi & power delivery.		Noctua NF-A8 PWM fan replacement.

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[n0nce]

Review
Today I want to share my thoughts on the GekkoScience Terminus R909 pod miner, after owning it for almost a year.

Hardware
The device is roughly the same size as my previously reviewed Apollo BTC, and I paid 599.00€ for it one year ago. Bitshopper now has some sort of 20% promotion where they dropped the price to 479.00€, which is a great deal in my opinion, especially with current Bitcoin prices.

It is easy to see why I'll compare this pod-style miner to the Apollo here and there, since they're in a similar price bracket and form factor. They are marketed as home miners, so we should be able to run them at home, which puts several constraints on such devices. The most obvious is an acceptable noise level as well as decent efficiency, since home electricity can be quite expensive especially in Europe.

This is why the importance of the chosen cooling solution cannot be emphasized enough for such a product. Installing a more quiet fan is sometimes not possible, such as in the Apollo BTC, since it is just too inefficient / putting out too much heat for its size, so there are no real quiet alternatives to the supplied Delta fan. Some home mining solutions like GekkoScience's Compac F, just don't come with any active cooling, so users end up with somewhat scary looking setups with loose fans positioned in the vicinity of their mining setup, especially considering that stick miners often don't sense overheating and just continue running until the solder melts off and becomes a fire hazard.

All that is just to say how much I appreciate the cooling solution of the R909. It is a simple 80mm PWM 12V fan, so even though the preinstalled Arctic F8 is not the best, it gets the job done and can be replaced by a much quieter Noctua model. I did run the miner with the stock fan for a month, and it was very noticeable hum in the background, so I replaced it with a Noctua NF-A8 PWM with 2200RPM and it's been running happily like that ever since. While it's not technically silent, it's totally living room-friendly in this state and cools the chips more than well enough; more on that later in the performance section.
It also seems that GekkoScience have done a great job with thermal interface material between the 6x BM1397 ASIC chips and the beefy heatsinks on either side of the PCB, as shown above.

Software
Here's where it gets a bit more nuanced. While I had pretty much nothing but praise regarding the device's hardware, the software side of things may or may not be suitable for everyone.

Compared to the Futurebit Apollo BTC, this is not a plug-and-play solution, but it's also not meant to be, nor marketed as such. It's just something to be aware of before buying. The R909 is extremely well suited to tinkerers and tuners and people who want to get their hands dirty with configurations and dialing in even individual chips, if they choose to do so.

In order to make it easier to get up & running quickly, I'll shortly release a full step-by-step installation guide based on Raspbian. Any old Model 2B+ (or newer) will do, as not much computing power is required at all; in fact, I'd recommend not to use something too powerful to keep power consumption as low as possible.
However, this means more hardware to buy, more individual 'electronic components' laying around and a bit more work for the user.

In order to operate an R909, you will need to install kano's version of CGMiner with the driver for GekkoScience products and configure a system service that automatically restarts it upon boot or any other reasons for failure.

While it is not required to install Bitcoin Core and synchronize the blockchain for pooled mainnet mining, such as with kano's own pool, this unit is very well suited (even somewhat overpowered) for solo-mining Testnet BTC.
I recommend following nullama's solo mining guide. Do make sure to follow the recommendations and fixes I pointed out here, as they were not edited into his original post.

Performance
I can confirm that the numbers this miner is advertised with, are correct.

The miner is guaranteed to run at 1.5TH from under 100 DC watts at stock voltage and do it nearly silently. Better performance isn't guaranteed, but is probably attainable.

I'm measuring power at the wall, including PSU losses and the power consumption of a Raspberry Pi Model 2B+. In my opinion, this is what ultimately counts, even if the miner alone may pull 5-10W less from the 12V rail.

Throughout all my testing, I powered the whole system from a high-quality Seasonic Focus Plus 550 Gold ATX power supply unit; however if you need to buy something new anyway, I would recommend getting a smaller unit such that it operates at 50% of its rated capacity, or whatever the manufacturer states to be the point of highest efficiency. In my case, pulling between 87-126W (16%-23%) corresponds to the unit's point of lowest efficiency - about 90%. Therefore, pulling 100W from the wall means the miner only actually consumes 90W.

Measurements
The following numbers have been recorded without any fine tuning, i.e. I did not touch the core voltage at all. Slightly reducing the voltage would lead to even higher efficiency, however it needs to be dialed in carefully in order to keep all chips hashing stable. If you reduce it too much, they'll stop working at all or intermittently, until you increase it again.
This is what's attainable by simply changing the following parameter in the cgminer config file.

Code:

"gekko-r909-freq" : "450"

|	Clock speed	|	Data	|	Power at the wall	|	Hashrate	|	Efficiency	|
|		|		|		|		|		|
|	Stock (450.00MHz x6)	|	107.35kWh in 1235:22h	|	86.9W	|	~1.74TH/s	|	20GH/s/W (50W/TH)	|
|	OC (500.00MHz x6)	|	16.39kWh in 168:33h	|	97.2W	|	~1.95TH/s	|	20GH/s/W (50W/TH)	|
|	OC (550.00MHz x6)	|	26.17kWh in 238:52h	|	109.6W	|	~2.14TH/s	|	19.53GH/s/W (51.2W/TH)	|
|	OC (600.0MHz x6)	|	7.65kWh in 60:56h	|	125.5W	|	~2.33TH/s	|	18.56GH/s/W (53.9W/TH)	|

For comparison, the Apollo pulls about 200W while churning out between 2TH/s and 2.5TH/s, leading to an efficiency of 12.5GH/s/W at best, so it's about half as efficient as the R909. This corresponds to 80W/TH.

At stock speed, my unit exceeded the guaranteed performance of '1.5TH from under 100 DC Watts' easily, as it pulled under 90W at 1.74TH/s. To me, achieving 1.8TH/s at 70W DC, seems very attainable with minimal voltage tuning, too.

Sidehack also talks about a 2.1TH/s machine pulling just 88W. I needed 550MHz to achieve this hashrate, and pulled 109.6W from the wall, i.e. ~98W DC. If we subtract 5W for the Raspberry Pi, there's a small difference of 5W. This could simply be due to silicon lottery. Still a great result for a home miner!

Here's a non-exhaustive overview ^{[lower is better]} of some popular industrial miners' efficiency over the years / generations. It's important to take into account that it is an extremely difficult process to get your hands on bare ASIC chips in the first place and reverse-engineer them in order to get them running in your own product. Home miners have always been 'lagging behind' in this regard, since none of the companies building them, develop or manufacture their own chips.

• ~100W/TH Bitmain S9
• ~80W/TH Futurebit Apollo BTC
  
• ~50W/TH Bitmain S17
• ~50W/TH Termius R909
  
• ~35W/TH Bitmain S19 / Whatsminer M30S+
• ~30W/TH: Canaan Avalon A1346 / Whatsminer M50 / M53 / M56
• ~25W/TH: Canaan Avalon A1366 / A1446 / Bitmain S19k Pro
• ~20W/TH: Canaan Avalon A1466 / Bitmain S19XP / Whatsminer M60 / M63 / M66 / Bitmain T21
• <20W/TH: WhatsMiner M60S / M63S / M66S / Bitmain S21

Final Verdict
Who should buy it:

• If you want to spend about 500€.
• If you want to consume about 100W or less power.
• If you want something really, really quiet (think: one-bedroom apartment, living room mining or similar).
• If you want something reliable.

If you have a higher budget for purchase & power bills and no noise requirements, you could look into bigger gear, such as industrial miners with latest-gen chips that yield higher efficiency. I have recently heard about Futurebit's Apollo Version 2 which seems pretty efficient, but I have not tried it myself. It consumes more power, will be louder, and more expensive to buy.

Other than that, I see no alternatives to the Terminus R909.

[n0nce]

Reserved.

[FP91G]

Are you trying to win the solo Bitcoin mining lottery using this mining?
For this price there are good video cards with the same power consumption and they have a better chance of paying for themselves in a few years. And with this miner in solo mining you can lose 599 euros and the cost of electricity

[BitcoinSoloMiner]

would be interesting to see how the new v2 apollo compares with its 6TH for 175W

[DaveF]

I have one of these, along with just about every other GekkoScience product.
But I have to say that as with all these miners be in the 909 or 606 or futfurbit or whatever you are paying a premium for it and have to be aware that you will never get your investment in the unit back.
They are for tinkering, or lottery mining. Not a bad thing, just that we as a group who KNOW this have to make others aware of it.

But, a good review and another solid product from GS.

-Dave

[philipma1957]

Are you trying to win the solo Bitcoin mining lottery using this mining?
For this price there are good video cards with the same power consumption and they have a better chance of paying for themselves in a few years. And with this miner in solo mining you can lose 599 euros and the cost of electricity

I owned this. and most of sidehacks gear. it is not for turning a profit.


I owned most of Apollo and moonlander gear. I hit a block of doge and actually made a profit with that gear but that's a long shot.

This is fun gear and it looks cool you can have it in an office.



unfortunately a 300 or 200 watt miner burning 20 watts a th does not exist at the moment maybe in a year or 2.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Are you trying to win the solo Bitcoin mining lottery using this mining?
For this price there are good video cards with the same power consumption and they have a better chance of paying for themselves in a few years.
...

Video cards are only good for mining alts aka crapcoins and are beyond useless for mining BTC. Considering this area deals only with Bitcoin that is a pretty poor comparison of 'value'.

The point of these miners is not based on them paying for themselves - they are (relatively) low-cost lottery ticket machines. *Maybe* ya get lucky and while the odds say it's bloody unlikely to find a block -- it is possible and in the meantime they are dirt cheap to run.

[sidehack]

The original announcement post says we guarantee 1.5TH under 100DC watts, but when we do burn-in testing, we pretty much don't pass anything under 1.6TH and most see 1.65-1.75 before going out. Under 1.6TH or over about 85 DC watts indicates at least one weak chip which probably gets replaced, or some endemic balance issues that may necessitate a complete overhaul. Our internal testing standards are higher than advertised.

Maybe I'm too used to fan noise, but it takes a lot of F8 for me to notice the sound of them running. If it's really "too loud" for people, I'll investigate other options for the next generation. Good input.

Also, the new Smart Hub (and we may make more integrated-controller devices) takes a lot of the headache out of assembling a controller and setting up software.

[n0nce]

Are you trying to win the solo Bitcoin mining lottery using this mining?
For this price there are good video cards with the same power consumption and they have a better chance of paying for themselves in a few years. And with this miner in solo mining you can lose 599 euros and the cost of electricity

Good question; I might clarify this in my reserved post later. When mining with home ASICs, due to the aforementioned efficiency disadvantage and home electricity prices, you barely ever look at making a profit.

What you do when buying a home ASIC (that you don't when mining alts on GPUs) is decentralizing Bitcoin's hashpower, thus doing your part in keeping the network secure against e.g. raids of ASIC farms.

You can choose to pool or lotto mine, it doesn't really make a difference for the network. I feel like using kano's PPLNS pool is a kind of a way in between solo lotto and something like NiceHash pooled mining (which actually pay out over Lightning; a good option if you make just a few pennies a day). You won't get anything for months or years but then when Kano does hit a block, they payout is big!

would be interesting to see how the new v2 apollo compares with its 6TH for 175W

Correct; I'll see if I can get my hands on one. That equates to <30W/TH, which is closer to latest-gen ASICs (that you probably can't even buy yet) than BM1397-based stuff, which is impressive.

Although as I said before, cooling 200W with a single fan - in my experience with Apollo v1 - is always going to be louder than cooling 100W, and it's for sure not going to be livingroom-friendly; there's just a physical limit at a certain point. Keep in mind that while we're throwing around numbers in the hundreds and thousands of Watts in the mining space, a typical desktop CPU only outputs 100W under full load.

Combined with the higher purchase price (that you're not going to get back, as mentioned in my above reply), it's just a tougher sell in my opinion.

The point of these miners is not based on them paying for themselves - they are (relatively) low-cost lottery ticket machines. *Maybe* ya get lucky and while the odds say it's bloody unlikely to find a block -- it is possible and in the meantime they are dirt cheap to run.

I briefly mentioned it in OP, but this thing is also amazing for solo-mining on testnet. While it may seem useless, first of all it's fun to reminisce about past times when you could solo-mine blocks consistently from time to time and get that feeling back; getting a coinbase transaction paid directly to your wallet just has a different feeling. It's nice to experience it every now and then.

Also, Testnet coins are actually useful, so e.g. I mined about 10 of them for my faucet over a relatively short timeframe ([here]).

I fully agree that a big part of the 'value' of the R909 is that it's cheap to buy and cheap to run (see my TL;DR), so it's well suited for lottery and just hashrate decentralization on a tight budget. If you set one up to burn 100W, that's just 72kW per month (like 20 bucks if you have very expensive electricity with ~30 cents / kWh).

The original announcement post says we guarantee 1.5TH under 100DC watts, but when we do burn-in testing, we pretty much don't pass anything under 1.6TH and most see 1.65-1.75 before going out. Under 1.6TH or over about 85 DC watts indicates at least one weak chip which probably gets replaced, or some endemic balance issues that may necessitate a complete overhaul. Our internal testing standards are higher than advertised.

I really appreciate the attention to quality control. My unit pulled about 78.21 DC watts (including Raspberry Pi) at stock speed, churning out 1.74TH/s.

Maybe I'm too used to fan noise, but it takes a lot of F8 for me to notice the sound of them running. If it's really "too loud" for people, I'll investigate other options for the next generation. Good input.

Thanks for considering my input! I feel like upgrading to that specific Noctua model was worth it noise- & price-wise and it still cooled the unit more than well enough, but you may want to really put it through its paces with proper thermocouples around the board and ASICs to see if this change harmed the overclockability at all.

I don't run any servers or other electronic equipment with (audible) fans in my living areas, so it was definitely noticeable, even with the Noctua model - although a lot quieter. Even stock though, it was miles better than the Apollo v1's Delta fan, don't get me wrong; it does not sound like a jet turbine..

If I have to run something in the basement, I can just as well get an industrial miner, so that's why I think it's awesome to have something that's easy to cool quietly for people who want or have to run their gear in the office or living room.

Also, the new Smart Hub (and we may make more integrated-controller devices) takes a lot of the headache out of assembling a controller and setting up software.

I didn't get into detail how I powered everything. Since I also own Compac F sticks, I chose to power the Raspberry Pi and the F's with the v1 GekkoScience USB hub, taped to the top of my R909 and supplied it all with 12V by my Seasonic ATX PSU. That's what's shown in the pictures, for anyone wondering.

If anyone reading just needs to power a Pi from 5V, they should simply use the official Raspberry PSU instead.

I'm looking forward to checking out your new and future stuff! Sounds interesting.

[BitcoinSoloMiner]

one thing about the v2 apollo is that its advertised it also can be used as a linux pc and comes with a nvme ssd, so its not just a single use bitcoin mining machine, you could resell the nvme for example, so you do get some money back on the investment, or use for a pihole or something

[n0nce]

one thing about the v2 apollo is that its advertised it also can be used as a linux pc and comes with a nvme ssd, so its not just a single use bitcoin mining machine, you could resell the nvme for example, so you do get some money back on the investment, or use for a pihole or something

In the case of Apollo v1, I've shown that it would have been cheaper by quite a margin, to just buy an Apollo hashboard-only unit and a separate controller + SSD. I assume it's going to be the same with v2, as well.

I must say that $300 for adding this SBC and SSD is steep. The 'hashboard only' option can be acquired for $524.99 right now, whereas the 'full unit' runs you $824.99. Buying an Orange Pi 4 and the exact same SSD right now, runs you pretty exactly $200, so it's a 50% premium.

In fact, they also sell a hashboard-only unit again, which is what I'd use as comparison against R909 if I were to do one.

[paid2]

I love small home mining ASICs, and Gekkoscience's products have nothing but quality. They are stable and reliable, I still love my old R606s that are still running solo. I even added 2 last year. I'm hoping to finally add one or more R909s to my collection this year!

Thanks for the review! The only thing that surprised me is the noise of the fan: (if we're only talking about home mining) I've been only bothered by the noise of the PSU on my Antminer R4s for now, but never by such a small fan (R606 or external fans I use for the Compacs et Newpacs usb). I am very curious to see what it sounds like IRL.

I agree with your point of view on the kano pool, which I think is the only real solution for home miners who want a payout other than solo. (Sad that mmpool exit-scammed)
There is a good new alternative using ck solo pool managed by Willi: Solo Pool Miner Race  

[n0nce]

The only thing that surprised me is the noise of the fan: (if we're only talking about home mining) I've been only bothered by the noise of the PSU on my Antminer R4s for now, but never by such a small fan (R606 or external fans I use for the Compacs et Newpacs usb). I am very curious to see what it sounds like IRL.

It's a small fan, but it runs at full speed; as far as I know there is no PWM or DC-based fan control on the R909. You could experiment with different Noctua (or other brand) 80mm fans; just look at their maximum rated speed since that's what they'll run at, and check thermals.

I do think it's a good idea to have mining fans connected to constant voltage, since then you cannot have overheating due to a fan controller bug or software issue.

Wouldn't say the fan is 'bothering'; just that it's definitely noticeable in a quiet environment. Maybe I'm just spoiled since all my hardware that runs in living areas is solid-state and mostly fanless.

I agree with your point of view on the kano pool, which I think is the only real solution for home miners who want a payout other than solo.

Also keep in mind that kano maintains the software for GekkoScience miners. So I think it's a good choice to point our home mining hashpower at his pool.
He also offers a solo pool option, as well!