**Note: I was given this miner for the "Spondoolies Legendary Members Promotion" (
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=887807.0)
Some background on my mining history/experience. I started mining late 2012 with a pretty decent sized GPU farm - Ended up somewhere around 250 GPU total. After I sold off my GPU farm I started buying up SHA256 ASICs, and currently have quite the assortment hashing for me. I own or have owned pretty much every type of miner except for a SP-Tech...that is until now!
Shipping: - The unit went from SP-Tech in Israel to my door in Ohio in a matter of 4 days via FedEx. I was very impressed with how fast they had this miner boxed up and to my front door.
Packaging: - The box that these ship in is
REALLY thick and strong. It would take some really serious abuse to damage this box. Inside of the box I was surprised to not see any packing peanuts, bubble wrap, or foam. SP-Tech uses cardboard inserts to keep the miner from moving around the box, and they seem to work quite well.
The Miner: - The SP20 is very small for the hash rate it produces when compared to other miners. The over all construction of the miner was very solid and clean looking, it definitely looks like a high quality unit. All of the ports and lights were well labeled etc.. This miner does not come with its own power source so you must provide one. Within 5 minutes of bringing the box into my office... I had it up and hashing! Now the one thing that most people complained about with this miner is the fan noise. SP-Tech has marketed this as a "home user" type miner, so I can see why some would complain. The fan is really loud and if I tried to run this at my house... my wife would not put up with it. I have owned 2 other miners that were as loud if not louder, and those would be the AM Prisma (not sure if it got louder when hashing since mine never worked) and a Cointerra. If I had to put a comparison to the sound it makes, I would have to say a hair dryer running at full blast.
For a size comparison I tossed it on top of a Dragon miner which does around 1TH (Granted this miner is much older than the SP20).
Setup/Controlling the SP20: - The setup was a breeze since it comes with DHCP enabled. You simply type myminer.io into your browser and it redirects you to start.spondoolies-tech.com
After you click on the link to your miner it opens up the web interface and you can add some pools and start hashing. The web interface is really simple and intuitive for new miners to get going. The advanced features come in handy for the more experienced miners to fine tune the unit. I will not bother going over every single step by step, but will comment on a few things that I really was impressed with.
-Advanced Voltage Control: Was nice to fine tune each board separately and not having to ssh it to make changes. You can set maximum and starting voltages.
-Max PSU Power Per Unit: Really cool feature to fine tune it with or let the miner learn your PSU and set it for you.
-ASICS Control Panel: A feature I hope to never use - Lets you disable and bad ASIC chips
-Firmware Upgrade: simple way to upgrade your frimware...it also tells you when new ones are available
-Main stats page: Has everything you could want to see about the miners current status and history.
-ASIC Stats page: Everything you could want to know about the ASIC chips power/voltage/temps/etc..
I wish I had taken a screen shot before moving the miner from my house to my farm (also cleared history), but it was up for almost 36 hours and 0 issues. When I first started playing with it some of the chips were getting too hot (125) so I made some adjustments.
Main Page
ASIC Stats Page:
Support/Customer Service: - These guys are constantly in touch with the community via these forums, and customers seem very happy with them. I looked at the SP-Tech website (
http://www.spondoolies-tech.com/) and notice they are very active with new firmwares and updates to their tech blog. It Is amazing how horrible other companies are with this important aspect of selling miners (not all, but many).
Final Thoughts - Overall I am very impressed with this miner so far. It runs very stable and is really easy to fine tune plus a lot of speed from a small footprint. I really have no complaints with it since I do not run it at my house. I will be buying more SP-Tech gear in the future and look forward to seeing what else these guys come up with!
Thank you for this awesome miner! I will be buying more of your gear in the future.
