I got my SP20 a little later after some problems with the Customs, not believing that I can get something for free. Anyway that's not the story of this post, here is it the nice and shiny SP20 JACKSON well packed in a sturdy eco-friendly box.
What you see is what you get - the device and that's all. I'm OK with that
Before I start this little beast I was worried about power delivery, it has only 4 PCIe 6-pin power connectors, this with combination of 1200W at wall consumption gets me a little bit worried.
1200W @ Wall => ~1080 W @ 12V divided by 4 connectors and you get 270W per PCIe or 7.5 Amps per cable or even more during the test period for this review.
As a home miner sometimes I have to leave the "farm" unattended and melting cables is something I don't wanna see so I've decided to made some new 1.5 mm² high quality copper cables for my DPS 2000BB PSU, at a later point it gets clear that you can limit the power per connection from the software which is great especially with mixed power supplies.
The size of SP20 is close to Bitmain's Ants, maybe slightly longer:
D 380mm; W 110mm; H 140mm
Firs Impressions: very good build quality, well manufactured and pretty damn good looking for a bitcoin miner, not something that we actually need but it's welcomed
On the front of the device are all connections and air intake, at the back we have the exhaust
FAN
Yes kitty this is the one that bothers you so much, but we'll get to that later.
Setup:So you have to prepare one big 1200W power supply or two 600-750W, yes the device can run with two PSU. Network connectivity is via a standard Ethernet cable, just connect it to your home router (you need to have DHCP server ON) wait for the device to boot and point your browser to:
http://myminer.io
User friendly way to determine the IP address of your device, now just click on
Go to miner link and enter the default user/pass: admin/admin
The setup is easy, just enter your preferred pools, you can drag to reorder them. You are now mining
Specification and Performance:As mentioned above I power my SP20 with Delta DPS 2000BB PSU 90-92% eff.
The miner has two boards each with 4 Rockerbox 28nm ASICs
Rated hash rate: 200 GH/s per chip
Rated Voltage: 0.7 V, voltage range is 0.63 V - 0.8 V
Spondoolies sell the device as 1700GH, I didn't pushed it so high - here are some results:
On the settings page of the miner you have two options
Basic and
Advanced voltage setting, test 1 to 7 are on advanced settings, while the last 3 represents the user friendly setups:
SF, MR - slow fans, medium rate
MF, HR - medium fans, high rate
TF, HeR - turbo fans, highest rate
The results are astonishing, especially the efficiency in the first test 0.5W per GH @ wall is by me a great achievement, I'll probably switch to test 1 to 3 in the spring or early summer depending on bitcoin difficulty and prices. It's great to have this flexibility which extends the life of the miner. For now I'm using the miner with
test 5 setup - a great balance efficiency/hashrate/loudness.
At the
Asic stats tab you have advanced statistic of the current state of the device, this includes power consumption per LOOP (2 chips), DC2DC voltage and temperature, ASIC temps and so on. I'm very happy with this screen it gives me the whole information that I need to precisely tweak my unit.
The back chips are getting hotter air that's why their temp is higher, to keep them cool you can set lower start voltage for them, and limit the power for unit 2 and 4. By doing so the software will try to keep them at the maximum power defined while bellow 125C and you can go low enogh to undervolt. Basically you can maxout the front chips and undervolt the back - this is so far the first bitcoin asic miner I test that supports this kind of tweaking - amazing.
When you apply new settings the miner's chips are powered with start volts and the fw slowly increases the voltage to the higher setting, if the temp for a specific chip reaches 125C the chip resets and it's voltage is dropped slightly until max point for this specific ASIC is found. This point depends on the environment temperature, fan speed, specific chip characteristics etc.
Cooling:
One very powerful 120mm Y.S.TECH fan is used in the negative pressure tunnel. A lot of pages in this forum about how load in reality is this miner... what to say
It is LOUD, but not that scary as some describe it only the cat doesn't like it much, but she is scared from the vacuum cleaner so no big surprise if you know what i mean
Maybe I'm used to Technobit's loud miners and can't be surprised that easily anymore, but in anyway this device is not suitable for home environment as Spondoolies presented it: "HOME MINING IS BACK"
The two boards are vertical, while chips are aligned in a chessboard pattern, but still the back chips get a lot hotter air. If the miner wasn't designed in "carrier grade/data center" in mind but more home oriented they could of put the boards horizontally and use two 120mm fans, that way each chip gets cool air, yes the upper board will be slightly hotter but they can even seperate the boards with metal, it's all a point of engineering and solutions can be found. Don't get me wrong this is so far the best miner I had, but that's just human nature - we always want more and better - this is how progress is driven
IMO the problem with cooling is not the fan, but the asic's heatsinks, some users on the forum managed to "unglue" them and it turns out that the copper shim is not bolted or something but just sitting there between the chip and the heatsink, so you have two heat transfers via thermal compound once from the chip to copper and another to the heatsink itself. Personally I'm not planing to mod this for now, maybe when the winter is over.
I'm a big fan of fully automated autonomous devices, ones that you can set and forget. This miner is close to that goal, maybe Spoondolies will automate the fan in future fw update. I would like to see min and max fan settings, and maybe target output temp (top) setting with these inputs a script can regulate the fan within the defined range while keeping the device cool and at maximum performance. In the end they advertise SP20 as a "home miner", and a typical resident have to leave the miners unattended once and a while not to worry about the weather or neighbors calling 911 to rescue that "wild cat" trapped in the garage for days
Pricing:There is not much to say here. ATM You can choose from:
Technobit HEX4R - 850GH - 365$ (0.43$/GH)
Spondoolies SP20 - 1700GH - 659$ (0.38$/GH)
Bitmain Antminer S5 - 1155GH/s - 418$ (0.36$/GH) (just released)
Pros:- Reasonably priced
- Full Software control
- Great overclock/undervolt capabilities
- Amazing efficiency at lower speeds
- Easy to use, responsive and good looking interface
Cons:- Hard to reach advertised speeds
- Auto fan feature will be nice
- LOUD
Conclusion:The Spondoolies SP20E Jackson is a very high quality bitcoin miner with great capabilities for custom performance optimization in terms of speed or efficiency. It's very easy to set up and runs flawlessly without an issue. The efficiency of the unit at lower speeds is amazing and implies longer life while keeping your bills low.
Full gallery can be found here:
http://imgbox.com/g/f9dpu4eptXbest
2GOOD
