Mining
We bought a maintain of a pleasant little golden iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC miner and determined to mess around with it to see why so many individuals like these small home-oriented high-hashrate and low-power ASIC miners with assist for the Ethash and ETChash algorithms. You would possibly have the ability to rating deal on used iPollo V1 Mini now that these units aren’t that worthwhile like they have been in the course of the time when you might mine Ethereum (ETH) with them and so they can nonetheless turn out to be useful within the subsequent bull run or in the meantime should you mine some Ethash or ETChash cash in the meantime. The nicest factor is that they’re very compact, not that noisy basically and really energy environment friendly in comparison with what a GPU mining rig would use to provide the similar hashpower. And so they do include WiFi adapter built-in, so when you set them up they’re straightforward to maneuver round the home or condo as you’d solely must plug them in an influence socket to ensure that them to start out hashing, no want to make use of community cables, though you’ll be able to nonetheless if you wish to.
Now, allow us to begin with just a little clarification as iPollo does supply two units of V1 ASIC miners, one is described as ETC Miners and have the phrase Traditional of their product names. These are iPollo V1 Mini Traditional (130 MH/s at 104W) and iPollo V1 Mini Traditional Plus (280 MH/s at 270W) with each units having a design reminiscence of three.75 GB out of which the accessible reminiscence to be used is 3.6 GB. Which means that these units can mine Ethash or ETChash cash which have as much as a 3.6 GB DAG dimension. There’s additionally the iPollo V1 Traditional (1550 MH/s at 1240W) with the identical reminiscence limitation accessible, however that one is huge and noisy and never very appropriate for residence mining anyway.
The opposite ETH Miner class is comparable by way of hashrate and energy utilization or extra environment friendly, however these units do include extra reminiscence accessible. The design reminiscence is 6.0 GB of which the accessible reminiscence for DAGs is 5.8 GB, which means you can mine even Ethereum (ETH) forks resembling ETHF or ETHW which have DAG dimension of over 5GB already. Ethereum after all is not accessible for mining because it has switched from PoW to PoS. However should you get the iPollo V1 Mini (300 MH/s at 240W), the mannequin we’re and testing right here, or the extra environment friendly iPollo V1 Mini SE Plus (400 MH/s at 232W) or the smaller iPollo V1 Mini SE (200 MH/s at 116W) you ought to be safer on the long term on what you’d have the ability to mine many extra Ethash or Etchash cash passing the 4GB DAG dimension within the close to future. There’s additionally the iPollo V1 (3600 MH/s at 3100W), however identical to the same Traditional counterpart this one is huge, noisy and fairly costly for the common residence miners anyway.
As you most likely already guessed, after checking that the gadget works superb, we opened it up. The iPollo V1 Mini ASIC miner is sort of compact and comes with an exterior 12V energy provide with a most ranking of 360W (2 traces rated at 180W every) with two 6-pin PCI-E energy connectors popping out of this passive Huntkey PSU. It’s worthwhile to plug within the two 12V energy traces into the miner that has an influence utilization of 240W and that ought to be superb for the wires and the miner. The 6-pin PCI-E energy connectors are usually rated at 75W, however good high quality ones are in a position to deal with 100W or extra often. There may very well be issues nonetheless should you attempt to use a 6-pin PCI-E energy connector for a 150W or extra because it often begins to overheat and burns up resulting from being considerably overloaded.
The ability provide is sort of good, though it will get scorching when mining it is rather environment friendly and offers secure energy to the miner. The ability utilization we now have measured with the inventory energy provide is round 50W for the miner whereas on the brink of mine and round 244W on the wall when mining begins. Connecting a 1000W Platinum rated Corsair energy provide resulted in 249W of energy utilization whereas mining (4-5W extra as a result of additional 5V line energy consumption the Corsair has).
As a result of compact dimension of the miner the producer Nano Labs has determined that they might use two small 60mm dimension followers with high-rpm to offer the cooling for the miner. And whereas these followers do their job very effectively, at most RPM they’re fairly noisy (round 7000 rpm), although with the fan management and regular operation they go all the way down to a sub 5000 rpm and the noise is far more acceptable. With the utmost pace of the 2 cooling followers you’re going to be getting round 64 dBA noise stage whereas with them working usually with the miner working at round 50 levels Celsius and the followers at round 4800 rpm the noise stage measured is round 52 dBA and that’s far more acceptable, although nonetheless not very silent. The 2 followers used are from a Chinese language producer known as Ebonda and are rated at 0.8A at 12V. We’re after all going to attempt to optimize the cooling and see if this miner may be made extra silent, however that can comply with in one other submit.
The cooler of the miner is a big aluminium copper block that looks like a server kind heatsink, however doesn’t appear to be a regular sized one… the mounting gap distance, the protruding copper block and never centred placement of the screws make it appear to be a customized design. Would’ve been good should you may simply mount tower-based CPU cooler to make cooling simpler and fewer noisy, however that might not be a simple activity – definitely not as straightforward as juts changing the heatsink and followers. The miner itself consists of two boards with a pin header connection between them. The underside one is the management and energy board and the highest one is the hashing board with a single massive ASIC chip. BTW after disassembling the miner with changed thermal compound utilizing Arctic MX4 thermal grease we’ve seen about 1 diploma Celsius drop within the working temperature of the miner.
The Nano Labs V66H ASIC single chip is seemingly able to 300 MH/s Ethash/ETChash hashrate with an influence utilization of round 200-ish Watts of energy utilization, no actual specs of the chips. These are straightforward to scale with huge hashrate miners should you simply enhance the chip depend. Although apparently effectivity may very well be additional improved judging by the specs of the Mini SE and Mini SE Plus miners that present even higher energy effectivity. Nano Labs’s iPollo Ethash/ETChash ASIC chips won’t be essentially the most energy environment friendly within the bunch, however they do appear to carry out fairly competitively and the 6GB of reminiscence is a plus as effectively. To not point out that these miners do include assist for dual-mining with ZIL, so just a little additional revenue added by that as effectively, a revenue which will enable the units to efficiently compete with increased hashrate merchandise with decrease energy utilization resembling Jasminer X4.
The iPollo V1 Mini ASIC miner comes with a easy and simple to make use of web-based interface for monitoring and management of the gadget, there’s additionally the iPolloTool software program for Home windows that permits for simpler establishing and monitoring of a number of miners directly. The common reported hashrate we’re seeing for the iPollo V1 Mini is round 300 MH/s with an working temperature at round 50 levels and followers at round 4800 rpm. At 244 Watts of energy used and with 52 dBA noise. So, the claimed specs are just about what you need to anticipate to get in actual utilization.
The miner helps each ETChash and Ethash mining and dual-mining with ZIL as effectively. There’s nonetheless a catch with the twin mining assist, the most recent dual-mining firmware will not be but accessible on the official firmware improve package deal but, however you’ll be able to obtain firmware model 0.76.96 from RabidMining. There doesn’t appear to be assist for Nicehash mining on the iPollo nonetheless, The 6GB reminiscence onboard permits for a good future-proof functionality of the gadget (watch out with the 4GB fashions!). It takes about 4 minutes for the miner to get able to mine ETC when you boot it up, so fairly fast on that entrance in comparison with Jasminer X4 the place you have to to attend about 20 minutes.
There’s a consumer fan management possibility accessible with each guide and computerized modes accessible for the consumer to configure. And there’s additionally a Wi-fi community setup within the web-interface that you want to use to attach your gadget to a WiFi community. The primary time you run it must be linked with a community cable so that you could setup the Wifi, after that it’ll simply hook up with the wi-fi community you set it up to make use of mechanically. There’s sadly no management for working frequency or voltage accessible, so no consumer choices accessible for attempting to optimize the gadget for higher energy effectivity or sooner hashrate for instance. The accessible logs within the internet interface aren’t very usable as though there are three totally different logs accessible so that you can monitor by means of the online interface neither certainly one of them is the cgminer output for the precise mining course of (the gadget makes use of a modified cgminer as mining software program).
So, all in all, the iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC miner is a pleasant compact residence miner for anybody , it really works effectively, fairly versatile and performs as anticipated… there’s after all extra performance to be deisred, so room for additional imporvement. In case you are trying to get certainly one of these search for some sub $1000 USD offers.
