‘Mining Hardware’ Part 1

550 MHS BW-L21 Litecoin (Scrypt) ASIC Miner

The recent return of interest in Litecoin (LTC) and the growing price has apparently also sparked interest for more up to date ASIC miners and there is one more contender now available apparently. Here comes the BW-L21 Litecoin (Scrypt) ASIC Miner from BW.com promising to deliver up to 550 MHs with 950W of power usage. The ordering process for these devices however is not that easy apparently, there is a minimum order quantity of 100 units and the price is about 2500 USD. You need to contact BW by email in order to arange an order and make the purchase, though with 100 units MOQ this is hardly interesting for small home miners. Bitmain’s AntMiner L3+ Scrypt ASIC miner is still much more attractive to small miners that want to get just one or a couple of units, that is if you manage to buy one when new batches are being released.
BW.com BW-L21 Specifications:
– Hash rate: 550 MHS +/- 10%
– Power consumption: 950 W +/- 10%
– Power efficiency: 1.727 J / MHS
– DC voltage input: 12 VDC +/- 5%
– ASIC chip type: 28nm LTC ASIC chip by BW.com
– ASIC chip quantity per unit (miner): 144 chips
– Number of hash boards per unit: 4 hash boards
– Cooling: 2x 120mm x 38mm fan, 3000rpm (front and back, in a push-pull configuration).
– Weight: 4.8 kg
– Dimensions: 329mm (L) x 127mm (W) x 159mm (H)

PinIdea 17GHS X11 ASIC Miner DR-100

PinIdea has updated their product range with a new 17GHS X11 ASIC miner named DR-100 in order to be able to cope up with the increased competition from Bitmain and Innosilicon with their recently announced new X11 miners offering significant X11 hashrate boost. PinIdea seems to be planning to start shipping their new X11 ASIC miner in September with first-come first-served principle. Currently the miner is already out of stock due to the big demand apparently (or limited number of units), even with the price of a single unit close to almost 3 BTC.
PinIdea DR-100 X11 ASIC specifications:
– HashRate: 17000 MHS (+-5%)
– Power: 820W (wall power +-5%)
– Dimensions: 28cm x 18cm(h) x 15cm(w)
– Weight: 5KG
– Interface: Lan (100m/1000m)
– Fan: 2x 14038 Double ball fan (55DB)
– Operating Temperature: 0C~40C
– Mining Software: Custom CGminer

Asus B250 Mining Expert Motherboard with 19 PCI-E Slots

It seems that the race for a mining motherboard with the most PCI Express slots is far from over with the AsRock H110 Pro BTC+ and Biostar TB250-BTC PRO probably being only the start. Asus is planning on joining the party with not just 12 or 13 PCI-E slots, but with 19, though you might be limited to actually using only 16 of them. We already know that you are limited up to 8 GPUs from a kind (AMD or Nvidia) under Windows, so 16 max if you mix them. With Linux though more GPUs from a kind that what Windows allows are usable, but then again more than 16 at this point might not be possible. This is probably why Asus are talking about this product as supporting 16 GPUs even though it does come with 19 slots…

For now Asus is just teasing us with this motherboard and there are no full details about it, including info on pricing and availability. Still it shows that the company has interest in the mining market, especially after also releasing mining oriented GPUs. Unlike some other manufacturers however Asus is showing that they are designing their mining products with miners in mind and not just pushing something that is not worth buying like some others. Their Asus B250 Mining Expert mining motherboard comes with three 24-pin ATX power connectors for directly connecting up to three power supplies without the need to use external means to synchronize the PSUs. There are also three 4-pin Molex power connectors on board for powering GPUs, though you probably will use powered risers and won’t be needing these.
We are yet to see more information emerging, but things are definitely looking interesting already. What you need to be prepared with motherboards for mining supporting so many GPUs is that there will be some unexpected challenges when building the mining rig. Cable lengths, connector spacing, enough space for proper cooling and so on. Design challenges emerge and the more video cards you use, the harder it gets to make things work as expected. Though once you clear the design for let us say 16 GPUs, then the next mining rig should be much easier and problem free to assemble… hopefully.