2013-10-11 – 001-004 – HDR
A discontinued 30GH/s bitcoin miner from Butterfly Labs with a Fallout 3 bobblehead for scale.
This ASIC-based bitcoin miner isn’t mine but I stumbled onto this installation work. The miner’s build was reasonably made with no sharp edges. The screws holding the end-plates were very loose and unlike what’s pictured here the fan’s power cable was disconnected and was looped around only one of the chassis support with no retaining clip. That’s just unacceptable with no mention of it on the placard. Servicing is done by unscrewing the intake cover while keeping the opposite screw on the exhaust cover in place with a bit.
The miner isn’t using a stack effect like some PC cases such as the Silverstone FT03. Instead it’s placed on it’s side making it basically a miniature wind tunnel. A single fan pulling from the rear ensures that hot air pockets are minimized while reversing the fan where it’s blowing directly at the heatsink would work better in an open case configuration. At an ambient temperature of 21ºC the miner under full load was around 80ºC without the case and about 68ºC with the case. It was always intended to run with the case on so no experiments were done with the fan blowing across the heatsink. There is a mild roar that’s as loud as a GPU using a reference centrifugal or blower fan design while under load.
The miner does a consistent 30GH/s whereas a miner with two Radeon HD 6870 may do around 1 GH/s. It’s not a turnkey solution for the average person but using Windows Vista or higher as the host OS makes it vastly easier to set up than on Linux. The hash difficulty increase throughout the year announced that ASIC-based miners are being slowly phased in but the pressure has increased. Monday’s first congressional hearing on virtual currency has pushed the exchange rate from at times in the year a low of $2 with a very rough average of $100 to a high of past $900. It’s currently at $714. With the wide attention given by the media it seems like these miners are the way to go.
This Butterfly Labs miner is reliably mining at the rated 30GH/s, draws little power and the minimalist powder black brushed aluminum design isn’t too bad looking. Just make sure that the fan is connected and nothing is loose.
By vmax137 on 2013-10-11 13:41:31
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