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Founded in early 2013, Bitmain is a Chinese IC design company that focuses on the research, development and sales of Bitcoin mining chips and mining machines. To date, it has developed and produced two generations of Bitcoin mining chips and five Bitcoin mining machines.
Bitmain's mining machine products are named Ant. Among them, based on the first-generation chip, the Ant S1 with a computing power of 180G and the Ant S2 with a computing power of 1T. In addition, there are small-computing-power USB mining machines Ant U1 and Ant U2 that are suitable for mining experience.
The test was conducted on the latest product, Ant S3, based on the second-generation chip.
Official parameters of Antminer S3:
Mining machine name: Antminer S3
Rated speed: 440GGH/s
Power consumption at wall: 332W
Number of chips: 32
Chip parameters:
Chip process: 28nm
Chip package size: 8mm×8mm
Mining speed: 13.75GH/s
1. Unboxing and Photos
The S3 arrived after many twists and turns due to logistics factors. The mining machine is packed in a five-layer special hard carton with international warning signs printed on the outside. The mining machine is wrapped in a double-layer foam bag to prevent moisture and shock.
It can be seen that the Antminer S3 mining machine adopts a chassis design, the chassis shell is sprayed with matte paint, and has a dual-fan design. The two sides of the chassis are printed with the white Bitmain Antminer logo.
The fixing screws of the entire chassis are embedded and the surface is very flat.
Here is a divine beast. This divine beast and this Ant S3 mining machine will accompany me day after day.
Antminer S3 adopts dual fans with one inlet and one outlet for heat dissipation. The fan is a four-pin fan with temperature control and speed adjustment. This is the front of the mining machine. The air enters from this side. There is a network cable socket and status indicator on the fan, as well as a recessed system reset button. It is worth noting that the network cable interface has two network status lights, which are similar to the status of the network card. Friends who have used independent network cards should have an impression of this.
This is the back of the mining machine. The hot air is discharged from this side. You can see a small Bitmain Ant S3 model logo.
There are four PCI-E 6-pin power interfaces on the top of the mining machine.
The physical parameters of Antminer S3 are given below.
2. Installation
The installation of Antminer S3 is very simple. Just connect the power supply and network cable, turn on the power, and you are ready to go.
This time, an idle Zhenhua Bingshan Gold Disc 500w power supply was used.
First short-circuit the power supply and connect the green wire to any black wire.
Connect the PCI-E power supply to the power interface on the mining machine (there are two sets of interfaces parallel to the fan, you can connect any one of them). Pull a network cable from the router to connect the mining machine. Then you can turn on the power supply to work.
When the mining machine is working normally, the signal lights on both sides of the network cable and the green light of the mining machine next to it flash from time to time.
3. Debugging
Enter the mining machine backend, the default IP: 192.168.1.99, enter the password root, and you can see the familiar interface.
After setting up the mining pool, restart it and it will start working for you.
The Antminer is like this. When your friends have no idea what is going on, the miner is already working!
Looking at the 18-hour operation curve of the mining pool, we can see that the average computing power is above 445g, reaching the nominal computing power.
After running for 20 hours, the HW value (hardware error) is only 85, which is so small that it can be almost ignored.
4. Test
The room temperature of my test environment was 31 degrees, the humidity was 56, and the indoor noise was 41dBa.
It can be seen that the mining machine power is around 352w.
In terms of temperature, since the mining machine has its own internal temperature control, the two blades are about 45 degrees. Therefore, the chassis temperature near the front and rear fans of the mining machine is tested. It can be seen that the front chassis temperature is about 37 degrees.
The temperature of the heat exhaust fan at the back of the chassis is higher than that at the front, and the temperature near this area is around 40 degrees.
In terms of noise, due to the high room temperature, the fan is always running at high speed, with a speed of up to 2400+ rpm. The noise in front of the mining machine is about 65dBa.
On the side of the mining machine, the noise of the two fans is about 67dBa.
5. Internal structure
The internal structure of Antminer S3 is very similar to that of S1, with the same double-blade design.
The outer heat sink is added, and the inner heat sink is close to each other to form an air duct. It can be seen that the heat sink specially customized by Ant has a wider heat dissipation area under the same volume, which greatly enhances the heat dissipation.
The data cable has a male-female interface, which looks very classy.
This is the controller of Antminer S3, with network cable interface, data cable interface and small speaker.
A blade on one side of the mining machine integrates 16 Antminer second-generation chips with a 0.28 process.
The customized violent fan has an ant logo, a diameter of 12cm, and a parameter of 12v1.0A. From the parameters, we can see that it should not be as noisy as the S1 when running at high speed.
The beast below appears again!
6. Brief summary
The design of Antminer S3 is very good. Except for the slightly loud noise when the dual fans are running at high speed, the other performances are basically satisfactory.
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