Post
Topic
Board Mining (Altcoins)
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: Bitmain launches the Z9 Equihash miner
by
greyday
on 08/05/2018, 02:26:45 UTC
⭐ Merited by bones261 (1)
Any idea how noisy would the Z9 miner be?

Single fan and running 300W shouldn't be any louder than a small GPU rig. Most of the noise from other ASICs are from cheap vacuum cleaner sounding PSUs.

I don't know about other companies, but almost all Bitmain ASICs don't have built in PSUs, so that's down to what you're buying. The ones they provide aren't very loud, and neither are the fans themselves; the noise comes from the chip/heatsink configurations, it's the sound that high pressure air running over a bunch of jagged edges of metal makes. The higher the power output, the more heat generated, the faster the fan, the louder the noise. Due to the space in the miner, any miner with 3 or more cards is going to be loud as heck at higher hashrates (and usually stock), because they're packed in pretty tight and the air is being pushed/pulled through constricted spaces.

On some of the older lower powered models you could solve this by replacing the single fan with a pair of low noise, lower powered fans. That worked on, say, the S5, partially because the draw was so low (under 600W) and partially because of the type of heatsink the early Bitmain ASICs used, which filled the middle compartment in an extremely long and thin metal strip config that filled the center between the pair of cards. Having only two allowed them to face each other and create a huge radiator compartment the fan cools. Newer Bitmain ASICs aren't configured like that, or at least the ones I have aren't. I have an X3, B3, and Z9 on order, so we'll see how those end up being (I'm hoping the Z9 and/or the x3 are easier to quiet than having to build a box).

Another option on a lower powered ASIC would be to remove the casing, lay the boards out, and run fans over them, but I'm honestly not sure how well that would work. In theory it should work fine.