Quote from: virtualspade on April 08, 2014, 07:06:35 PM

I went to check out Noncetech's beta miners in Helsinki today, generally speaking I liked what I saw, I admit I'm not a Bitcoin miner expert but I have some general knowledge about electronics and Bitcoin mining. I started mining scrypt coins about a year ago and I have read a lot of articles about Bitcon mining and mining hardware in the last year. I would say I have pretty good picture about Bitcoin mining in general.

The whole team was there, the coder, hardware guy and the economics guy, everyone seemed to know their stuff pretty well. Also one of the guys has a Chinese origin and speaks Chinese which I would say is a good advantage when you do business with Chinese subcontractors, for the assembly of the miners and so on. All the guys were friendly and in my opinion "down to earth" and none of them were full of themselves. Well that may yet change when they get filthy rich selling all those miners to us, I noticed money can do strange things to good people, I just hope they get rich, and don't turn into the dark side after that... I liked their team and wouldn't mind doing business with them.

They set up 2 miners at the occasion, one was their first test miner the other was one of the "beta" miners. The hardware setup seemed quite basic, just plug in the cables and boot the RasPi, the software side was not not yet that simple, their drivers for cgminer was not yet completely finished, so they needed to manually input some commands ( setting the voltage to the chips ) to the RasPi before starting cgminer.

Their web interface for the miner was not yet finished, so I just got a look at the page layout for the interface. The driver part that controls the fan speed on the miner was not yet fully programmed so the fans were on full speed all the time, and those small fans are quite noisy.

The miners was running in "Turbo" mode hashing around 250GH/s or more correctly they showed in cgminer as 2 x 125GH/s per card, 2 hashing blocks per card. One miner showed a little more HW errors than the others, that was the original first test miner the built, on the "Beta" miners they had made some hardware modifications on the Pcb, and it had less HW errors or none. We calculated the percentage of the HW errors on the original test miner, but stupid me cant remember the exact number, but it was low. As a scrypt miner with Gpu's I'm used to 0 HW errors, if I have HW errors I re tune my rigs so they go away, I was assured that Bitcoin mining with Asic's will produce some HW errors and thats normal.

The components on the Pcb's are of high quality, all critical components are made in USA or Japan, this is for stability and long life of the miner, I agree with the choice for a little more expensive components, as for me a miner has to be production grade, I don't have time to baby sit my miners, they should work 24/7/365.

One thing that I didn't get to see in the 3h visit I made to Noncetech is the chassis for the miners, they have not yet got that from the producer. Well I of course wonder how hot will the chassis get on the inside, with 4 cards running in "Turbo" mode producing 1000w of heat, and 2x120mm fans to get that heat out from there.

I'm no expert, but I don't see any major issues with Noncetech getting their miner shipped within a reasonable time after the Pre-orders start, there is some coding to do, but I would say that the coding is not a big issue. I was told that they have the "assembly line" all ready arranged with a Chinese subcontractor, and they are going to China to oversee the assembly and shipping of the miners. One thing that comes to mind is the chassis, if it needs total redesign, that could cause a small delay. Another thing that they have not done yet is a long term stress test, running a miner more than a day or two, now that I think of it, I should have volunteered to do a 3 week stress test on some of their miners, I'm sure my scrypt rigs wouldn't mind the noise in the garage...

Ok, I wont bore you guys any more today..

Best of luck to Noncetech launch today

Thank you for visiting and writing about us! You forgot to mention the coffee and cookies!

Here are some comments to your post:

We have been running beta cards for about a week now without problems, however we have had to take the setup down to do some hardware and software updates.

About the chassis: we have been working with our chassis supplier and cooling systems subcontractor. The cooling inside the chassis is set up so that the mining card coolers are constantly pushing out the hot air and the frontal fans are there only to supply fresh air. The chassis should not be a problem with overheating.

The user interface is indeed still under development, but it is almost finished (1 or 2 days left). The communication with cgminer will use the standard cgminer API connection, thus it should also work with other cgminer monitor softwares.

In other news, here are the videos:

Simulating Sampo 1T with beta cards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exvXD2K9vNA

DIY overview for the mining card
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctam5lk_xKQ