Buy a fan for it. They don't run well just with passive cooling.

Until you have a fan on it, limit the clock rate to 400Mhz ~=200GH/s.

Once you have a good cooling fan for it you can probably clock it up to about 545Mhz. don't be tempted to over-clock it unless you're going to bolt on a much bigger heatsink with good thermal compound.

Also, you might want to change the repo you got CGMiner from to the officially supported source, downloads from elsewhere might contain undesireable features.

Kano's github is the only officially supported source:-

https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer/


Also, this table is quite useful for power consumption and hash rates Vs clock rate

You have https://pool.nerdminer.de listed twice in your OP

I didn't think it was still running. Last time I looked it wasn't, but that was 6+ months ago.

Sadly nothing for second place. Nice shot though, be another 4000 years before that arrives again. 

Good luck.,

But there are many solo mining pools with a proven track record. I doubt you'll get much support to be honest.

I certainly wouldn't touch it with a barge pole until you've got a proven track record.


Just out of interest who's pool code are you running or is this something of your own making?

Are you another one of these pool operators that just pretends to run a pool but instead forwards shares to another PPLNS service so you get everyone else to pay for your hashrate without ever having a chance of winning a block?

Always sceptical of "noobie" pool operators, your account here is new, you've no history of interaction with anyone that's been posting here for years.

Why would anyone trust you with their hard earned hashrate when you've litterally no credibility?

Another luck block! congrats to the miner and -ck

Mine on! 

Read this thread.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2415854.0


These days, anything less than 1TH/s is wasting your time and even at that entry level rate the odds are astronomical

Chance per block: 1 in 920,100,000

Chance per day: 1 in 6,389,583

Time estimate: 17,506 years

You might want to consider listing your spare hashrate on MiningRigRentals (https://www.miningrigrentals.com/) I'm not sure what they pay out probably worth a look.

I assume you mean 43TH/s hash rate.

With the current network difficulty, the odds of you finding a block at 43TH/s are

Chance per block: 1 in 22,010,930

Chance per day: 1 in 152,854

Time estimate: 419 years

I'm quite pleased with the Pironman Max case its well thought out and pretty easy to build.

I've pointed 3 workers (approx 7TH/s) at my CKPOOL set-up, other than 2 shares being rejected at start-up its been running flawlessly.

In fact my BitAxe Gamma hit its all time best share yesterday morning which was a pleasant surprise.

I'm working on getting a local stats web page up and running on it too, but thats going to take some time as real world issues have to come first.

In terms of usage stats, its been consistenly running with <2% CPU usage and around 1.7GBytes memory usage.

So, quite capable.

Just following up on this.

I bought myself a PIRONMAN-5 MAX case and repurposed one of my PI-5's and a 2TB NVME SSD. The PI-5 I've used is only a 4GByte version.

Setting up Bitcoincore 29 took me around 10-15 minutes, sync of the blockchain took nearly 3 days.

As a side note, I compressed the data directory for offline storage to a TAR.BZ2 at max compression even after all that it is around 693.5GBytes in size, but at least in future I can use that to rebuild the chain without having to re-download the whole damn thing again. Mind you, the copy from the PI to the backup storage media took nearly 3 hours alone!

I then git cloned CKPOOL and followed the build instructions, this worked fine.

Then I spent around an hour tinkering with the ckpool.config file to get it functional with my set-up. This was the hardest part of it.

Once that was done, I connected one of my mining rigs and away it went quite happily mining to the PI5 through Stratum to the newly configured CKPOOL on the PI5


In terms of usage stats: memory usage is hovering around 1.2-1.7GBytes

CPU usage is <2% on average.

So the PI is more than capable of running both Bitcoincore and CKPOOL as a local pool provider.

I'll follow up on this post with a more detailed configuration and step by step but for now it seems to be working just fine.

Well done!!!

Congrats to the miner and -CK for another block win. 

Thanks but I still don't think its worth it for the odds of getting a return.

If I want to buy hashrate then I'll do a solo run with a rental same risk greater reward.

Interesting, but given the division of rewards its really not worth it for smaller rigs

With 92% efficiency that equates to 80Watts dissipation per KW of load, so at 4KW load the PSU will be dissipating 320Watts of heat.

This is not insignificant and will definately need good thermal managment. I think the Alpha Miner PSU's are designed for immersion cooling, though they do seem to list forced air cooled models as well.

Using anything flammable as a coolant is asking for trouble.

Butane/Propane when used as a coolant is used as a non-contact refrigerant much like R134a air-con refrigerant and is typically passed through a compressor into a heat exchanger. It is not used as a direct contact coolant like with immersion cooling.

Good point!

The correct kind of liquid coolants for immersion cooling are typically PFPE (Perfluoropolyethers) such as Solvey Galden, which has a high dielectric strength (i.e. non conductive) is non flammable and non toxic.

Interesing side note, Galden PFPE is also used in vapour phase soldering for electronics.

IIRC its expensive depending on the temperature requirements.

You're welcome. I would suggest you avoid using unbranded power supplies, especailly those that do not carry safety marks on them CE, FCC, UL, NEMCO, TUV etc etc.

With unbranded PSU's you have zero guarantee that they pass even basic safety standards, given the operating powers can you really risk that?

If you decide to use one of those Alpha Miner power supplies, please ask the vendor for a copy of the safety approvals, even if they're just an importer they are responsible for ensuring product safety.

Safety first!

Its perfectly normal and is typically infrequent, I believe it issued when a pool updates the block template because a new block has been placed to the network.

Given your response, I guess you don't know an awful lot about electronics or power supply design.

I've been designing off-line switching power supplies for around 30 years.

You're making the assumptions that the original designers have allowed an overhead in their design of more than 30%, in general this could not be further from the truth. Most of the time designs are made to a price. So components tend to be heaviliy optimised for a particular operating condition, exceeding this will result in failures and these failures are not all down to operating temerature.

It is beyond the scope of a reply to teach you how switching power supplies work and what the weak points are in them. However a simplified list would be

A basic PSU design can be broken down into 4 sections

1) Primary rectification : Consisting of diodes or full FET (transistor) bridge, both approaches will be designed for a particular maximum operating current. Exceeding the specifications of the parts used will result in failure for diode and FET rectification they tend to fail short resulting in the primary fuse going open circuit (assuming the design has one), however in failing they often damage PCB and surrounding components.

2) Power factor correction: Following the primary rectification given the operating power, there will be some form of power factor correction circuit, the will have one or more switching elements consisting of FET's and rectification diodes or other rectification FET, the FET's will again have both voltage and current limits which when exceeded will cause permanent damage to them.

3) Depending on the swiching supply topology and for the kind of power required it is likely a full bridge forward converter or resonant LLC circuit, both of which are heavily complex designs having multiple FET switching elements, snubber circuits and output conditioning and smoothing all designed to meet a particular current and power requirement, you exceed the power design and permenent damage will be done, again not necesarily because of heat, but because you have exceeded the power delivery capablilities of the components in the design.

4) Control loop elements, operational amplifiers, opto-couplers, fixed and variable voltage references, protection and monitoring devices and the switching controller. These elements are less likely to fail but may fail as a result of parts in the power path failing short and delivering high voltages where they do not belong.

Hopefully if the design has been done properly there will be over current and over voltage detection at each stage of the power supply in order to prevent you from destroying the supply by overload, short circuit or by overvoltage.

Damage to components does not come purely from generated heat, although it is a significant factor in the failure of parts due to thermal run-away. Thermal run-away occurs where a part is driven beyond its operating limits and it starts to fail in such a way that it becomes resistive or its leakage current exeeds the devices capability, at which point they let out the magic smoke.

So all in all I reitterate what I said.

Overloading a high capacity power supply is A REALLY BAD IDEA!