First Impressions from the iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC Miner

We got a hold of a nice little golden iPollo V1 Mini Ethash/ETChash ASIC miner and decided to play around with it to see why so many people like these small home-oriented high-hashrate and low-power ASIC miners with support for the Ethash and ETChash algorithms. You might be able to score a good deal on used iPollo V1 Mini now that these devices are not that profitable like they were during the time when you could mine Ethereum (ETH) with them and they can still come in handy in the next bull run or meanwhile if you mine some Ethash or ETChash coins meanwhile. The nicest thing is that they are very compact, not that noisy in general and very power efficient compared to what a GPU mining rig would use to give you the same hashpower. And they do come with WiFi adapter built-in, so once you set them up they are easy to move around the house or apartment as you would only need to plug them in a power socket in order for them to start hashing, no need to use network cables, although you can still if you want to.

Now, let us start with a little clarification as iPollo does offer two sets of V1 ASIC miners, one is described as ETC Miners and have the word Classic in their product names. These are iPollo V1 Mini Classic (130 MH/s at 104W) and iPollo V1 Mini Classic Plus (280 MH/s at 270W) with both devices having a design memory of 3.75 GB out of which the available memory for use is 3.6 GB. This means that these devices can mine Ethash or ETChash coins that have up to a 3.6 GB DAG size. There is also the iPollo V1 Classic (1550 MH/s at 1240W) with the same memory limitation available, but that one is big and noisy and not very suitable for home mining anyway.

The other ETH Miner category is similar in terms of hashrate and power usage or more efficient, but these devices do come with more memory available. The design memory is 6.0 GB of which the available memory for DAGs is 5.8 GB, meaning that you can mine even Ethereum (ETH) forks such as ETHF or ETHW that have DAG size of over 5GB already. Ethereum of course is no longer available for mining since it has switched from PoW to PoS. But if you get the iPollo V1 Mini (300 MH/s at 240W), the model we are looking at and testing here, or the more efficient iPollo V1 Mini SE Plus (400 MH/s at 232W) or the smaller iPollo V1 Mini SE (200 MH/s at 116W) you should be safer on the longer term on what you would be able to mine many more Ethash or Etchash coins passing the 4GB DAG size in the near future. There is…