First Hands-On Experience with the Jasminer X4 1U Ethash-Etchash ASIC Miner

The Jasminer series of ASIC miners for Ethash and ETChash by the Chinese company SUNLUNE have been quite big (and expensive) when they were announced near the end of last year. They were the most efficient Ethereum ASIC miners out there at the time and with the high mining profitability of ETH at the time there was interest and demand even being quite expensive miners. Now, with the end of Ethereum’s mining phase and the low profitability of mining for pretty much everything the Jasminer ASIC miners are easier to get a hold of and you may get a decent deal for the price of one. The big question however is should you invest in a Jasminer X4 ASIC miner now and that is precisely what we are going to talk about here.

We’ve managed to score a decent deal for about $2000 USD on a Jasminer X4 1U-C ASIC miner as we were trying to get our hands on one of these for a while now to play around with it and see what the hype is all about and share our first-hand experience from the device. So, below you will find some of the things we have noticed playing for a few days with the device as well as some useful tips and tricks that might help any of you that might already have an X4 miner or are maybe planning to buy one. One of the first thing we love to do is to open up the hardware and explore what we have inside and how we can improve it further or optimize it, then play around with the software as well to see what else may be lingering in there too. But we will get to that in a bit, for now let us just share our first hands on experience with the device…

Jasminer X4 1U is rated at 520 MH/s with a power usage of 240 Watts (with 10% variation according to the specs) with a power efficiency of 0.46 J per Megahash or hashrate. The device is equipped with 8x Jasminer X4 ASIC chips in a 45×45 mm size (678 square millimetres die size) with 1TB memory bandwidth, 5GB of memory and a hashrate per chip of 65 MH/s. Each of the chips has 384 computing cores and 384 on-chip dies according to the manufacturer with a 512-bit bus width and an operating frequency of 800 to 1 GHz and a power consumption of 23 Watts. The 8 ASIC chips are placed on a single board with a controller in the middle and there is also a separate controller board, a power supply and a number of fans inside the case.

The Jasminer X4 1U-C that we got is pretty much the same as the Jasminer X4 1U model, however it is rated to 450 MH/s with 240 Watts of power usage instead of 520 MH/s…