Topic: Antminers E3 still alive for ETH? (Read 2191 times)

Hi! How exactly did you do the Antminer E3 modification? How many chips did you swap and what did you do to the firmware? I am stuck at a crossroads on this experiment. Please share details. Thank you!

This is the last information I heard Antminers E3
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/antminer-e3-etc-5311866

"https://t.me/chat2miners/83013
Awesome news for Antminer E3 owners.
2Miners Telegram Chat (https://t.me/chat2miners) members have released the new firmware that allows Ethereum Classic (ETC) mining!
This firmware works only in 2Miners ETC pool:
https://etc.2miners.com/
Download the archive and follow the manual. The archive password is 2miners"

Anyone know details on this? Thank you in advance.

Hello! You succeeded with the E3 RAM mod? Would you tell me what you did exactly as I have been attempting to do this myself and am at a crossroad. I've been trying to figure it out since last year. What did you do? Congratulations and thanks a lot! Please turn on the ability to receive direct messages. I tried to message you and got a message to post here.

 I have modified the hardware (upgrade 8G memory) and software and E3 works again.

You can come check out phoenixmax.org. we have a software download for the E3 free of charge. Come mine etc on our pool...

is there a firmware that will allow for zil dual mining. Mine always changed back to ethermine.

The firmware costs money, but it allows you to mine on any pool.
If you do not want to pay money, then you can download a free firmware only for mining on 2miners pool
How to Start Mining Ethereum Classic
https://etc.2miners.com/help
"Quick start - Download ready to go version of the GPU Miner (archive password - 2miners)".

Can anyone explain how to mine ETC with E3?

You may want to try reading this thread.  There are 576 memory chips in E3 you'd have to solder and replace.  I did read somewhere that some other solution is being worked on, but until then I'm fine mining ETC.

Anyone tried to upgrade the RAM Chips? Maybe the E3 Firmware recognize it automatically without modifying firmware?

My hash rate is around 200 MH/s and I'm using etc.2miners.com pool

.  What sort of hash rate are you getting and what pool are u using?

Yep, I can confirm. I found the way how to mine ETC with Antminer E3. Cool
Everything was from the software

You do realize that ETC also changed the algo so it is not the same as ETH any more ... so you will need a new asic.  People keep saying its just firmware but ETC now runs a modified dagger hashimoto.  How are you going to change the actual asic chips?  Firmware wont change the asic chips circuitry.  

CORRECTION

Only requires a firmware upgrade to mine ETC. 
ETC did not change the algo enough to cause asics to be unusable. 

Wrong, ETC forked to ETCHash and the DAG is around 2,6Gb.
You can mine ETC with your E3, but need another customfirmware.

The only way forward with a antminer E3 is to find a new coin or not too old coin that runs on Ethash Algorithm to mine, they should have less mining difficulty and enough room for 4gb miners like E3, go to Google and find answers am sure there are many coins running on Ethash Algorithm

Antminer E3 has 4gb vram, that's not even the problem, if you can't mine Ethereum anymore you can mine Ethereum Classic because the team have worked on ETC algo to support gpu and asics with low vram, the main problem I see with antminer E3 is the high energy consumption

I'm mining on https://baikalmine.com/en/pplns/moac/
The configuration is simple:
URL: stratum+tcp://moac.baikalmine.com:4444
User: your MOAC wallet address from coinbene
Password: leave it empty

 

www.coinbene.com

which exchange u use for moac coin?

I was mining ETP (Metaverse) too, but recently I switch to MOAC and so far is making around $4.20 USD per day. Almost $2 more that ETP

Zerg is reliable.
pinpin from there is good people.
They support a lot of algos and mining methods.
You can get paid in coins that you may prefer....ltc is what i take payment in fast and cheap and easy to convert....sure beats waiting much longer to meet minimum btc withdrawl and higher tx fees.  But i think you can get Dash and maybe even Doge.  Much choices...many options

Thanks adaseb

Question to all E3 owners
Where and what coin you mining now with Ant E3?
Is zergpool reliable?

Yes I think you are confusing the E3 with an FGPA which is reprogrammable. However the E3 is an ASIC and its hard-coded on the silicon chip and even one slight change cannot be done unless you create a new fabrication chip which costs millions.

This is why many people always ask, what to do with old bitcoin ASICs. People want to "crack" passwords with them because its SHA256 however the way that its coded, you cannot even do that even if there was money to be mad "cracking" password.

Yes ETC forked and changed the algo to prevent ASICS, I don't know why they did this because the extra E3 hashrate on ETC network would provide more hashrate and security. I don't think the E3 posed as a threat. Maybe the devs just don't like Bitmain and their ASICS.

I agree with you about the Algo, and I think this is the part that I'm missing and confuse
I believe the Algo is managed by the software.
For example, PhoenixMiner 5.2 and older versions can't mine the new ETC algo, but the new ones over 5.3 no problem.
From a hardware point, there should be no difference between GPUs and Ant E3. They both are GPUs.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
By the way, Ant E3 was the most profitable asic miner ever. More than 2 years and a half and still profitable. Is unbelievable. And I'm sure E3 can continue to work fine, but I don't believe bitmain will release new firmware
Hope someone will found a way to patch the software

[/quote]

 

Asics in your bitmain and all others are good for only the specific algos they have been designed and made for.  The miner software in this case is basically feeding the raw data and receveing and conveying the results back to the pool.  In a gpu setup the order and types of operations are coded in the miner software but it relies on the big complex gpu.  So gpus can quickly adapt to any change in algos where asics take a lot of time and money to develop. 

No they changed the Algo specifically to prevent asics from being able to mine it. 
[/quote]

I agree with you about the Algo, and I think this is the part that I'm missing and confuse
I believe the Algo is managed by the software.
For example, PhoenixMiner 5.2 and older versions can't mine the new ETC algo, but the new ones over 5.3 no problem.
From a hardware point, there should be no difference between GPUs and Ant E3. They both are GPUs.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
By the way, Ant E3 was the most profitable asic miner ever. More than 2 years and a half and still profitable. Is unbelievable. And I'm sure E3 can continue to work fine, but I don't believe bitmain will release new firmware
Hope someone will found a way to patch the software

No they changed the Algo specifically to prevent asics from being able to mine it. 

Hello guys,

I believe much more possible will be to make Ant E3 start mining ETC again because the DAG file now is 2.5 GB
Maybe I'm totally wrong, but for me seems to be a software fix. Ant E3 is just a case /box/ with GPUs inside and Linux OS and miner software.
Can we somehow install another mining software like Claymore / Ethminer / PhoenixMiner ?
The original one is a cgminer named bmminer
If Ant E3 can mining ETC again will be great.
I have only one Ant E3 and currently mining ETHO or EGEM coin, but profit is max $3.50 per day
Any ideas or suggestions are very welcome

Thanks,

yes those are ddr3 chips , there is the Data sheet : https://datasheetspdf.com/pdf/1305324/ESMT/M15T1G1664A/1

maybe this is what we need to replace those chips : https://www.esmt.com.tw/upload/pdf/ESMT/datasheets/M15F2G16128A(2L).pdf

If anyone can do the software part , i might would be happy to deal with the hardware part , really depend on my free time , but just for try  , why not

Looks like there are 32 memory chips per ASIC, so 32*6=192 per blade so 576 memory chips per Antminer E3. Like I assumed before they didn't use memory ram modules but just used the chips. Looks like they are DDR3 SDRAM instead of DDR2 like I thought.

Sure you can easily use a hot air station station to desolder one chip, but not 576. Each chip would take maybe like 2-3 minutes to desolder, then you need to solder the new chip, if its new then you don't need to reball it however if you are taking the chips from actual DDR3 ram you would need to desolder that, then reball the chip, and finally solder it onto the E3. Basically just not worth the hassle. Even with all the free time we got during covid this job wouldn't be worth it. Then you would need to recode the firmware so it recognises the higher density chips. I'd say its officially a doorstop.

nope ... today was the last day ... around 4.30pm EST all of my working E3 become a door stopper  

yours still working?

Each Antminer E3 have 3 Blades , on every blades have 6 BM1790 ASIC chip

I suspect just like 570/580's the memory chips can be replaced with higher capacity units.  Would probably need a fix to firmware but maybe not.  Surely somebody will open one up...removing and replacing SMT components is not a big deal....if ya got the gear.

Anyone open up their E3 units? I am assuming that the RAM found inside it is surface mount? Most likely bitmain ordered the DDR2 memory chips instead of actual memory modules.

However if there are interchangeable DDR2 memory modules inside, then maybe its possible to upgrade the ram to a higher capacity. You will need some open source software to be able to rewrite the firmware however. Most likely won't be worth while to resolder any surface mount memory chips. I can imagine that there are probably a few hundred of them in total on the E3.

Mine are all dead now for ETH. If you want to continue mining another coin, you will need to downgrade your firmware as version 5.4.0 and 5.6.0. will not work.

Are the E3 190 MH/s miners also dead, or will be soon?

No its going to be around 50% of the original speed in about 3 weeks or so. Go to the lolminer thread and there is a benchmark posted. I think unless there is some interest in developement then most will shut off their rigs by the end of the year.

There are lots of 4GB sitting idle since ETC is not profitable that maybe some clever developer like Claymore or Phoenix can find a way to get them hashing again at close to their original mining speed. But who knows if that will happen. Since lol did it, it might be possible.

4GB cards still mining ETH right now, will lose around 5-6% hashrate for every new epoch until around mid-late jan when they will be at around 50% of their original speed.

The above is true for Linux, Windows is much worse.. 4GB cards on windows hashrate will be halved around now or in the next week.

Look at, https://ethermine.org/statistics

There was a drop when the epoch hit. However it looks like hashrate is growing from somewhere. It topped at 65TH/s and now its back to 61TH/s so 6% total reduction, if you add to entire hashrate of ETH which is 280TH/s, it means 16.8TH/s has left the network. This obviously is just an estimate. Since its one pool and there are new GPUs going online everyday.

But that 16.8Th/s is almost 100K of E3's. However most likely there was some 4GB cards that stopped mining as well.

I wounder is all the E3s are not working i don't see a drop in the eth difficulty or hash rate.

My advice is just list it on Craiglist and say that its for hobby purposes only and someone will buy it since BTC broke $20K today and many will want to get into crypto. Sell it for like $50.

I did this in 2015 when I had old miners like Antminer S1 or KnC Jupiter. I told people that you won't make any profits what so ever with it. Its just to learn about crypto and if you like it you can get more advanced ASICs or GPUs.

Because $50 will yield you the most profit than mining a coin such as Expanse.

I have 4 antMiner E3's. Three of them stopped hashing a week ago and the 4th stopped hashing today and it just won't connect. I waited for an hour and a half.

At this time I am mining Expanse for heat.  I will probably trade the Expanse on Bittrex for another coin.

I would like to hear what other E3 owners plans are.

The hashrate drop for 4GB should start at Epoch #382 which is tomorrow. For some reason my 4GB stopped at #381. And the testing that was done in the past, its extremely rare for a 4GB GPU to mine on Epoch #382. However there is an lolminer which lets 4GB mine until like Q2 2021, however at reduced speeds.

Either way, there are some 4GB that should be offline and some E3's but its not reflected with the hashrate. Which leads me to believe that in 1-2 days or so, there won't be a 25% reduction like we were hoping for. Just way too much hash power out there.

Pray to be a coin as good as eth to keep those gpus price high then because if not then gameover to all mining farms.

You guys thinks that asic miners controls the higher ETH Hashrates but the truth is there is more gpu miners out there, some build gigantic eth mining farms in asia parts of the world too, if I have to build a mining rig today it's will be GPU mining rig not asics, we all have our reasons, also remember that GPUs are so costly today because of miners

https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate
I also do not yet notice a decrease in the hash rate on 4 GB video cards.
There are still a lot of 4 GB cards working on Ethereum mining
https://hiveos.farm/statistics/
How much hashrate starts to drop after the 383 epoch?

From my view is a good job and i think all E3 , with a " good job" : can mine eth at least till Christmas , so my ETA for my E3's is around 10 days or more from now.
We are on DAG 381 , dag size is not over 4GB yet, the critical dag will be at EPOCH 383 when the dag size going to be almost 4GB.
384 Epoch dag size will be over 4GB for sure( block# 11.520.000 ... so from there 4GB cards and E3's will be out from ETH mining
6GB cards should be ok to mine ETH till Epoch 639 , that's probably around 4 years from now

Paperweights , recycling places ( aluminum is expensive :0 ), door stops ... cant guess anything else right now ...

Good job, ETA on next DAG : 32 hours.. Cant be many left

what a surprise.. it works! i just follow your guide.. just fill those stratum pool 1,2,3 address..then wait for an hour..now e3 is hashing..

its not the connection or bugs. when i switch mining ETP, work fine. No idea why he can still mine and my E3 cant.

Don't think 5 hours is enough to pronounce your equipment dead, maybe some bug or connection issues.

That said, though, what other coins might it be reconfigured to mine?

mine seems dead, waiting almost 5 hours to hash, i think i will mine other coin.

When the E3s finally retires anyone knows where else they can be useful? Any other altcoin maybe?

It's like I always say, bitmain and co aka mining mafia of china knows when the difficulty goes down then they go and turn on few more eth asics in their factories. It has always been like this. They do that to shadow the difficulty which makes people think 4gb gpus or asics were inexistent on the network.

lol.. how long u wait? couple hours?

They not done yet

Just a short update ,after a day of playing with one of my E3 with no missing chain, all blades ok , is finally is come back online not to long ago , and hashing.
Im not sure for how long ...
The another 2 with missing chains are still hashing without any issues .

4GB units , with some missing chains

Are they 4gb units? or the larger ones.

Two Rtx 3080 can outperform a single Bitmain E3 , with a much better power usage
All RTX 3060TI / 3070 / 3080 / 3090 cards are out of stock within a second after they become available in any online retailer on MSRP price .

I have E3's still hashing ... so they not done yet

Gee do you think it might be due to all the new GPUs coming on line.....

Yes quite disappointing eh? I was hoping the difficult would get reduced by like 25% or so, so my 8GB would be more profitable however. The E3 and 4GB GPUs going offline has done absolutely nothing .

I guess globally there must really be millions of GPUs out there mining or some high tech ETH ASICS that the E3 shutdown doesn’t make a blip in the hash rate charts.

Might still go down when epoch 382 hit in 2 days. However I doubt it will even cause hashrate to decrease by 5%. I guess bitmain had a supply constraint of the DDR2 ram chips and couldn’t mass produce the E3 miners.

Funny, even though eth e3 asics are done for, difficulty is not going down, actually is increasing faster than before. It's all time high at moment, https://etherscan.io/chart/difficulty . It seems eth price will rise in the next few days.

I stopped trying. I am mining ETP now. I wish E3 can mine ETC with new algo, but not sure bitmain will do firmware update.

You can't tell how many users are using asic miner E3 out of the hashrate mate, I'm sure many E3 miner have already sell their rigs and upgrade to better miner, it's same thing with those using 4gb VRAM graphics card for mining Ethereum, do not buy E3 because they are very close to been fully obsolete

I kept 3 of my E3 .. another ones sold in August
2 of those i kept,  have 1-2-3 non functional chain , those are hashing fine as of today
1 have all the chain working , and that's one went offline this morning ...
tried everything , just in case replaced psu , unplugged 1 -2 blades , re-fleshed the firmware ...still nothing
So its time when those e3'become a paper weight or door stops... or whatever
Leaving the non functional e3 online for tonight, maybe by the morning im going to get some hashes out from it ... if not , its time for a retirement
Tomorrow i Might giving a try to connect to antpool , i heard some ppl get lucky , and antpool worked for them , after they tried everything .. if its just a few days , or hours , still better than nothing

My 4GB GPUs stopped mining on epoch 381 which started 2 days ago. However there are reports of some GPUs going until epoch 382. I think it’s the same with the E3. Some are still hashing while others are down. I think the final nail on the coffin will be in 3 days when epoch 382 starts. No more 4GB GPUs (unless they run that lolminer software) and E3 will cease to mine.

Will hash rate decrease? Honestly I don’t think it will change much. When epoch 381 hit, the hash rate went sideways. And assuming same for epoch 382. I think many knew this was coming a long time ago and upgraded to be prepared.

I actually was hoping to see a hash rate reduction when 4GB went offline so the 8gb would be more profitable but doesn’t seem to be the case here. Newer ASICS are vert advanced and efficient and so are some of the GPUs that were released in the last year.

us.
1 is out as of today , its went offline this morning , and from there i tried everything, but wasn't able to bring back that one alive ...
still messing with it ...

In the kernel log , can you see something like this "[_WorkerThread]:  CRC Check Failed! Drop!"

which server? eu? us? or asia1?

All of my E3's are on ethrmine.org

i tried, didnt work. Waiting 2 hours still not mining..

i am using Ethermine. What pool u r using? i didnt disconnect miner from power source.  I will try it. Thanks 

What pool are you using ? Did you tried to disconnect your miner from power source for a few minutes ,then restarting .. Thats might help..
Dont ask me why
... just try and be patient , its might take over a hour to start mining again

cannot mine and stop mining eth yesterday. the end..

Giving you a bunch of merits since you took the time to post a detailed calculations. I always wonder which ASICs were a good investment and which were not. Was always curious about the E3. I guess the biggest fear of the E3 at the time was not the difficulty but the fear of the eth devs changing the algo.

I remember that most people ROI'd on the Antminer S1, while many never ROI'd on the S2,S3,S4 then the S5 and S7 were pretty profitable. S9 and on I never really took the time to make the calculations. I also know that most Scrypt ASICs such as the KnC Cube Titans and Antminer L3 (or whatever its called) was also pretty profitable.

Thanks for the detailed calculation.

Im sure all my E3 earned me way more money what i paid for those units . My electricity rate is 12cents from June to September , all other months is between 7-8 cents . Im  Doing mining as a business ...
I was lucky , ordered my E3 from the very first batches , if i remember right , in 2018 summer first batches was around 800$ each with shipping or something very close to that . Some gpu or mem went out on those blades , but still all of them hashing . I have those units in the past 25 months if i remember right ...

Lets do a little math with 10 unit and average hashrate around 170MH/s... with 780 watts of power usage ... and current ETH price/difficulty calculation ...
Total investment 10x800=8000$
Total hashrate 10x170=1700MH/S
Total power used for 25 months : 7,8KWH/hours , 187.2KWH/day , 5616KWH/months so 25x5616KWH for 25 months = 140400KWH ...
12cent/kwh power rate for 8 months :5616x8 = 44928KWH for summer months = 44928x0.12=  5391$ for 8 summer months power
8cent/kwh power rate for another 17 months : 5616x17 = 95472KWH for the remaining 17 months , = 95472x0.08 = 7637$ for 17 months power

So for 25 months I paid 13028$ for power to run 10 Antminer E3 , that 10 miner provided me 1700MH/s hashing power .

As of today , You can do a calculation with 0.0345 USD/Day for 1 MHash/s , so with today prices my 10x E3 still earning me 0.0345 USDx1700/day = 58.65$ minus power usage 187.2KWHx0.08cents=14.976$ so the total what im makin as of today with those 10 antminer E3 is still not that bad  as of today , 12-10-2020 , 58.65$-14.976$= 43.67$/day profit after electricity

If calculating back for the 25 months with today numbers , then this is how its look like :
43.67x30x25 the total money i made with my 10x E3  , if we do the math , then is 32755$  , I paid 8000$ for the 10 E3 25 months ago ,minus power usage, so the profit : 32755-13028-8000=11727$ Profit for 25 months .
Thats on paper with today difficulty , price ... BUT THERE IS A VERY IMPORTAT THING ABOUT MY MINING PROFIT !!! I NEVER SOLD THOSE HARD EARNED ETH'S.

With today price/difficulty ... i can mine around 2.8-2.9 ETH / month
But dont forget ... in 2019 when the difficulty was way lower , actually half what we have now , i was able to mine 5.5-6 ETH/months . Even on this summer i was able to mine around 4-4.5 ETH/monts . Difficulty jumped like crazy from the end of July !  I  still have all those hard earned ETH's from the past 25 months, so the real profit,  is way much higher what i calculated here for you...

I hope i give you a very detailed answer i Might opening another topic with all this information

Epoc 383 is that last sub 4GB Dag size, so we will now for sure when 384 hits. About two weeks away.

E3s sold for like 800 on launch, so yea you would have mined a couple ETH on them in the past two years and would have more than ROIed if you didn't sell the coins.

Still works? Strange seems that there is conflicting info, a few days ago there were 2 people who claimed that their E3 stopped mining on the last DAG. I figured there would be tens of thousands of these units go offline and we should see a hashrate reduction. However looking at,
https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate

Looks like the hashrate is about to hit a record high again. So obviously it doesn't seem they the E3 have died...yet

Just wondering did you ever ROI on your E3? I was going to order one but the first batch sold out and the later batch was basically double the price. I am wondering if I ever would of ROI if I invested in the E3.

all of my E3 hashing fine as of today Dec-08-2020

Are Antminers E3 still OK with mining ETH? As I understood they are limited to around block height 1,400,000 which has already passed. Can some user of Antminer E3 confirm that the E3s are still mining ETH?