What is the cooling system for the ASIC's? There is a picture of a small heat sink/fan on your website but surely this is not for the ASIC?
Hi Stevbenson,
You are correct the heatsink / fan on their slideshow is NOT for the asics, it is for the control board. The picture makes it look even bigger than it really is, that thing is tiny, like barley a few inches tiny. If i remember correctly the sample heat-sinks for the ASIC boards will be in this week and will be added to the photo roll and on the updates on their blog. From the sketch-ups i have seen the cooling system is a large radiator and fans unit that lines almost the entire case with a few blades also exposed on the bottom of the case itself. I will see if i can get the 3d models for you and send them to you in a PM sometime early this week like Monday or Tuesday, they have tons of 3d renders of most every component but they were trying to stay away from posting them all and stick to actual pictures of components to avoid all the "ooooo look at a 3d render scam" propaganda.
If there is anything else i can help you with please feel free to PM me, it seems to be the preferred method of communication of people with honest inquiry's and will save you from having to scroll through the 20 pages of blather i am sure this thread will fill up with in the next few days just to find the answer to your questions.
Thankyou for your reply, I will prefer to ask questions in the thread in case othershave the same questions.
I think cooling your asics will be the toughest part for your design, when you say a "large radiator with blades" I get the picture the of metal blades being used as the heat conductors to the radiator? Indicating that is is not liquid cooled.
Is this right? No liquid cooling?
Correct, at this time their thermal testing algorithms do not show the need for liquid cooling, that is not to say that when the prototype heat-sinks arrive and are tested with a working unit that the design might not change to incorporate liquid cooling.
You are also correct that cooling was one of the biggest engineering obsticles in such a high power but small size unit, that and powering the unit itself.
I believe you that your simulations don't predict the need for liquid cooling but I would be perhaps questioning some of the assumptions in your model.
It seems to me that when I look at other ASIC miners out there it's a pretty simple design trait that determines weather it needs liquid cooling or not. This is the number of ASICs.
For example, look at the Bitmain/Spondoolies products they consist of hundreds of small ASICs and thus can get away with heatsinks and air cooling as the heat is spread out over the whole board. If you look at designs where one or two larger ASICs are used such as Cointerra, Hashfast ect these requied water cooling as the
heat density is much greater in these designs.
TBH it looks like your design will probably need water cooling, I get that your chips are more efficiect then say cointerra/hashfast but we can still compare, I will use the cointerra box as an example as I know the specs of the top of my head. It uses 4 ASIC @ 2000W for 1.6Th/s lets sat the ASICS use ~70% of the energy this means each chip uses 350W, requires liquid cooling. Now your machine has 2 ASIC @ 450 for 1.4Th/s making the same assumptions you have 160W per chip...
Only half the power density of the cointerra chip... Interestingly the cointerra design was ment to use less energy than it does by a pretty big margin and they still designed it with liquid cooling originally.
Another design that was ment to be low power and not need water cooling is the fabled BFL 'Monarch', who knows what the specs will be when they finally release it but this suffered from the same design flaw as your machine. Very small case, and only two ASICs ment to use 350W for 6000Gh/s same assumptions as above means ~120W per chip (even less than yours) and they have since found that this needs water cooling on the ASICs.
I think not designing liquid cooling for the get go is a
big mistake... Just like it was for BFL.
If your design does need liquid cooling this will add a big expense for you in terms of cooling systems and larger cases. And possibly delay your product significantly, tbh this is my major concern.