I believe I'm probably the first person in the U.S. to receive one of MAT's (Mining-Asics-Technology.com) miners so I thought I'd post a little review.
http://www.mining-asics-technologies.comConventional wisdom is that you never ever Pre-order anything and I've been burnt a few times, but back in April of this year the thought of getting 1 MH of mining power for less that $40 was incredible and MAT was advertising such a machine - In fact what I pre-ordered was two of their 125 MH/s units. My fears of pre-ordering were quickly realized then their largest competitors KNC announced they were doubling the speed of their offering for the same price. MAT responded with a 2 for 1 offer so I was not as upset when I found out I'd be getting 500 MH/s of mining power instead of 250 MH/s and I was thanking KNC under my breath: LOL
To make a long story short - MAT was supposed to deliver by the end of the 3rd quarter of this year. By the way - this was a serious investment for me back in April so I did a lot of due diligence on Marc Coumans the CEO of MAT and that began by becoming friends with him on Linkedin.com and then some of my own due diligence. Marc has had a very good business career and background and my personal feelings are that people who have good business careers are rarely scammers and Mark was not hiding his identity like scammers do and also invited a forum member to their offices - especially in light of the horror stories I read about Alpha, KNC, BFL and others to name a few). Without disclosing information that I'm privy to from conversations with Marc, there is no doubt they got off to a rough start and got led down a path by an original supplier that left them at least 6 to 8 weeks behind schedule and scrambling in mid to late July and remember they were supposed to deliver by the end of August.
In any event - 3rd quarter delivery did not happen but Marc kept in touch and let me know about the delays and although I was getting pretty frustrated toward the end of September I hung in there as Marc kept me updated on progress and sometimes lack of progress. I can always take bad news because bad news is better than no news.
In any event Marc shipped my first of two units out last Wednesday via Fedex International Priority with the hopes it would arrive by friday but it got stuck in customs clearance at JFK last Friday and not released until late friday afternoon and lo and behold - it showed up at my office in suburban Philly first thing yesterday morning. The funny part is that I checked the delivery status on the Fedex site and it said it had been delivered - WTF? - so I walk out in the lobby to find a box sitting there - LOL
Marc told me ahead of time that the unit would consume about 2,200 to 2,300 watts and suggested 3 x 850 watt PSU to allow for some headroom.
The machine has 8 hashing boards all with 8 pin connectors (of which you can just plug in the 6 pin plugs). There's a 9th connector that is used to power the built-in controller and fans - that 9th connector draws 75 watts.
I had my wattometer and started checking each of the boards as I got the unit up and running and determined that each board which hashes at about 35 to 36 Mh/s draws about 325 watts each - so that's 8 boards at 325 watts each consuming 2,600 watts + the fan/controller plug @ 75 watts totaling 2,675 watts (I had to run back to Microcenter and purchase a 4th 850W PSU
The unit has 6 fans - 3 in front sucking air and 3 in the back blowing air out. When it's hashing the air coming out is much cooler than the air coming out of my Gaw Miners 54 MH War machine - but that's probably due to the increased air flow. I have the machine in our 'computer room' here at the office where there are lots of other servers and it's no louder than my War Machine or an Hp Proliant DL360 or DL380 but I do not see someone sticking one of these things in a small apartment - those 6 fans do make a decent amount of noise. The second unit I have coming will go into a real data center where the business I work for has spare rack space.
Now to the machine - it weighs about 45 lbs and measures about 18" deep 8" high and about 11" wide. It has an LCD display on the front that displays it's ip address and hashing rate.
You can ssh to the units to 'poke around' like I always do and get you this:
SSH Secure Shell 3.2.9 (Build 283)
Copyright (c) 2000-2003 SSH Communications Security Corp - http://www.ssh.com/
This copy of SSH Secure Shell is a non-commercial version.
This version does not include PKI and PKCS #11 functionality.
Welcome to Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-g536726d armv7l)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/
Last login: Mon Oct 27 15:40:43 2014 from 192.168.1.47
The default IP address is 192.168.1.101 and it wants DHCP on first boot.
You can give it a static IP address through the MAT control panel.
Marc told me this is their first version of their controller software but it works nice and let's you setup your pool - however in this first version you can only specify ONE pool. The controller software also shows the hashing rate of each of the 8 boards and you can stop and start the mining process. I did some poking around and it's my guess since there's 2.6G free out of 3.5G on the controller chip you could probably run multiple instances of the miner and select which board to mine on if you wanted to mine multiple coins at the same time - forgive me Marc if you're reading this - poking around is my nature.
OK - now to the good stuff - The machine consistently hashes at 280 - 290Mh/s and in my poking around I found their asic.ini file which seems to contain clock rate for all the chips on all the boards (kewl) - but I have no intentions of overclocking this beast.
snippet...
[board_06]
asic_00 = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_01 = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_02 = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_03 = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 447, "05": 511}
asic_04 = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_05 = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_06 = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_07 = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_08 = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_09 = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_0a = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_0b = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_0c = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_0d = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_0e = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_0f = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
asic_10 = {"02": 511, "03": 511, "00": 511, "01": 511, "04": 511, "05": 511}
I've been mining on Ghash and my own pool this morning since getting it up and running and I've found when running on my NOMP based stratum that's it runs best with a fixed difficulty of 70,000 - 90,000 - it does not like vardiff. It comes out of the chute hammering away and low vardiffs cause it to restart often until the vardiff gets really high so a very high fixed difficulty seems best.
Even though it's consuming more watts that I had anticipated I have to put that into perspective.
as a comparison and these are from actual readings of other mining computers I own
Classic Zeus Miners 24 MH/s Unit with 4 boards: 1,120 watts =46 watts Mh/s
Gaw Miners War Machine 54 MH/s : 2,100 watts = 38 watts Mh/s
ZeusMiner LIGHTNING X6 40 Mhs - 1,150 watts = 28.75 watts Mh/s
MAT - 280 MH Excaliber : 2,675 watts = 9.55 watts Mh/s
here are some pics below of my unit in action.
I hope this short review has been helpful.
ninja.mat is the MAT unit
