Usability and performance improvements for Antminer X17 models (S17, S17+, S17 Pro, T17, and T17+)
Last month’s release, Braiins OS+ 20.11, included full support for the Antminer S17+, T17, and T17+. In this release, we’ve made improvements to those builds (and the full X17 family) based on your feedback and feature requests.
Bitcoin has been setting new all-time highs this month, boosting margins for miners across the industry. The chart below shows the cost of production for a Braiins OS+ optimized Antminer S17 that’s being overclocked to 2700 Watts with a hashrate of 64 TH/s. (Note: results will vary from for every ASIC based on chip quality and other factors.)
With the current BTC price just under $23,000, network difficulty at 18.67 T, and an electricity price of $0.05/kWh, this autotuned S17 would be earning nearly $7.50 per day of profit. The break-even all-in electricity price is over $0.16/kWh.
You can input your own custom specifications and check the cost to mine 1 BTC for your ASICs on our Mining Insights page.
As usual, we’ll be focusing specifically on what’s new in this release, so we recommend to read the overview in the 20.09 Dev Update if you aren’t already familiar with the bigger features of Braiins OS+.
All users who have an old version of the BOS Toolbox should download the latest version before running any batch operations or installing to new devices. The latest update has some minor fixes.
Bitmain’s X17 family of devices is notorious for heatsinks getting disconnected and overheating issues in general, so we have taken a cautious approach with pushing these devices to their limits at high power settings. However, we know that some miners use immersion cooling setups, which enable safer overclocking.
With that in mind, the new FPGA component in Braiins OS+ allows overclocking up to 950 MHz. However, note that this is only intended to be used in immersion cooling setups! If you have an air-cooled setup, it is extremely risky to overclock that much and may cause permanent damage to the hardware, so please be careful.
When a miner is powered on and tuning begins, BOSminer waits for the PSU to stabilize before saving the tuner profile. However, in some cases it was not waiting long enough for the voltages to be stable before restarting the miner, which meant that the tuning process would restart as well. BOSminer waits longer for voltages to stabilize in the 20.12 build, so this problem is fixed.
In the last release, it was not possible to flash onto Macronix NAND chips, which are used in 2-3% of Antminers in the X17 generation. We have added support for Macronix NAND flash memory in this release, so miners will no longer need to run from SD cards for those devices.
Note that this build for Macronix chips doesn’t have as much testing as the original build, so you should proceed with caution and preferably have physical access to your miners when flashing.
Additionally, we saw rare cases where the EEPROMs were corrupted on all 3 hashboards of a miner, preventing BOSminer from automatically detecting which hardware model it was. To address this, there is a new configuration section called model_detection which allows overriding the result of the hardware autodetection and instead using the preset hardware type in the .toml file(taken from the stock firmware).
If you turn this feature on, it’s very important to be double check that you are installing the right version of Braiins OS+ for your hardware model, as using the wrong version can damage the hardware.
If your X17 model has a locked SSH, currently the only option is the SD card installation method. To make this process easier, it’s now possible to configure the SD image so that it will install Braiins OS+ into the NAND automatically.
The upcoming January release, Braiins OS+ 21.01, will most likely include support for the Antminer S17e and T17e, completing the full X17 range of devices.
We will also be releasing a management solution for larger mining farms. This will be a free add-on for all Braiins OS+ users.
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