Monday, June 2, 2014

GAW Miners Fury [Review]


Early this year a new crypto coin hardware supplier appeared on the radar of enthusiasts. While GAW Miners started out hosting and re-selling mining hardware from Gridseed and other brands, they recently debuted their own brand of scrypt coin mining hardware. On the low end of their line of products sits the Fury. After a few weeks of waiting, I’ve got my hands on a one from the first batch and excitedly set it up.

The GAW Miners Fury is a 1 MH/s ASIC based scrypt miner. A relatively simple device, the Fury is comprised of a printed circuit board with six Zeus Integrated Systems ASICs, a heat sink that doubles as an enclosure, and an 80mm fan. The whole device is about the size of a paperback book and comes neatly packaged in a GAW Miners branded box.


Included with the Fury are a micro USB cable for connecting the miner to a controller and a 12 volt 5 amp power supply. The power supply runs a little warm but has proven to be stable thus far. A single Fury and the included power supply pull about 48 watts at the wall. That’s about 37 watts per megahash. This is a bit higher than the originally quoted power consumption numbers and almost double the power consumed by the Gridseed USB Mini. There’s always the hope that improvements in power consumption, and maybe even hash rate, might be found in future firmware releases.


The first batch of Furys (Furies?) came with a zenMiner zenController, which is a CanaKit - Complete Raspberry Pi Starter Kit with zenMiner’s software installed on the SD card. Current Fury orders do not come with zenControllers, but they can be purchased separately. GAW also provides open source software that has been forked to work with their miners. Users can roll their own Raspberry Pi setups or control the miners with Windows or Linux based PCs.


From box to hashing took less than 10 minutes. The zenController setup was simple: plug in all the cables according to the included instructions, type the activation code into zenminer.com, and log in or register an account. It’s really that easy. zenMiner could be a good thing for novice or new coin miners, but as it stood last week… power users are going to want more.

More is on the way. zenMiner has been making steady updates to their software since its concurrent launch with the GAW Miner hardware. There have been almost daily updates, but there are still a few concerns. With the pace they've set during the initial week it’s reasonable to expect that they’ll have many of the feature requests and bugs ironed out in coming weeks.


The Fury has been hashing away problem free for almost a week now. Power consumption is an issue, but if power isn't your biggest concern, these little miners are great.


Specs:

Power Consumption: 48 watts
Dimensions: 83mm x 128mm x 55mm
Hash Rate: advertised (1+ Mh/s), mining software (1.3 Mh/s), poolside (1.377 Mh/s)
Pool Reject Rate: ~.6%

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for sharing detailed information about GAW Miners Fury. This post will assist me very much in future.
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