Overclocking the TechnoBit DICE Bitcoin ASIC Miner

Today we’ve been playing with the TechnoBit DICE Bitcoin ASIC miner to see what is the actual performance we are getting with the default settings as well as to see what is the overclock limit of the device. We were again on a quest to find out how exactly we should overclock the DICE from the options available in the cgminer config file as apparently the version provided for the DICE also contains settings for other ASIC miners, but the ones we need to tweak are the “hexminerr” settings as they are the ones for the 1-chip DICE as well as the other 4-chip RockerBox ASIC miner that TechnoBit has. Below you can find the description about the available options that are available as description.

Rocker (HEXR) new cgminer config options:

–hexminerr-asic-diff – Use at least 16 here and make sure your pool worker min difficulty is configured accordingly in order not to loose hash rate

–hexminerr-pic-roll – Default: 60 or 90. MicroChip PIC work internal roll count – Reduces dramatically USB load – Range 0-255. Please use at least 10 or 20 here

–hexminerr-chip-mask – 255 enable all chips

–hexminerr-voltage – core voltage Default: 690

–hexminerr-options chip_count:frequency – Default: 4:650

Apparently the description is referring to recommended values for the 4-chip miner as does the default settings in the config file set for the DICE version of cgminer provided by TechnoBit, though they will work with the single chip DICE as well. By default the values set in the config file are 720 mV (0.72V) for as voltage instead of the “default” 0.69V value and the operating frequency is 915 MHz. With these settings we’ve managed to see a hashrate of about 170-175 GHS as reported by cgminer and the mining pool averaged for a long period of time.

With the standard settings for operating frequency and voltage the DICE miner does manage to consume about 98.4W of power, though with some additional overclock the power usage does rise. Overclocking the device does take some time and effort as it seems that even though it may start running at a higher voltage and frequency that you set in a few minutes it may stop responding and you need to unplug and then plug the USB connector and restart the miner. IF you experience such a problem you might want to try increasing the pic-roll value a bit and see if that will help with the USB issue when working at a higher operating frequency. Do not that rising the pic-roll value may be just a temporary solution that will extend the time before the miner stops responding again. Some guidelines for overclocking, 1000 MHz should be possible with a voltage of about 0.74V with a power usage of about 115W and expected average hashrate of about 190 GHS. You may also try going for a maximum of up to about 1150 MHz with up to 0.8V that should get you at around 135W of power usage and expected hashrate in the range of 200-205 GHS, but be careful and try not to go for higher as it may be dangerous to try and push the miner more. Do note that your results may vary from unit to unit, also do note that the power usage values we cite here are for the actual power consumed by the miner on the 12V line and not the power usage at the wall. The total power usage measured at the wall may depend based on the power supply you are using and what efficiency it will have, but you need to add additional 10-20% to the cited figures to get the expected power usage at the wall.