Antminer Z9 Mini ZCash Mining ASIC Review

Another Solid Miner: Antminer Z9 Mini ZCash Mining ASIC Review

September 30, 2018 by Scott

Bitmain recently made waves with its announcement of its new 7nm BM 1391 ASIC for Bitcoin SHA-256 mining. They’ve been regularly putting out several other algorithm ASICs, and the first of several we are reviewing at Bitsonline is the Antminer Z9 Mini. The Z9 Mini is a Zcash miner using the Equihash mining algorithm. The Z9 is small and sips power while putting out 10k sols. Let’s take a look at the full specifications.

Also read: Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Unlimited Contributor Disclosed Bitcoin Core Bug

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Antminer Z9 Mini Specifications

• 12 ASIC chips
• 3 Boards
• Hash rate 10.0k Sol/s±5%
• DC voltage input 11.60~13.00 V
• DC current input @12V DC input @25℃ 20.6 A +5%
• DC Power @12V DC input @25℃ 247 W +5%
• 220VAC Power @25℃, 93% conversion efficiency of APW3 266 W +5%

The Antminer Z9 Mini arrived packed safely as always. It is a small form factor as the name suggests, being 2kg in weight and short. The small form factor is in contrast to the full-sized Z9, which is double-decker style like the Antminer E3 we will be reviewing next.

Setup is simple — plug in all power sockets (plus the one on the controller board), an ethernet cable, and power on your PSU. Since the Z9 Mini uses less than 300 watts at stock settings, you will need a PSU of at least 500 watts (to give your PSU some overhead) and have 7 PCIe connections on it. Once you have found your Z9 Mini on the network, enter in the IP in your browser and login. The user and PW is root/root as usual, as we always caution you to change your PW for best security practices.

Simple Setup on Nanopool

For this review, we mined using the pool at zec.nanopool.org, so we setup a wallet, with the worker quickly adding that info to the Z9 Mini config screen.

The Z9 Mini comes up to speed quickly on the miner but may take a bit pool-side to show up. On nanopool, it took about 30 minutes for the worker to show up. With the config on nanopool, it is important to remember if you want to have separate workers for each rig you need to put a “.” after your wallet address and name for your rig.

Also, to adjust payout options and such you also need to add your email address using a “/” followed by your email address. Of course, leave out the quotation marks!

While those who are old hats at mining will know this there, are many new to the industry who don’t and will find this useful: it is always good to have separate workers for your rigs if you can. This way you can quickly identify if one is acting up or running below spec.

In the case of our Z9 Mini, we were surprised to find it was running well above spec at an average of 12k to 12.5k sols. The normal chip freq is 500, but it reached 550 on this one.  Notably, there’s cooler than average temps in the Bitsonline data center right now, currently at 65F, with the Z9 Mini’s fan running at 2600 rpms creating 46 db at 5 feet. Not bad for the Z9 Mini, though this should not be taken to mean they will all run at this speed.

The Z9 Mini runs stable like most Bitmain miners with very little hassle. We had the same results when we ran it on NiceHash, although at first it did not want to connect which could be due to the coin-switching nature of the pool. As is well known, several Bitmain miners do not work on NiceHash.

Equihash ASIC Mining

The Antminer Z9 Mini is a nice addition to to your miner collection if you want to mine Equihash coins. It is a simple and powerful miner, but it is on the edge of profitability. It is quieter than many miners out there, but still it does make some noise at 46db in a 65F degree rack. The full-sized Z9 is also shipping but with the tariff issues going on there is a significant markup on top of the miner’s cost when importing them into the US and several other countries now. So people that have their Z9 Minis already got them just in time. Another solid miner from Bitmain.

What are your thoughts on Equihash ASICs, like Innosillicon and others are coming out soon next? Let us know your thoughts on social media or in the comments section below. 

Images via Bitsonline