My Experience with the R606 Miner

I placed an order with MineFarmBuy on August 17, and it was backordered at that time. They said it would be available in about a week. On August 23, I got a message saying it would ship on August 27 (but it actually shipped a bit earlier on the 24th) and I received the miner on August 31. So, it took a total of 14 days, which isn't too shabby considering it was out of stock when I ordered. I skipped using escrow since I ordered directly from their site minefarmbuy.com. There was a nice discount for paying with BTC, which was a bonus. The miner arrived well-packaged, along with an 8A power brick and a 6-foot USB cord. I had to download a couple of things: 1. cgminer from this link: http://23.108.83.14/images/cgminer-4.11.1-windows-gekko-9e51f0b.7z 2. zadig from here: http://zadig.akeo.ie/ Both of these were originally linked here on this forum. After opening Zadig, I went to Options > list all devices, selected the R606 Bitcoin Miner, and chose "Reinstall Driver." Then, I unzipped CgMiner and checked the readme files. After that, I ran cgminer.exe, entered my pool info, username, and password, and the miner started hashing right away! The loudest it got was 81 dB, but the miner itself stayed cool to the touch, not even warm at all. Just a heads up, when I took that dB reading, my Apollo miner was still on. So, with the Apollo off, the new reading was 62 dB. For power usage, after running it for 3 hours on setting 5, I found it used 1.193 amps, 118.4 volts, and 76.7 watts. Now I've got a miner on each side of my desk.

I am currently running the miner on zpool to clean up some dust (about 10k) I will be doing this with at least a dozen pools before I eventually toss it on kano.is or maybe go solo on ckpool I realize this miner (along with my FutureBit Apollo Scrypt miner) is a hobbyist miner and will not be making me a fortune (unless I get some considerable luck when solo mining  But I like having these type of miners in the house away from the loud and hot ASIC's in my mining building. They are really handy when a visitor asks about mining and has very little knowledge - these beat taking them out there to the loud sweatbox lol I will need some more days to fully test and get stats for the various settings this miner has available - but right now (and it may be the pool?) the hash rate is all over the place from 1.5 Kh/s to over 1.1 Th/s  - currently I am on the 440mV (setting 5) and it has dropped to zero hash rate for past 5 minutes. when I restart the miner, it will go back up to around 1 Th/s but then within 15-20 minutes it goes back to zero. I am not sure what the issue is - can it be related to running it via my pc? is it the pool? did I get a faulty unit? (I rather it be one of the first two than the last) now after about 2 hours it is showing that if "found 0 chip(s)" I am going to try another pool and see if it just a pool issue. after almost 4 hours, it also stopped hashing on ViaBTC - says found zero chips again. only solution I can find is to turn miner off and restart it. isn't lasting more than 30 minutes now no matter what pool I stick it on. always goes to zero chips message. 6th attempt - lasted 34 minutes, it slowly would lower the frequency eventually lowering the number of chips - screenshot below was right before it went to zero chips and 5s speed went to zero. end result: Sidehack stated unit should be RMA and would send me a new miner asap.

In this post, I will be testing to see what the hash rate change is for each setting. Setting 0: Setting 1: Setting 2: Setting 3: Setting 4: with freq set to 750 in cg miner: - freq ramped up and I got the following message: asic plateau: (1/3) 605.73 mhz - after restart I got message: asic plateau: (2/3) 631.25 mhz - after restart I got message: asic plateau: (3/3) 631.25 mhz - it also gave the following message: plateau adjust: target frequency 750.00 mhz -> 625.00 mhz and then miner restarted - it then gave the following message:  plateau adjust: target frequency 625.00 mhz -> 618.75 mhz and then miner restarted - it then gave the following message:  plateau adjust: target frequency 618.75 mhz -> 612.50 mhz and then miner restarted - it then gave the following message:  plateau adjust: target frequency 612.5 mhz -> 606.25 mhz and then miner restarted - miner settled at T: 606.25 mhz and after 15 mins the average hash rate was 832.2 gh/s - best share was 4.2M Setting 5: with freq set to 750 in cg miner: - freq ramped up and I got the following message: asic plateau: (1/3) 628.13 mhz - after restart I got message: asic plateau: (2/3) 631.25 mhz - after restart I got message: asic plateau: (3/3) 631.25 mhz - it also gave the following message: plateau adjust: target frequency 750.00 mhz -> 631.25 mhz and then miner restarted - miner settled at T: 631.25 mhz and after 15 mins the average hash rate was 856.4 gh/s - best share was 64k Setting 6: with freq set to 750 in cg miner: - freq ramped up and I got the following message: asic plateau: (1/3) 660.94 mhz - after restart I got message: asic plateau: (2/3) 681.25 mhz - after restart I got message: asic plateau: (3/3) 700.00 mhz - it also gave the following message: plateau adjust: target frequency 750.00 mhz -> 700.00 mhz and then miner restarted - miner would keep restarting about 3-4 minutes after reaching 700 mhz but was not changing the target frequency, it was staying at 700 mhz - after 4 restarts, I decided to move to next setting - hash rate before the restart was averaging 953.7 gh/s though it did hit as high as 1.01 th/s - best share was 989k Setting 7: with freq set to 750 in cg miner: - freq ramped up and I got the following message: asic plateau: (1/3) 700.00 mhz - after restart I got message: asic plateau: (2/3) 700.00 mhz - after restart I got message: asic plateau: (3/3) 700.00 mhz - it also gave the following message: plateau adjust: target frequency 750.00 mhz -> 700.00 mhz and then miner restarted - miner would keep restarting about 5 minutes after reaching 700 mhz but was not changing the target frequency, it was staying at 700 mhz - after 4 restarts, I decided to move to next setting - hash rate before the restart was averaging 940.2 gh/s - best share was 251k I will update the list above as I test more settings.

Maybe try using a USB hub, mine would not even start if plugged directly to my PC.

I might - I switched it over to ViaBTC and it has had zero issues - so the pool may have been the issue.

it struggles with switching pools.  iirc

maybe so, but I am setting up only one pool at a time.

Thanks for the order Stryfe. Looking forward to reading more!

RMA was completed and new miner came in and is up and running with zero issues after almost 4 hours of operation so far. Playing with voltage and freq settings presently. will update the post above as I try out different settings.

Your results for Voltage settings 4 and 5 look good.  Curious how you did on Voltage level 6?

Will be doing setting 6 and 7 tonight update: my results for settings 6 and 7 posted above. due to the restarts at 700 mhz I set Target frequency to 690 and on setting 7 - will see if that will be stable.

What horrible thing happened that you saw 81dB? Around here they're so quiet I have to stick my hand in front of 'em to make sure the fan's still spinning.

lol, note that is the loudest reading, and the meter is sitting right on the exhaust exit. It might be ambient noise too - I should take another reading with the Apollo off - here I will do so now - so look for an edit on this post in a moment. this is probably a much more accurate reading with the Apollo off

Yea, my GPUs are way louder than the r606 at my workstation.

I think the hard part is that I am not in a sound proof room with only the miner - so the readings have to be understood that ambient noise is also present. but that is also why I try and stick the mic right on the exit point.

When I check the sound levels on my 2 R606's along with 2 usb fans attached to them, 2 additional usb fans over my  4newpacs that sits beside them, the tiny fans attached to 2 futurebit moon landers,  and a 1930's F. A. Smith Artic Aire Table Fan sitting directly by it as well on high, my readings are 30 db.  If I turn my 1930's fan off the readings drop to 22 db.   What else do you have running in the room you have these miners at?   Mine are setup in my home office and are quiet as a mouse. What's sad,  I have another Raspberry Pi 4 that I typically use as a desktop replacement (try to limit my gaming rig to just that, gaming instead of day to day tasks) so that I conserve a bit more energy, with the fan on high on my Pi 4, that's louder than my mining setup

do your readings negate the ambient noise? and how close is your device doing the reading? I am laying mine essentially right against the miner but I also have ambient noise - it reads at almost 25 dB if the miner is off. It also could just be that the app I am using (its on my iPhone) is a POS that returns erroneous readings.

Using a phone app as well but android related.  I've placed it at the rear of the unit where my exit fans are (I added these --screen shot https://ibb.co/tq4tXLS)  I also placed the fan on top of the unit, on the PSU, in front etc.  They are very quiet.  The rear fans I am using are these:  https://www.amazon.com/AC-Infinity-MULTIFAN-Receiver-Playstation/dp/B00IJ2J2K0 My home office is also our master bedroom and me and the Mrs sleeps well.  Not loud at all.

Does your app have the ability to reset to 0 with ambient and then where you turn on miner and get reading? If I set my phone on my desk at work, it reads anywhere from 45 to 62 dB - at home, where it is a bit more quiet, it reads between 25-30 dB with the miners off (I have 2 on my desk) I thought about rear fans but I do not really see the need, my R606 feels like an ice cube to the touch. I would not be able to sleep with this in the room - the noise while very low is still discernible to me and with the flashing light as well, it would drive me crazy if I was trying to sleep.

I'm thinking it's possibly your app.  60db on up is getting into the normal Asic miner sound levels.  A Bitmain Z9 mini for example is 65db.  There are plenty of youtube videos demoing the sound level of the Z9 mini and these R606's are no way close to that.