The background story of GekkoScience miners

Historical overview Made in the USA by the well-known GekkoScience (Sidehack). This is currently the most efficient USB miner out there. The NEWPAC Compac packs 2 Bitmain BM1387 chips, which are the same ones used in the Bitmain S5. It has a default clock speed of 100MHz that gives you 23GH. You can tweak the frequency from 100MHz all the way up to 600MHz, pumping out speeds from 23GH up to 130GH. Just a heads up, you need to keep it cool (like using a table fan or USB fan) while it’s running because it can heat up a lot, especially over 100 MHz. Specs & details Base hashing speed: 23 GH. Max speed: 90 GH+ (just remember you need a good USB port for higher speeds). Totally silent operation, but you need a powered USB hub (10 watts for each miner per port). 2 x Bitmain BM1387 chips. Works with Windows, Mac, and Linux using cgminer software.

Okay but the BM1387 was used on the S9. S5 was BM1384, the chip in the original Compac and the 2Pac.

Merits given for perhaps starting a nice historical thread. It should also be pointed out that a Compac-F found a block last year despite the pretty high diff at that time.   Wonder if any other USB sticks have ever found one? My intro to Gekko products was the IBM 2kw psu breakout boards and some mighty fine PCIe cables. Those were s5's running in the back, I had 10 of `em, technically 12 because still have 2 of the water cooled C1 version. Long long ago I donated all but 1 of the s5's to Sidehack to use their chips in his early Compacs

Um, actually, nope, the most efficient USB miner is the CompacF ...

Personally - I'm a huge fan of GekkoScience. I had several S9i's once upon a time - but when i moved, i lost the storage unit in the basement i used to house my miners (it was very cold down there and the floor upstairs worked very well for isolating sound). When I moved, no more basement - so I started looking for something quiet, effecient, and something that would not turn my new apartment into a sauna and all signs pointed towards Gekko. Very unique, innovative, well thought out/engineered, reliable products. Very much appreciate the time, effort, and thoughtfulness Sidehack puts into his products!

Can the speed of the underlying LINUX DISTRO affect Sidehacks performance? I ask b/c I developed 2 lightning fast LINUX distros used by medical clients like hospitals which took tasks that ran 2 weeks of data for 1 hospital that required 5 hours to process 26 weeks of data for 2 hospitals in 72 seconds. It boots off USB and a lot of my students use USB only devices so I wondered if I can steer them towards building machines w/ Sidehacks boards, but instead of sluggish LINUX distros base them on mine. Any thoughts?

I really like gekkoscience products, they are very stable and reliable. I like the idea of home mining. I am dreaming of owning each product made by gekkoscience, my collection is almost complete but I never managed to find a good R808  I had one >1T share with a Gekko Newpac recently, and a 19T share with a R606 not so long ago. I really like to use these ASICs to solo mine, and would like to own more R909s. I use both Ubuntu server and Debian with XFCE desktop on the computers runnings gekkoscience ASICs. No difference between the OS, hardware is the exact same in my case. I think what you are mentionning, regarding to gekkos, is more a question related to your CPU than your OS. IMO Linux will be ok in any case, always better than with Windows for example, more stable, more safe in many aspects. You can save some (very few) electricity if you run a Ubuntu/Debian server without a monitor via ssh, or at least from TTY. I would not chose MacOS or Windows because of the updates and random reboots.

Since the OP is just copy / pasting from google links and can't be bothered to think on their own. Here is the link to the original announcement of the NewPac https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5053711.0 And for those who wand to discuss it's operation a 115 page 2300 post link to the support thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5053833.0 Don't encourage people like the OP to just post drivel and copy and past OUTDATED things. -Dave

I do not believe all Linux systems are equally fast and reliable. After 30 years buying homes and Porsches with money I made servicing DOS and Windows customers, first in the early days of migrating mainframe-bound corps onto Novell networked PCs running DOS-based custom-coded accounting systems I wrote, then later, giving them GUI based systems, AND owning computer sales and service stores, it was always my hope&prayer Microsoft would produce just ONE operating system release that wasn't a crash-and-burn/blue-screen/lost-data/pissed-customer disaster. Windows 2000 was the only one a few mags suggested to be as reliable as a clunky UNIX system, but critical-operation clients like hospitals and a nuclear power plant required I build recovery processes in for daily disasters like frozen screens and some secretary calling me in tears. Finally, in 2010 I watched a long painful recovery/rebuild/reinstall of a Windows system crash and burn the next day (possibly a virus) and I said F-IT I can't keep recommending anyone use this half-baked junk and had better dust off my Unix/Mainframe skills and learn how to work w/ Linux, code, compile and configure for Linux, and deliver systems that don't crash. My criteria for "a distro" was a) reliability across a wide range of memory and CPUs b) speed  crunching large files c) availability of office apps (I don't want to have to code a damn word processor eh?) d) availability of multi-media apps like sound and video editors and e) ability to run some Windows/DOS programs without rebooting, which WINE and QEMU did, since a few of my early clients were addicted to DOS and Win 3.11 programs I had made for their biz. So I tested about 20 distros out of over 200 I found, ran speed tests, reliability, app availability etc. and finally figured I'd have to build one - and built two - which have served me well for 15 years... I do not believe all Linux systems are equally fast and reliable (I better put that sentence at the top). Yes, a few are almost as fast as what I built but none have that benefit AND are halfway easy to use AND can serve as an office environment desktop and boot easily from a USB, though that is more common now. Turning this learning process towards mining, I read the OS-BOUND CPU isn't really the bottleneck in the mining, so perhaps there's no difference in speed between a Windows/Linux/fast Linux system since the whole idea of mining moves the burden of calculating off to daughter-board chips, Since I am a total newbie to this world I can't say a screaming fast motherboard CPU and OS is going to make much if any difference, but as I get more experience I will (maybe) find out. Perhaps a plug-and-play LINUX distro built for mining is in the cards. But what I do know is the students (and a couple of clients) asked so I stumbled in here with a kinderkid's knowledge base to figure out what kind of hardware config to try first and liked Sidehacks USB approach and the "theoretical" possibility you can build a system off an old Atom motherboard using 10 - 25 watts in a little MINI-ITX case with some USB dongles and poof! A child can mine. That vision kind of evaporated when I saw the heat sinks Sidehack has on their products and I'll guess overall wattage is going to be smoking hot. I read somewhere people use mining rigs to heat their homes which leads this newbie talk to the subject of zero-cost electricity designs along with questions I have about pooled vs solo mining which I best save for another post.

Read: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5423227.msg61850232#msg61850232