I know there's not a lot of need for Antminer S3 overclock / underclock testing since this Bitcoin miner was first introduced by Bitmain in June of 2014 and was superseded by other faster ASIC miners not long after that. But there are some good reasons to use the Antminer S3 (if you can find one) for home mining. I know there are a few Antminer S3's still out there in 2022 and they needn't be in a closet or gathering spiderwebs in the basement.
- It makes a great lottery miner. If you don't think 30 or 40 dollars per month is a lot to pay for lottery tickets, you could run the S3 for that much electricity (more or less depending where you live) and have the chance of winning 6.3 Bitcoin. The lowest underclock would cost around $15/mo. With this setup you don't have to drive to the convenience store all the time to buy lottery tickets. That said, solo mining for Bitcoin offers a very slim chance of solving a block, just as does a Powerball drawing offer a very slim chance of winning. You can also pool mine if you want to stack Sats. Additionally, you can mine for other SHA-256 coins which will have lower network difficulty levels and thus be "easier" to solve blocks for (i.e., Bitcoin Cash, Digibyte, XEC, and others).
- The miner gives the house heat in the winter. So it serves the dual purpose of mining for SHA-256 coins and warming the house, thus reducing the work of the main heat system by whatever small amount. In summer you can underclock the S3 (if you're keeping it in the house) so that the heat it adds to a room is negligible.
- The Antminer S3 is more powerful than USB stick miners and less hassle.
- It is easy to make it quiet. If you are going to use a miner in the house it has to be reasonably quiet. This miner doesn't get as hot as an Antminer S7 or Antminer S9 or any of the other multiple terahash miners that exist these days. Since it doesn't get as hot, it doesn't need as vigorous a fan as the S3 originally came with. Replace the original fans with quiet PC case fans of the same size and with 4 pin connectors (~3000 RPM). Even at the highest hashrate these are more than enough for cooling the S3. Make sure your PSU is quiet as well.
The testing data below is going to be frustrating for people with Antminer S3's that have all the chips available for hashing. My S3 doesn't, so I had to do the testing with 24 working chips when there are usually 32. I really did this testing for myself. Still, you may be able to glean some useful information from this testing, such as wattage differences between settings and hashrate differences from low clock speed to high.
Testing was done using the firmware version "Fri Jan 9 20:41:34 CST 2015". This version of firmware has the ability to adjust clock speed (Frequency) and voltage. However, my testing and the testing of other miners has concluded that the voltage setting in the firmware doesn't do anything, or much of anything at all. If you want to adjust voltages, getting a power supply (PSU) that has adjustable output voltages is your best bet. In my testing the only thing that made a difference was changing the clock speed.
Different clock speeds often caused 1 or 2 chips to display an X in the miner's interface which means they aren't hashing. This causes a lower hashrate and lower wattages. Sometimes a reboot at that clock speed would help those chips, sometimes not.
Fan speeds were affected by clock speed, hashrate, and by the HVAC heat coming on in the room, but you can see in the chart that lower clock speeds result in lower fan speeds and thus quieter miners.
Hardware errors were never much more than 0.01%, but when they were under that I noted it as low hardware errors in the chart (LHWE). Perhaps those are more efficient or stable speeds to run at.
In the 0725 voltage part of the chart I tested with one cable into each hashboard instead of two. There was no difference between the two options.
The chart did not convert well onto a blog page so it is presented here as an image which you can click on to enlarge. If you right-click on the image you can save it and thus enlarge it when viewing.
- It makes a great lottery miner. If you don't think 30 or 40 dollars per month is a lot to pay for lottery tickets, you could run the S3 for that much electricity (more or less depending where you live) and have the chance of winning 6.3 Bitcoin. The lowest underclock would cost around $15/mo. With this setup you don't have to drive to the convenience store all the time to buy lottery tickets. That said, solo mining for Bitcoin offers a very slim chance of solving a block, just as does a Powerball drawing offer a very slim chance of winning. You can also pool mine if you want to stack Sats. Additionally, you can mine for other SHA-256 coins which will have lower network difficulty levels and thus be "easier" to solve blocks for (i.e., Bitcoin Cash, Digibyte, XEC, and others).
- The miner gives the house heat in the winter. So it serves the dual purpose of mining for SHA-256 coins and warming the house, thus reducing the work of the main heat system by whatever small amount. In summer you can underclock the S3 (if you're keeping it in the house) so that the heat it adds to a room is negligible.
- The Antminer S3 is more powerful than USB stick miners and less hassle.
- It is easy to make it quiet. If you are going to use a miner in the house it has to be reasonably quiet. This miner doesn't get as hot as an Antminer S7 or Antminer S9 or any of the other multiple terahash miners that exist these days. Since it doesn't get as hot, it doesn't need as vigorous a fan as the S3 originally came with. Replace the original fans with quiet PC case fans of the same size and with 4 pin connectors (~3000 RPM). Even at the highest hashrate these are more than enough for cooling the S3. Make sure your PSU is quiet as well.
The testing data below is going to be frustrating for people with Antminer S3's that have all the chips available for hashing. My S3 doesn't, so I had to do the testing with 24 working chips when there are usually 32. I really did this testing for myself. Still, you may be able to glean some useful information from this testing, such as wattage differences between settings and hashrate differences from low clock speed to high.
Testing was done using the firmware version "Fri Jan 9 20:41:34 CST 2015". This version of firmware has the ability to adjust clock speed (Frequency) and voltage. However, my testing and the testing of other miners has concluded that the voltage setting in the firmware doesn't do anything, or much of anything at all. If you want to adjust voltages, getting a power supply (PSU) that has adjustable output voltages is your best bet. In my testing the only thing that made a difference was changing the clock speed.
Different clock speeds often caused 1 or 2 chips to display an X in the miner's interface which means they aren't hashing. This causes a lower hashrate and lower wattages. Sometimes a reboot at that clock speed would help those chips, sometimes not.
Fan speeds were affected by clock speed, hashrate, and by the HVAC heat coming on in the room, but you can see in the chart that lower clock speeds result in lower fan speeds and thus quieter miners.
Hardware errors were never much more than 0.01%, but when they were under that I noted it as low hardware errors in the chart (LHWE). Perhaps those are more efficient or stable speeds to run at.
In the 0725 voltage part of the chart I tested with one cable into each hashboard instead of two. There was no difference between the two options.
The chart did not convert well onto a blog page so it is presented here as an image which you can click on to enlarge. If you right-click on the image you can save it and thus enlarge it when viewing.
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