Overclock for higher revenue, Underclock for higher margin
Sometimes, you may want to change hashrate / power consumption of your ASIC miners for better operation. This is called as Overclocking (increasing hashrate) / Underclocking (decreasing hashrate) and can be achieved by installing custom firmware.
MSKMINER or OKKONG may be famous as such firmware provider. Also there are so many other firmware providers, like VNISHI / Asic.to, BTC.com, ASIC.WORLD, Efudd, Braiins OS+ or ASICseer, etc. (Tell me if I miss any major firmware provider)
Let me summarize firmware offering of these providers based on publicly available info. Note that they may support other models for large-scale miners, so you may want to directly contact them to check their offering.
Dev fee is around 2-3%, which is automatically deducted by allocating hashrate to firmware providers.
So, how these custom firmware improves mining profitability? Let’s have a look at OKKONG’s S17 firmware as an example. That firmware enables you to adjust S17’s hashrate from 32.6TH/s to 71.6TH/s, v.s. Bitmain’s default 53.0TH/s. Assume BTC/USD=$17,000, network hashrate is 135PH/s, electricity tariff is $0.08/kWh, firmware dev fee is 2.5%, pool fee is 1% and BTC transaction fee income is not considered.
As shown in above table, daily revenue is maximized to $7.8 in case hashrate is overclocked to 71.6TH/s, while Unit power efficiency is sacrificed to 46.8W/TH in that case. On the other hand, profit is maximized to $1.7/day in case hashrate is underclocked to 42.5TH/s and margin is maximized to 38.8% in case hashrate is underclocked to 37.6TH/s thanks to improved Unit power efficiency.
- If you operate under competitive electricity tariff, you may overclock your miners to maximize revenue;
- If your tariff is high and margin is narrow, you may underclock your miners to maximize profit/margin. This approach will extend operating life of old miners.
Find the sweet spot for your facility/model.
We tried some custom firmware in our facility. Let me share consideration points when you try overclock/underclock:
- Some firmware made miners unstable and required frequent rebooting. Recommend not to install custom firmware into brand-new machine, if you want to protect your precious machine
- Some firmware caused overheating both in overclocking and underclocking
- You may need immersion cooling for extreme overclocking
HASHRATE INDEX posted an good article, which you may also want to check for better understanding of Pros & Cons of overclock / underclock.
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