PC Gaming

I got one of these a while ago for €75 delivered from China to mess with, way before all the YouTubers got hold of them. Seemed like a fun little unique board to mess around with and they were dumped because they weren't suitable for mining anymore. I modified the hardware quite a bit, changing up the cooling, connecting a small PSU etc. I wanted to put it into an enclosure but never did. The reason was after I modified the hardware and was happy with that, modified the firmware and was happy with that, I focused on the software. The software is a nightmare, I intended to run Linux so Windows not working was a complete non-issue for me. However even under Linux it's a pain in the butt to get it working and even then it's very weird. Some things will run just fine, be stable with excellent performance. Other stuff just straight up won't run with super weird errors I couldn't figure out, or it runs but the performance it terrible. I have seen a lot of people posting hacks and fixes and some people trying to collect all of those in some centralised locations, which is really cool and helps a lot. It also seemed fussy about the PSU, where a high power large standard PSU would work fine with the old paperclip trick, getting other PSUs to run was more difficult. I tried 3 different smaller PSUs before ending up on something that it would boot on each and every time. With the others it would just hang on a black screen instead of booting, although it did sometimes work when trying multiple times in a row. I also severely underestimated the amount of cooling required, the heatsink it comes with is terrible and only works with extremely high and laminar airflow, with intake in the front and exhaust in the back. This was probably fine for running in a mining location where they have large aircons going and super loud fans that put out a lot of airflow. But I wanted a little case I could put on a desk. At first I thought I could use 2 40mm fans to blow the air just like the original design, but that turned out to need so much RPM it got loud even with quiet fans. So I started with modifying the heatsink so the top is open, it's all folded close so with a little 3D printed tool it's pretty easy to get it folded back open. Doesn't look pretty and takes a few hours to do, but improves it a lot. Then I 3D printed some brackets and attached 2 120mm fans to that, attaching the brackets on the side with some tape to make it fit snugly on the heatsink. This works well, temperatures are good, but still isn't super quiet and requires a bit of airflow. This means designing an enclosure is a lot harder, as it would need rather a lot of intake and exhausts to not suffocate the fans.

In the end I gave up. I had a really cool concept in mind and had a lot of fun tinkering with it. But with all the software issues and having a hard time cooling the thing, it just wasn't worth going forward with it. I might revisit it sometime, when more fixes are posted, so it actually works. And maybe design and build some custom water cooling for it, so it can be cooled more easily.