Comino Crypto Mining Rigs: Liquid-Cooled 16 GPUs in a 4U Server
by Anton Shilov on June 27, 2018 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Mining
- Asus
- NVIDIA
- Liquid Cooling
- GP106
- Computex 2018
- Comino
- Object N1
Cryptocurrency mining has made quite a dent in the hardware industry in the last couple of years. Motherboard manufacturers have built special platforms for mining rigs, video card vendors have put together specially-designed "mining edition" video cards, and even chassis & PSUs vendors have gotten into the game with mining-focused designs. Obviously, not everyone wants to build mining rigs themselves, hence there is a meaningful market for companies who offer turnkey mining solutions. One of such companies is Comino, a multi-national firm registered in Cyprus with offices in China, Latvia, and Russia, which produces liquid-cooled turnkey mining rigs that look to be quite unique.
The company brought two of its key products to Computex — the Comino Object N1 designed for homes and offices, and 4U systems aimed at large cryptomining farms and offered for remote rent by Comino itself. Both types of machines use the company’s own liquid-cooled solutions and run proprietary software to ensure stable operation, predictable power consumption, and a guaranteed hash rate.
The Comino Object N1 is a factory-built system that looks like a regular desktop (taking some pages from the Voodoo Omen), yet packs eight NVIDIA GP106-based graphics cards from GIGABYTE. The mining rig is a completely sealed solution that only needs to be plugged to a power outlet and connected to the Internet. The Object N1 does not need to be set up, as all the management can be done using a special program for smartphones. Similarly, since Comino is focusing on a low-impact/low-hassle design, the Object N1 is also designed to be rather quiet despite the TDP, with the idea being that it can run 24/7 without disturbing anyone around (pictures over at Comino’s web site depict cats sitting on a working N1 machine). It is noteworthy that while the Object N1 uses a proprietary cooling system and software, it is actually based on off-the-shelf components, which is understandable as this was the first product by Comino and the company did not have access to custom hardware last year.
Meanwhile the 4U machine from Comino is a completely different thing aimed at large mining farms. Each 4U system is based on a custom ASUS motherboard, custom PCIe risers and packs 16 of the earlier mentioned GP106 GIGABYTE cards. One of the key features of this rig is Comino’s liquid cooling system comprising of proprietary water blocks, an external heat exchanger, and special tubing that allows technicians to remove just one 4U system from a rack without leaks if a GPU fails. Each water block can take away up to 450 W of heat, meaning that one block can handle two 220 W GPUs. Right now the GP106 GPUs that Comino uses dissipate up to 120 W, but if it manages to obtain more powerful GPUs, it will be able to install them without changing the cooling setup.
The 4U systems from Comino will be available for purchase by owners of large mining farms. Meanwhile, the company is also operating a cloud hosting program that rents out time on these servers to everyone interested in mining. For example, a 40 MH/s system costs €644 a year. For customers willing to take financial risks and unwilling to invest in hardware, Comino’s cloud mining program offers a potential alternative.
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FunBunny2 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
"A corrupt debt based society that's only fueled by consumption?"all economies are driven by consumption. lose it, and you get Depression. where do you think the Great Recession came from? most folks ran out of income. it doesn't matter how we keep score. gold has nowhere near the economic value it commands as a tradeable. not even close. almost all of it is fantasy. a UN run global currency, a Super Euro, would level the playing field. but that would be bad for the Trumps and Putins and Xis of the world. they want one world currency, but only if it's theirs. bitcoin is no better. and when new ones run out, then what do you do?
FunBunny2 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
just to confirm, the January Bitcoin conference:"bitcoin proponents got some unfortunate news this week as the event organizers have announced they have stopped accepting bitcoin payments for conference tickets due to network fees and congestion. "
"Bitcoin settlement times, and the fee market associated with transactions, have become a hot topic these days as on-chain fees have risen to $30-60 per transaction. These issues have made it extremely difficult for businesses to operate, and many merchants have stopped accepting bitcoin for services and goods altogether. "
here: https://news.bitcoin.com/miami-bitcoin-conference-...
FunBunny2 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
"a distributed, self sustaining, immutable database"hardly. it's just a translog missing a database. they've been around for decades, but normally with a database. using cryptopointers is hardly an innovation. that's been done before. and, by the way, how does it take to complete a trans in such a "database"????? last I looked, the crypto conferences stopped accepting crypto payments just because trans never completed. now, that's innovation!!!
dromoxen - Saturday, June 30, 2018 - link
bLOCKCHAIN... was hugely innovative ....Bitcoin ..not so muchboozed - Sunday, July 1, 2018 - link
Innovative? "Blockchain" is simply the renaming of a handful of decades-old concepts. It's also inextricably linked to fraudcoins. There's no other reason to run a blockchain.prisonerX - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link
I kind of thought that too, but there does seem to be some interesting uses, like public distributed ledgers used see: https://github.com/corda/cordaUnNameless - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Not only that but do we have any idea what are the costs to run FIAT? For example USD? I mean what are the electricity costs for all the banks? Human assets? Then indirect pollution costs that result from humans working in this industry (humans need to eat, drive their cars etc).We never talk about that but we do talk how wasteful crypto mining is. What a bunch of hypocrites
boozed - Sunday, July 1, 2018 - link
FIAT is a car company.UnNameless - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
"Fake" currency? Do you even know what fake means? What is not genuine, or better yet what is a genuine currency?Findecanor - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Agreed. It is not the concept of a digital currency that is the problem but how cryptocurrency is created.By requiring more and more resources to "mine" the more there is and the value going up they in effect favour those who got in early. Existing stockpiles rise in value at the expense of miners who get in later. That is the same structure as a pyramid scheme!
The thing with bubbles is that bubbles burst.
Encouraging this development, and using so much energy during this climate crisis is just so irresponsible. Thus, making and selling equipment for crypto-mining is reprehensible. We must protest against everyone who does it and if they have other hardware on the market, boycott that until they stop.