11-23-2017, 05:55 PM
My first Rock64-2gig arrived today, quite a surprising device especially considering its price.
I’m testing CPU mining (magi-coin) right now, if it proves viable I might put a small array of these together to chomp on coin at low power/heat ratios.
Right now I’m using a USB > 3.5mm barrel jack converter cable coming off one of those dedicated Anker multi-port USB charger devices (the kind that put out decent USB power). I have seen some which claim to output 3w per outlet, I was wondering if this arrangement would suffice for running a number of Rock64’s off a single point; the numbers seem to make sense but I’ve only done this for one point so far. Does it sound like a viable option longer term?
Secondly – I wanted to passively cool them with a tall/large heat sink and no fan, I’ve seen some solutions involving rather tall-fin heat sinks or even a copper plate bridging a larger surface area cooler (as Christopher Barnatt did on a Pi v3 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AYGnw6MwFM).
This would be run in a fairly open air setup (not enclosed in a case), the CPU of each device would be at or near 100% 24/7. To keep the CPUs within temperature range and to avoid throttling – is something like Christopher’s idea more practical or is there a preferred method of passive cooling that people have had more success with? Or does it absolutely need powered cooling? (ambient temperature here is typically high teens to low 20’s Celsius).
So far I’ve been unable to get LMSensor reading CPU temperatures but I’ve only just started investigating the builds (using the stock Debian distro which seems to be 64-bit from what I can ascertain).
I’m testing CPU mining (magi-coin) right now, if it proves viable I might put a small array of these together to chomp on coin at low power/heat ratios.
Right now I’m using a USB > 3.5mm barrel jack converter cable coming off one of those dedicated Anker multi-port USB charger devices (the kind that put out decent USB power). I have seen some which claim to output 3w per outlet, I was wondering if this arrangement would suffice for running a number of Rock64’s off a single point; the numbers seem to make sense but I’ve only done this for one point so far. Does it sound like a viable option longer term?
Secondly – I wanted to passively cool them with a tall/large heat sink and no fan, I’ve seen some solutions involving rather tall-fin heat sinks or even a copper plate bridging a larger surface area cooler (as Christopher Barnatt did on a Pi v3 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AYGnw6MwFM).
This would be run in a fairly open air setup (not enclosed in a case), the CPU of each device would be at or near 100% 24/7. To keep the CPUs within temperature range and to avoid throttling – is something like Christopher’s idea more practical or is there a preferred method of passive cooling that people have had more success with? Or does it absolutely need powered cooling? (ambient temperature here is typically high teens to low 20’s Celsius).
So far I’ve been unable to get LMSensor reading CPU temperatures but I’ve only just started investigating the builds (using the stock Debian distro which seems to be 64-bit from what I can ascertain).
