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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59 Comments
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rocky12345 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Yep it always seems no matter what happens in the USA that is good or very bad their dollar never really goes down much if at all. On the other hand here in CAD our own government likes our CAD dollar to be lower than the USA dollar and if it starts going up to far everyone starts yelling and screaming that we are doomed because we export a lot of stuff.The sad part is the rest of us get screwed because with our dollar worth less we then pay more for everything.
prisonerX - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link
CAD is a commodity currency, so its tends to do that. USD is seen as a safe haven, with all the irony intact.FunBunny2 - Monday, July 2, 2018 - link
"The sad part is the rest of us get screwed because with our dollar worth less we then pay more for everything."you would do to look up "Bretton-Woods" agreement, and understand that Uncle Sugar's Buck is the New Gold (up to today, anyhow), so we get to set the rules. there's a lot of power in the power to set the rules.
deepblue08 - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
For now...voicequal - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
By your generalization you could readily apply the 1 billion weekly hours of Netflix viewing or the 3 billion weekly hours of gaming with the label of "wasteful activity". Mining is a competition in the compute space, and consumes resources and drives innovation just like other competitive pursuits.There is a lot of work underway to find more energy efficient ways to secure blockchains. The motivation is to free up resources so they can be devoted to activities of more enduring value such as building transaction capacity and applications to grow user adoption.
smilingcrow - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
Some of the output Netflix shows can be considered artistic and has a value in of itself.Bitcoin has no inherent value.
Look at it this way:
If you had unlimited resources for whatever reason would bitcoin have any appeal to you?
In that situation I would still value artistic endeavours including Netflix but bitcoin would have as much value to me as a bunch of random numbers scribbled on a piece of paper by a robot.
voicequal - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
Bitcoin was hugely innovative - a distributed, self sustaining, immutable database. Being a techie type, it's easy for me to find intrinsic value in the technology and mathematics behind Bitcoin. The fact that it is actually worth $$ is a welcome bonus.smilingcrow - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
There are more interesting areas of mathematics than bitcoin that aren't reliant on the grubby world of currencies to give them a pseudo value.Take that element away and the whole fad side of it disappears as quickly as the assigned speculative value can.
I respect the pure science but not pseudo BS that gets projected onto it.
UnNameless - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
True that but the world need currencies does it not? If so, do you really think the future should belong to the same old corrupt banking system? A corrupt debt based society that's only fueled by consumption?Unless you come up with a better alternative to the blockchain tech, so far cryptos are the best alternatives to the corrupt monetary system the world used. The state/central bank duopoly truly enslaves us and if you don't have a problem with that then I'm wasting my breath
smilingcrow - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
They are both the evils of two lessers. I trust neither of them.