GAW Miners Falcon Review
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GAW Miners Falcon Review
A little over a month ago I purchased a GAW Miners Falcon 27 Mh/s Scrypt Asic Miner and posted some pictures of the unboxing here. In this article I’ll give an update of how things have been going with my GAW Miners Falcon over the past month or so.
GAW Miners Falcon Unboxing
Just for a quick overview, the GAW Miners Falcon is a scrypt based ASIC miner sold by GAW Miners. Scrypt asic miners can be used to mine scrypt based crypto-currencies such as Litecoin. Although it is not explicitly stated anywhere, it is common knowledge in the crypto mining community that the chips used in the GAW Miners Falcon are the same chips used in the Zeus Miner Blizzard. The manufacturer of the chips in the Zeus Miner Blizzard is Zeus Integrated Systems Limited.
When I ordered my GAW Miners Falcon, there was a special promotion for a free ZenController with my miner. The ZenController is bascially a RaspberryPi device that has been configured to allow you to manage your miners using their free cloud services. I chose not to use the ZenController with my setup and was lucky because while my GAW Miners Falcon shipped on time, my ZenController was shipped about a week later.
After receiving my GAW Miners Falcon and unboxing everything I realized that it did not come with an instruction manual. After doing some searching around on various crypto mining forums I was able to figure out how to get everything set up and put together this GAW Miners Falcon Instruction Manual for people who need help getting it set up.
In my other articles I mentioned that I used a modified version of BFGMiner instead of CGMiner to mine. In this case, I used CGMiner to mine with my GAW Miners Falcon because I was mining an alt coin and was having problems getting it to work with BFGMiner.
Initially, when I got everything up and running, there was a slight burning smell that eventually went away. Since everything was hashing away as normal I assumed everything was okay. The GAW Miners Falcon was hashing away happily for a little over a month before it died. CGMiner went into an infinite loop complaining about a hardware error. After a couple reboots, I decided to open up the unit. The pictures below show what I found.
The PCI connector cable that powers the unit was burnt so badly that one of the wires had melted loose:
GAW Miners Falcon Burned Cable
The PCI cable that connects to the power supply was also damaged:
GAW Miners Falcon Damaged PCI
Here is another view of the damaged PCI cable:
GAW Miners Falcon Burned PCI
This view shows that one cable melted loose and a second cable also became detached as well:
GAW Miners Falcon Melted Wire
My GAW Miners Falcon died on 24Jul2014, almost two weeks ago. The return RMA process took a couple days to get authorization to send the unit back so the unit is currently in transit. I requested a refund seeing that the unit barely lasted a month, but I have not received a response to whether or not a refund would be issued or not. I will post an update when this situation has been resolved.
Here is the GAW Miners Falcon setup instructions.
Here is the original article on the GAW Miners Falcon with more pictures.
