The Bitaxe Ultra (1366)

The Bitaxe ULTRA (1366) is, like its “little” brother, a fully assembled, open-source plug-and-play Bitcoin solo miner. 

It is an Open-Source ASIC Bitcoin miner and, unlike many other ASIC miners, not a polished commercial product. The Bitaxe Ultra (1366) is a raw electronic board with a ventilator cooling down the ASIC-chips contained therein. No casing nor elaborate additional circuitry for noise-cancellation and advanced cooling. 

The raw deal like the previously reviewed Bitaxe. 

Why the review? Why the focus? 

For the same reasons as talked about in our dedicated Bitaxe review here. 
In bullet-points: 

– It is OpenSource. Meaning that its coding and built-up is freely available to the public. (which means that, because it is OpenSource, ANYONE can start to experiment and build upon the work done by skot9000. 

– Implied continuous development based on passion by the community, NOT spurred and sustained based on economic (company) models. 

The Specs 

The major difference between The BitAxe Ultra and its predecessor comes down to a difference in hashrate as a result of difference in used ASIC chips. 
The Bitaxe Ultra (1366) boasts a hashrate of 527 GH/s with BM1366 ASIC chips. 
The Bitaxe (1397) boasts a hashrate of  400GH/s with BM1397 ASIC chips. 

Like its little brother is The BitAxe Ultra (1366) not as powerful as other fully-fledged ASIC-miners. 

Does it mean that it is unprofitable due to its significant lower hashrate? 
No. The great advantage of the Bitaxe Ultra (1366) has to do with its initial purchasing cost as well as EXTREMELY low power-consumption (just like The Bitaxe). As mentioned in the review of its little brother, both of these values (initial purchasing cost and power-consumption) are important in order to calculate profitability costs. The only fully-fledged miner who is cheaper than The Bitaxe (Ultra) in initial purchase is still the Antminer S9…yet when the electricity consumption comes into play does it easily outperform all established Antminers. The BitAxe Ultra, like its little brother, only consumes about 15W of power in total (or about a 100 times less than most established ASIC-miners). This low amount of power-use reduces mining costs greatly and helps increasing profitability for the miners. 

Albeit it being slightly more expensive than The Bitaxe does the Bitaxe Ultra (1366) still boast a quite low initial investment cost.

Development is still ongoing for this product which gave rise to the development of The Bitaxe Ultra who is a bit stronger in hash-output. More on the BitAxe ultra in its own properly dedicated review (TBA). 

Like another product I took a fancy to this year, the NerdMiner, does it come equipped with an integrated WiFi module which makes for direct mining to pool over WiFi possible. A little handy “extra” that takes technical hurdles away for the newbs who want to start with Bitcoin mining but aren’t as technically inclined. 

But it is not all sunshine and rainbows and there’s a few drawbacks. 
A strong case could be made about its peers (the Antminers and the like) being more powerful where it concerns output. While this is definitely true, it would not be the main thing to focus on. After all, is this budding Open-Source project ALREADY powerful enough to outperform many older Bitcoin miners and the (still) actual Antminer L3+ in hashrate.  

The only real hurdle is the lack of protective casing and dedicated “kit”. We have a raw piece of electronics after all. A protective casing must be foreseen with some filters and slightly more advanced cooling. 

… though this applies ONLY when buying the BitAxe Ultra (1366) as standalone. The Minibit 1366 is the fully-fledged version of this product whereby the BitAxe Ultra (1366) has its very own casing and full load-out. 

The Bitaxe Ultra (1366); as spoken about until now, is the naked version with which builders can go crazy. 
This means that with the necessary amount of dedication and creativity the Bitaxe CAN be used in dual-purpose mining applications.