How To Use Antminer S7

Bitmain, the China-based ASIC miner production company and owner of the famous mining pool Antpool, offers a number of ASIC miners on their signature Antminer series. These ASIC miners are specialized mining hardware, optimized for mining different cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and other altcoins like Ethereum (ETH), or Litecoin (LTC). 

If you are interested in mining machines or want to learn how to use mining rigs like an Antminer S7, this guide will help you to understand the basics.

What Are Antminers?

ASIC miners (application-specific integrated circuit miners) are microprocessors dedicated to mining cryptocurrencies. Compared to CPUs and GPUs, they have higher hash rates measured in gigahashes. Since these mining machines -or mining rigs as they are called- have higher hash rates, they became the industry standard for crypto mining.

Bitmain Antminer series offers different mining rigs for mining different cryptocurrencies. Technically, Altminer miners differentiate from each other depending on which proof-of-work mining algorithm they are compatible with. For example, Antminer S7 and Antminer S9 can be used to mine cryptocurrencies that use the SHA-256 algorithm for mining, whereas Antminer D3 can be used to mine digital currencies that use the X11 algorithm for proof of work, such as Dash.

Bitmain Antminer S7 is specially produced and optimized for Bitcoin mining. It came out in 2015 and can be bought second-hand online. 

Antminer S7 has an ideal hash rate of 4860 GH/s. It has two cooling fans that make a decent amount of sound, so you want to put this mining rig in a dedicated space where it wouldn’t prevent you from doing your daily tasks – or sleeping. 

Antminer S7 doesn’t come with its own power supply (PSU) so you need to buy a PSU separately for this Bitcoin miner.

Bitmain’s APW3 power supply is a good choice, as Antminer S7 functions at 93% efficiency with APW3 at 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) ambient temperature. You might consider investing in more cooling equipment as Bitcoin miners tend to run hotter than other miners and the resulting heat might damage the mining rig in the long term.

How to Use Bitmain Antminer S7?

Antminer S7 has nine PCIE connectors for connecting your hash board to the power supply. Make sure you don’t connect multiple PSUs to the same hashing board as this could damage the mining rig. Once you correctly attach the connectors to PSU, connect the hash board to your router through an Ethernet cable. 

Once you are done with the hardware, you need to set up your miner using your computer. Follow the steps below:

1. Download an IP Reporter from the official Bitmain Website.
2. Run the IP Reporter. You will see the IP address of the miner.
3. Enter the IP address into your WEB browser.
4. Login using “root” for username and password.

If you would like to join a mining pool, you can configure your pool settings through ‘Miner Configuration->General Settings’ on the browser. You will be asked to enter the URL of the pool.

If you aren’t sure if your mining rig is working correctly, you can check the ‘Miner Status’ page to see if there are any problems. Either your ASIC status shows OK, or it shows an X, meaning there is an error.

A Few Words Before You Go…

While Antminer S7 is fairly old at this point, it is still a useful Bitcoin miner you can buy at a decent price. You can use Antminer S5, S7, S9 for Bitcoin mining.

If you are looking to mine altcoins, you might look into other Bitmain Antminers such as Bitmain Antminer E9 for Ethereum, or AntMiner L3 for Litecoin.

You can compare the hardware and functionality differences of different mining rigs on Amazon.

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