ZeusMiner Blizzard Review – Checking All Boxes , Great Bang For Your Buck

Today is such a wonderful day. Not just because I had a great day with my co-owner of CryptoArticles, Serge Schouterden (we went to Aachen in Germany), but also because I received my ZeusMiner Blizzard! Wooo!

ZeusMiner was kind enough to give my order some extra shipping priority, so I could do a review (consisting of multiple articles) about their Blizzard Scrypt ASIC miner. It only took two and a half days to arrive from Shenzhen (China) to Hasselt (Belgium).

Delivery was handled by UPS, and they do work fast to be honest. I only have one gripe with UPS, and that’s maybe not even entirely their fault. 61 Euro Import VAT on a $240 device. Are you f’ing kidding me? Seriously?

Anyway, this is not about extra costs, so let’s get to business. The ZeusMiner Blizzard was well packages (see images below) and can withstand some abuse while in transit with the courier. Big props to ZeusMiner for getting that part right (and the others too, but we’ll get to that!).

When you unbox the ZeusMiner Blizzard, or any of their other Scrypt ASICs, you will find a power cable, PSU, mini USB to USB cable, and the device (in this case, Blizzard) itself. No manual or software is included, but that didn’t have me worried.

The one thing you need to take into consideration is that, if you are not in the US like myself, you will need a socket switching plug to convert the US to EU/UK/whatever power socket pins. Luckily, I ordered one of those when getting my Chromebook.

Once plugged in, you still need some additional software before you can start using your new ZeusMiner device. First of all, Windows will not install the device automatically, because it won’t find the correct drivers. Don’t panic when this happens.

Download the drivers here and install these depending on your operating system (x86 or x64). Your ZeusMiner Scrypt ASIC will be recognized as a “Silicon Labs CP210x USB to UART Bridge(COM3)” device. (the COM port might have a different number for you, write this down!)

Now all you need is a version of CGMiner that will actually mine Scrypt, and use your new ZeusMiner Scrypt ASIC hardware. This version of CGMiner can be downloaded here , which you can just extract to any folder you prefer.

In your extracted CGMiner folder, you will find a cgminer.bat file. Edit this file in Notepad/Wordpad/whatever application you use. Only change the server, port, username, password. Also make sure the COM port in the .bat file has the correct number (COM3 in my case).

That’s all there is to it really. Fire up the cgminer.bat file, and you are up and away! My ZeusMiner Blizzard has been mining at the CAIx Multipool for 15 minutes now, and these are the current stats :

(5s) : 0.000 (avg) 1.330 Mh/s  A: 365 R : 2 HW : 24  U : 19.3/m  WU : 1278.9/m

I’ll tweak the settings a bit to reduce the HW errors, it probably has to do with the ltc-clock setting, where 300 is normal, but mine is currently at 328, so I’ll need to find the sweet spot for my Blizzard. I’ll keep you guys updated on that tomorrow.

Below, you will find some pictures of the packaging, the hardware, what’s included in the box, and a screenshot of my hashrate. More news will follow tomorrow, once it has been running for quite some time.