NerdOctaxe Hydro | 14 TH/s

The NerdOctaxe Hydro uses the same base as the air-cooled version – eight BM1370 ASICs, AxeOS as firmware, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, configuration in the browser – and swaps the cooling. A water block sits on the chips with coolant running through it. Quoted figures are 14 TH/s at 220 W, supplied by a 12 V, 20 A power supply.

How loud the result gets is decided not by the board but by your loop: radiator area, pump, tubing and the fans on the radiator. A blanket dB figure would be misleading for this design. Power draw, on the other hand, is fixed: 220 W come to roughly 158 kWh a month, so about €44.40 a month at €0.28/kWh.

Solo mining is essentially buying tickets: 14 TH/s means fourteen trillion attempts per second at hitting the next valid block. If it lands on your worker, 3.125 BTC of block reward plus every fee from the transactions in that block go undivided to your address. The probability stays small – the only fixed part is the stake of about €44.40 of electricity a month, while your hash rate helps secure the network. How that works is covered in our solo mining guide.

• Heat gets transported: the water block picks it up at the ASICs and releases it at the radiator – over an area that would never fit on the board.
• Large area, slow fans: a properly sized radiator gets by with low fan speeds. That is the headroom a small fan above a heatsink does not have.
• Steady over long runs: feedback from continuous operation mostly describes one thing – temperatures stay where they were after start-up, even many hours later.
• As open as the small boards: pool, worker, address, frequency and voltage stay with you in AxeOS, with no manufacturer account and no service in between.

The box contains the miner with hydro cooling and water block, the matching power supply, a 3D-printed stand and a quick start guide. Temperature and noise, however, are decided by the build around it: radiator, pump, fans and how you route the tubing.

That is also where the work is. Several customers write that the first balancing of performance and cooling took time and that they would have liked a more detailed guide for the loop. So plan an afternoon, test the loop for leaks without load before the first long run, and pick a place where escaping water cannot damage anything.

That applies to the software side: network and pool are set up quickly, and the procedure is in the NerdQaxe setup guide. The real time goes into filling and bleeding the loop beforehand.

For miners with experience who are extending their setup deliberately: 14 TH/s in a build you understand yourself, on your own pool or solo pool. If you have built a water loop for a PC before, you will feel at home – customers usually name a technical shelf or a separate room as the location.

It is less suitable as a first device, when there is no room for radiator and tubing, when water next to electronics is a deal breaker, or when about €44.40 of electricity a month is not part of the plan. In that case the NerdQaxe++ Hydro at 100 W is the smaller entry, and the air-cooled NerdOctaxe delivers almost the same hash rate without a loop.

Besides the device and power supply you need a socket, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi at the location, pool credentials and your own Bitcoin address. For the loop, add radiator, pump, fans, tubing and coolant.

A permanent location matters too. A loop that is sealed once and not constantly rebuilt is the biggest contribution to quiet continuous operation.

There is little to change on the miner itself – the levers are in the cooling build and in the infrastructure around your mining.

• Cooling for fans and components that push temperature and noise down further.
• Bitcoin nodes if you want to build your block templates yourself instead of taking them from a pool.

The NerdOctaxe Hydro is the choice when 14 TH/s should live in your home and the heat should go where it bothers nobody. The requirements are a leak-free loop, a permanent spot and the willingness to fine-tune at the start.