A dedicated mining platform
One of the best things about getting into cryptocurrency mining is the degree of choice you have when it comes to managing your rigs. Once you gain a certain amount of experience, you might start looking into alternatives to mining through windows, as it’s multipurpose nature can be occasionally troublesome for miners.
HiveOS might just be the alternative you’re looking for, and this review will tell you all you need to know about it, so let’s get started.
What does HiveOS offer?
To put it briefly, HiveOS allows you to keep track of all rigs and ASICs in real time and monitor hash rates, online status, any potential errors in GPU farms, allows you to reboot them, manage wallets (configuration files) and overclock both AMD and Nvidia GPUs through a web based interface. However, let’s get more in depth with its features.
- A smooth and intuitive graphical interface.
- You can monitor the performance of your farm and will get Telegram notifications if any GPU errors arise, or if hashrates get too low or if electricity consumption is too high.
- Driver errors, faulty miner issues or hashrate drops are common. HiveOS allows you to reboot rigs in case any of these issues arise. Additionally, you can set up trusted accounts for different users.
- The ability to run two miners at the same time, such as miners aimed at AMD cards and miners aimed at Nvidia ones.
- The ability to freely switch miners and wallets in a quick and intuitive manner.
- An HTTP API.
- Easy and fast GPU overclocking.
- Support for Watchdogs.
Additionally, HiveOS comes with most of the popular miners preinstalled, such as:
- Claymore Dual Ethereum Miner.
- Claymore Zcash AMD GPU Miner.
- Claymore CryptoNote AMD GPU Miner.
- Ethminer
- Ccminer and its forks.
- Sgminer and its forks.
- Bminer Equihash MINER.
- Dstm’s Zcash Cuda miner.
- EWBF’s CUDA Zcash miner.
- Optiminer
- LolMiner – mnx.
- XMR Stak AMD Nvidia CPU.
- XMR Stak CPU.
- XMRig.
- Cpuminer – opt.
It’s also worth mentioning that HiveOS offers a referral program that lets you earn up to 10% of gross payments for referring a friend, so check that out if you have other friends interested in the platform.
What does the community have to say about it
So far, the reception to HiveOS has been quite positive. It’s relatively easy to set up, runs smoothly, gets constant updates with the occasional new feature and bug fixes. We’ll have to see how it evolves over the years, but so far it’s an excellent choice for someone looking for an alternative to Windows, ethOS or SMOS.
For more discussions about HiveOS, you can check out the bitcointalk forums, the GPU mining subreddit, and even HiveOS’ own community discord.
Pricing Model
Being such a young platform, their current pricing model is really fair. Essentially, the OS is free to use for up to 3 rigs. After that, you’ll have to pay a very modest monthly subscription of $3 (£2.16) per month for each additional rig you add to your mining operation.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Quite easy to set up and use, and can even be booted from a flash drive.
- Smooth, intuitive and friendly GUI.
- Allows you to manage every detail of each one of your mining rigs.
- Allows you to dual mine.
- It’s free to use if you only have 3 rigs mining.
- You can remotely access your rigs through OpenVPN.
- It’s constantly getting updates and new features.
Cons
- Being a relatively new OS, bugs or errors can happen.
- Despite being intuitive, it can still be confusing and overwhelming for a beginner due to the level of customization and fine tuning it allows.
As you can see, there aren’t many cons when we talk about Hive OS because so far it’s proven to be a great choice with plenty of room for improvement.
To sum things up
HiveOS has proven to be a really solid choice for both experienced users and newcomers alike. It has all the features you’d need to manage your farm, a fair pricing model and is constantly improving. At the very least, it’s worth checking it out and maybe testing it in one of your rigs; you might be surprised by the results.
About HiveOS
Similar to Awesome Miner, HiveOS is a tool that helps you meticulously manage all aspects of your mining operation, except for the fact that HiveOS is a Linux/Ubuntu based OS that is dedicated exclusively to mining rather than a tool that you just use on Windows. At first glance this might not look like a big difference, but it actually is.
Since it’s dedicated to mining, HiveOS performs more smoothly than Windows ever would since Windows acts as an all-purpose OS. Now, this doesn’t mean that you can’t mine with Windows at all, but setting things up right might take longer to configure and optimize properly.
