Cryptocurrency mining has made quite a dent in the hardware industry in the last couple of years. Motherboard manufacturers have built special platforms for mining rigs, video card vendors have put together specially-designed “mining edition” video cards, and even chassis & PSUs vendors have gotten into the game with mining-focused designs. Obviously, not everyone wants to build mining rigs themselves, hence there is a meaningful market for companies who offer turnkey mining solutions. One of such companies is Comino, a multi-national firm registered in Cyprus with offices in China, Latvia, and Russia, which produces liquid-cooled turnkey mining rigs that look to be quite unique.
The company brought two of its key products to Computex — the Comino Object N1 designed for homes and offices, and 4U systems aimed at large cryptomining farms and offered for remote rent by Comino itself. Both types of machines use the company’s own liquid-cooled solutions and run proprietary software to ensure stable operation, predictable power consumption, and a guaranteed hash rate.
The Comino Object N1 is a factory-built system that looks like a regular desktop (taking some pages from the Voodoo Omen), yet packs eight NVIDIA GP106-based graphics cards from GIGABYTE. The mining rig is a completely sealed solution that only needs to be plugged to a power outlet and connected to the Internet. The Object N1 does not need to be set up, as all the management can be done using a special program for smartphones. Similarly, since Comino is focusing on a low-impact/low-hassle design, the Object N1 is also designed to be rather quiet despite the TDP, with the idea being that it can run 24/7 without disturbing anyone around (pictures over at Comino’s web site depict cats sitting on a working N1 machine). It is noteworthy that while the Object N1 uses a proprietary cooling system and software, it is actually based on off-the-shelf components, which is understandable as this was the first product by Comino and the company did not have access to custom hardware last year.
Meanwhile the 4U machine from Comino is a completely different thing aimed at large mining farms. Each 4U system is based on a custom ASUS motherboard, custom PCIe risers and packs 16 of the earlier mentioned GP106 GIGABYTE cards. One of the key features of this rig is Comino’s liquid cooling system comprising of proprietary water blocks, an external heat exchanger, and special tubing that allows technicians to remove just one 4U system from a rack without leaks if a GPU fails. Each water block can take away up to 450 W of heat, meaning that one block can handle two 220 W GPUs. Right now the GP106 GPUs that Comino uses dissipate up to 120 W, but if it manages to obtain more powerful GPUs, it will be able to install them without changing the cooling setup.
The 4U systems from Comino will be available for purchase by owners of large mining farms. Meanwhile, the company is also operating a cloud hosting program that rents out time on these servers to everyone interested in mining. For example, a 40 MH/s system costs €644 a year. For customers willing to take financial risks and unwilling to invest in hardware, Comino’s cloud mining program offers a potential alternative.