Quick Comparison of the Goldshell KD BOX PRO and Goldshell KD BOX II Kadena ASIC Miners

Goldshell’s new KD BOX II Kadena (KDA) ASIC miners are getting into the hands of more and more small and home miners and we’ve also picked up one (now also a WiFi version is available) and have decided to do a quick comparison between the KD BOX II and the older KD BOX PRO model. The older KD BOX PRO model was rated at 2.6 TH/s with 230 Watts of power usage or 0.088 W/GHs and the new KD BOX II is rated at 5 TH/s at 400 Watts of power usage or 0.08 W/GHs or with other words more powerful and just slightly more efficient (there is also a more efficient low-power mode with 3.5 TH/s at 260 Watts). The advantage of the new model is the higher hashrate in a slightly bigger size compared to the older model as you can see from the photo with just a tiny bit of power efficiency improvement. Interestingly enough Goldshell’s website does cite the same size of the case for both miners and contradicting numbers regarding their weight, well the new KD BOX II is clearly a bit larger and weights more. The noise level cited in the specifications is also the same, though the new model definitely is a bit noisier with just a few decibels (can vary greatly on conditions you use it at), but nevertheless still runs pretty silent and is fine for home use.

Just like with the previous model, the new KD BOX II does get pretty hot inside as the miner is designed to run silently, while keeping the operating temperatures of the ASIC chips inside pretty high, making the new devices great for use as home heaters as well with their 400W of power usage… especially if you pick a few. The new KD BOX II miner however does get hotter as expected both on the inside and the outside as you can see on the comparison thermal image with an average of about 10 degrees Celsius.

The increased power consumption to almost double the one of the previous model and adding a second 6-pin PCI-E power connector doesn’t help much in keeping the power cables much cooler. We are not too keen on the idea on pulling 200W or even more over a 6-pin PCI-E power cable even if it is a thicker good quality one (16 AWG), let alone using cheaper and lower quality 18AWG or even 20 AWG (this could be dangerous). So, good quality power cables can easily get to slightly over 40 degrees C on both the old and the new models…

The real issue with the new Goldshell KD BOX II Kadena ASIC miners however is not the fact that they are slightly larger, hotter and not very much more power efficient, after all their price per TH/s is lower than that of the previous gen when it came out. The real problem is that they are coming on the market at a time when the new generation of large scale powerful KDA ASIC miners are also getting deployed such as the Bitmain Antminer KA3 ASIC that does 166 TH/s with 3154 Watts of power usage… that is 4 times more power efficient compared to the KD BOX II and a lot more hashrate.

All this new hashrate coming from more efficient miners getting deployed on the KDA network is driving the amount of new mined Kadena coins with the small home miners down quite fast each new day (network difficulty is skyrocketing). So, unless we see a good increase in price of KDA, the purchase of a new Goldshell KD BOX II might be pretty pointless by the time you get the device actually delivered to you, thus you should think carefully if it is actually a good idea to go for these new miners. And going for the older KD BOX PRO or even the previous KD BOX miners might be an even worse idea at this point, even if they do give them to you for free.