Bitaxe Hex 1300: 8.4 TH/s, Liquid Cooled

The Bitaxe Hex 1300 puts six BM1370 chips on one board under an all-in-one liquid cooler: 8.4 TH/s at 140 W, or 16 J/TH. That is essentially the efficiency of a single-chip Gamma at seven times the hashrate, for roughly half the cost per terahash. The specifications hold up under scrutiny. The open question is the pump.

This is also the first Bitaxe-class device whose odds on a second chain fit inside a human lifetime, which changes what it is for. Here are the numbers, the comparisons against the rest of the lineup, and the trade-offs nobody selling one will lead with.

Key takeaways

• 8.4 TH/s at 140 W, about 16 J/TH. Overclocked figures are 11.016 TH/s at 191 W, roughly 18 J/TH, with ASIC temperature holding near 60 °C in both states.
• Roughly $53.57 per TH/s at the $449.99 board price, against $100.00 for seven Bitaxe Gammas reaching the same hashrate.
• One Bitcoin block expected every 2,045 years at stock, or 1,560 years overclocked. On Bitcoin Cash the same device expects a block roughly every 7 years.
• Genuinely open. The design lives at bitaxeorg/BitaxeGammaHex under CERN-OHL-S-2.0, with full KiCad schematics and PCB files published.
• The 1300 series is not yet in the official series map. bitaxeorg/foss-miner-list documented 10x through 80x when read on 7 August 2026. This is newer than the index.
• A sealed pump is a moving part with finite life, and that is the real difference between this and an air-cooled board, not the noise figure.

What is actually on the board

The published design gives a clearer picture than the product listing, and it is worth reading because the architecture explains the efficiency.

Source: bitaxeorg/BitaxeGammaHex README, read 7 August 2026.

The two-domain arrangement matters. Splitting six chips into two groups of three lets the regulator work at a higher voltage and lower current than driving all six in parallel, which cuts resistive losses in the delivery path. It is the same reasoning behind series-connected hashboards in industrial machines, applied at desk scale. That is where the 16 J/TH comes from despite six chips sharing one board.

For what the BM1370 is and where it sits in a decade of Bitmain silicon, see our ASIC chip evolution guide.

Performance, as published

The manufacturer attaches a tolerance of plus or minus 15 percent to every figure in that table, which is unusually honest labelling and should be taken literally. At the low end of tolerance you are looking at 7.14 TH/s, at the high end 9.66 TH/s. The silicon lottery is real and applies to all six chips independently.

The overclock figures are the more interesting half. Note that ASIC temperature is quoted at the same 60 °C in both states, which is what a 300 W-rated cold plate carrying a 191 W load should do. The thermal ceiling is not the constraint here.

The power supply is. The included Mean Well GST280A12-C6P is rated 252 W continuous. At the 140 W default that is 56% load with 112 W spare. At the 191 W overclock it is 76% load with 61 W spare. Pushing beyond the published overclock puts you into the last quarter of a PSU’s rating, which is where efficiency drops and ripple rises. If you intend to go further, budget for a larger supply rather than assuming the included one stretches.

The odds, which is what actually matters

Solo mining probability depends on two numbers: your hashrate and the network difficulty. Nothing else.

Calculated as difficulty multiplied by 2³² divided by hashrate, using BTC difficulty of 126.23 trillion and BCH difficulty of 430.03 billion, both read in early August 2026. Difficulty moves, so check the live Network Radar before planning around any figure here.

The Bitcoin column is a lottery ticket and should be read as one. The Bitcoin Cash column is the story. Seven years is not a jackpot fantasy, it is a plan. It is the first point on the open-source hardware ladder where a single device gives a realistic expectation of finding a block during ownership, and where variance stops meaning “never” and starts meaning “eventually, if you keep it running.”

That framing needs the honest counterweight: a BCH block was worth roughly $668 in early August, against roughly $202,000 for a Bitcoin block. Our best coins to solo mine page covers why easy blocks and valuable blocks pull in opposite directions, and the Poisson maths explains why “expected in 7 years” does not mean “in 7 years.”

For the other three supported chains the arithmetic is the same but the inputs move faster, and eCash adds a wrinkle: its Real-Time Targeting rule makes a block harder immediately after the previous one, so a naive block-time estimate overstates your odds. Our eCash RTT explainer covers the formula. Use the block odds calculator for current numbers on all five.

Cost per terahash across the lineup

This is where the Hex makes its strongest case, and it is a case about density rather than efficiency.

Board prices as listed in early August 2026, excluding power supplies, stands and shipping. Multi-unit setups need one PSU each, which widens the gap further.

Read the two rightmost columns together. The Hex is not the most efficient way to reach 8.4 TH/s — seven Gammas draw 14 W less and hold 15.0 J/TH. What the Hex buys is everything else: one purchase, one power supply, one network address, one thermal system, one device to update. At $390 less than the Gamma cluster it is close to half the cost for a 1.7 J/TH efficiency penalty, which at typical residential rates is about $1.50 a month.

The Duo 650 deserves the attention it gets in that table. At $117.98 for 1.63 TH/s from two BM1370 chips in a standard Gamma footprint, it is the best value in the single-board range and the closest thing to competition the Hex has on price per terahash.

Why liquid, and what it costs you

The cooling is the headline feature and the least examined one.

The AIO unit pairs a pure copper micro-fin cold plate rated for 300 W with an RGB-lit radiator fan. Rated headroom is more than double the 140 W default draw, which is why the overclock holds temperature. Quoted noise is 30 dB, low enough for a room you sleep in, and that is a genuine advantage over six-chip air-cooled boards that need 80 mm fans running hard. Our cooling comparison covers the general trade-offs across air, hydro and immersion.

Here is the part to think about. A sealed all-in-one cooler contains a pump. A pump is a moving part with a finite service life, and it is the only component in the thermal path with no redundancy.

The failure modes are not equivalent. When a fan degrades on an air-cooled board, airflow falls gradually and the firmware throttles. When a pump stops, coolant circulation stops, and 140 W of ASIC heat has nowhere to go. Sealed AIO units also cannot be topped up, so permeation losses over years are not serviceable.

None of this makes the device a bad buy. It makes temperature monitoring a requirement rather than a nicety. The board reports dual ASIC temperatures through AxeOS, so set an alert and check it. If you run a fleet, the same logic that applies to any 24/7 hardware applies here: our troubleshooting guide covers thermal fault patterns and what the logs look like when a board is cooking.

Two smaller notes. The RGB lighting is always on with no switch or software toggle — the manufacturer says so plainly, which is more than most disclose, but a bedroom miner should know. And at 140 W the device puts out about 478 BTU/h, rising to 652 BTU/h overclocked, which is real heat you will feel in a small room. Our hashrate heating page covers when that is a feature.

Which Bitaxe Hex is this, exactly?

Three different boards carry the Hex name, and searching for one will show you all three. They are not variants of the same product.

Two practical consequences follow.

The Ultra Hex is the one to be careful with. Its repository at bitaxeorg/ultraHex carries an explicit unfinished warning, and states that revision v304 has a known problem with the Vcore regulator requiring a workaround documented at the bottom of the readme. It is also described by at least one major seller as a legacy model no longer in production. Older listings and older reviews describing a 3 TH/s Hex are describing that board, not this one.

Firmware is not interchangeable across the Hex family. The 70x boards are maintained separately from bitaxeorg and require their own firmware builds, and flashing the wrong image is a documented way to break sensors or worse. The 1300 uses esp-miner directly, with Gamma Hex support living on a dedicated branch rather than necessarily in every mainline release, so check which build your unit shipped with before pressing update. Our guide to spotting a bad clone covers reading the board version and firmware string, and why a version ending in -dirty is worth a second look.

Who this is actually for

Three profiles, honestly drawn.

1. Someone consolidating a cluster. If you already run four or more single-board miners and are tired of the power strips, the IP addresses and the firmware updates, this replaces all of it at lower cost per terahash. That is the clearest case.
2. Someone who wants a realistic shot on a second chain. Seven years expected on Bitcoin Cash is the reason to buy this rather than three Gammas. If your plan is Bitcoin only, the density argument still works but the odds stay in lottery territory.
3. Someone who needs it quiet. At 30 dB in a living space, liquid cooling solves a problem that six air-cooled chips cannot.

It is a weaker fit if you want maximum efficiency per watt, where a Gamma cluster still wins on paper. It is a weaker fit if you want field-proven hardware, because this is new: the design repository had six commits and a single star when we checked, and the product listing carried no customer reviews. And it is a weaker fit if a 90-day warranty on a $450 device with a pump reads as thin to you, which is a reasonable position.

On expected value, be clear-eyed. At 8.4 TH/s the expected Bitcoin return is about 27 US cents a day, or roughly $99 a year, against $12 to $36 a month in electricity depending on your rate. Solo mining at home is not an income strategy at any hashrate you can put on a desk, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. What it is, is the cheapest way to hold a real, verifiable, non-custodial ticket in the same draw as the industrial farms.