GekkoScience Compac F
A USB stick miner from the pre-Bitaxe era. It needs a host computer running cgminer and a powered USB hub, which makes it fiddlier than any modern board, but it is still the smallest and quietest way to point real SHA-256 hashrate at a pool.
Typical street price, excluding shipping and duties.
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Specs verified 5 Aug 2026. Source
What it costs, what it might win
Running costs across the site use this rate. The default is a typical household tariff — check your own bill for the real number.
The odds, honestly
At the current network difficulty of 1.262e+14, a GekkoScience Compac F is expected to find a block roughly once every 42.95K years. That is an average across infinite attempts, not a countdown — a block could come tomorrow, or never.
If you pooled instead
Point the same device at a normal mining pool and you would receive the statistical average steadily instead of gambling on it: about $0.3956 a month, against $1.49 of electricity. At your electricity rate that loses money — every 20 sats mined costs $0.0490 in power. Buying the same BTC on an exchange would be cheaper.
Full specifications
- ASIC chip
- 1× BM1397
- Stock hashrate
- 400 GH/s
- Tuned hashrate
- 600 GH/s
- Stock power
- 12 W
- Tuned power
- 20 W
- Efficiency
- 30.0 J/TH
- Tuned efficiency
- 33.3 J/TH
- Power input
- USB 5V (powered hub required)
- PSU included
- No
- Connectivity
- USB
- Noise
- ~30 dB
- Dimensions
- 90 × 25 × 20 mm
- Weight
- 0.05 kg
- Form factor
- usb
- Firmware
- cgminer / cpuminer host software
- Open source
- No
- Solo mining
- Yes
- Pool mining
- Yes
- Built-in full node
- No
- Released
- 2021
The verdict
Best for: USB miner enthusiasts and multi-stick farm builds.
Strengths
- Pocket-sized and nearly silent
- No dedicated PSU
- Well-documented, long-lived product
Trade-offs
- Requires an always-on host computer — count its power too
- 30 J/TH on 2019-era silicon
- A Gamma 602 is 3x faster and self-contained for the same money
About GekkoScience
Long-running maker of USB stick miners. Tiny hashrate by modern standards, but they draw a few watts, need no dedicated PSU and are the cheapest way to point real SHA-256 hashrate at a solo pool.
gekkoscience.com →