ASIC Miner Accessories: A Spare Parts Guide for Whatsminer and Antminer

"Accessories" is the trade term for the swappable parts around the hash boards — the control board, the transfer board and cables, the power supply, the fans. They are the parts you can change in minutes with a screwdriver, and they are where most diagnosis should start. This guide covers how to identify each one on Whatsminer and Antminer hardware, which versions interchange, and how many to keep on the shelf.

Why accessories come first

Components fail, and every hour a machine is down is hashrate you don't get back. Because an accessory can be swapped quickly, swapping it is the first diagnostic step: if a unit comes back to life with a known-good control board or PSU, you've found the fault without touching a hash board. If it doesn't, you've ruled the accessory out and the hash board goes to the bench. That only works if the spare is already in the building — which is what the 4% rule at the end of this guide is about.

Control boards

The control board is the brain: it runs the firmware, holds the network connection, and tells each hash board what to work on. It is also the part with the most variants, and the variant is printed on the board itself.

Whatsminer

Whatsminer control boards come in four families, each with numbered sub-variants. Within the H616 family, air-cooled, hydro and immersion machines use different boards — so match the cooling type as well as the family when you order a spare.

The family and variant are silk-screened on the board — CB2_V8, CB4_V10, CB6_V10 and so on — so a clear photo of the board is enough to identify a replacement.

Antminer

Antminer machines have used four control-board platforms: BeagleBone, Amlogic A113D (recognisable by its microSD port), Xilinx 7007, and CVITEK. Which one a machine carries depends on the model and when it was built. As with Whatsminer, the board is labelled, and a spare has to match.

Transfer boards and cables

Between the control board and the hash boards sits the data path. On a Whatsminer that is a flat ribbon cable and a small transfer board the hash boards plug into. On an Antminer it is a set of individual signal cables — one per hash board — plus the power leads from the PSU. These are the cheapest parts in the machine and a common cause of a "missing" hash board: reseating or replacing a cable is a thirty-second test.

Hash boards

The hash boards carry the ASIC chips and do the actual mining. They are not accessories in the swap-and-go sense — a failed board usually needs bench repair — but you need to be able to describe one accurately.

• Chips are grouped into domains (Whatsminer) or groups (Antminer). A domain holds 2 to 6 ASICs on Whatsminer boards and 2 to 5 on Antminer boards, and the count varies by model.
• Antminer chips are labelled BM followed by the chip number. An S19j Pro board, for example, carries 42 groups of 3 — 126 chips.
• On older Whatsminer boards, the ASIC number printed on the board may not match the number the test-fixture firmware reports. Newer boards are numbered correctly from first chip to last. Confirm the physical position before you desolder anything.

Power supplies

The PSU converts mains power to the voltages the boards need. Both manufacturers have several versions in circulation, and not all of them interchange — this is where a wrong spare wastes the most time.

Whatsminer

• Air-cooled, 12 V: P21D, P221B, P221C, P231B — these interchange with one another.
• Air-cooled, 14 V: P21E, P222B, P222C, P232B — interchangeable within the group. Do not cross the 12 V and 14 V groups.
• P732A (14 V) — the supply for M61-series machines.
• Hydro: P564B, P564Y, P566Z.
• Immersion: P463A, P463B, P467A, P467B, P663B.

Antminer

Bitmain's APW naming encodes the output range. In APW121215 the last four digits mean 12–15 V; in APW121417 they mean 14–17 V. APW12A is the 277 V-input variant, and APW171215 is a further model in the family. The compatibility rules matter more than the model number:

• APW121215 a, b and c are interoperable with each other (no voltage feedback).
• APW121215 d, e and f are interoperable with each other (with voltage feedback).
• A d/e/f unit can replace an a/b/c unit after a firmware upgrade. An a/b/c unit cannot replace d/e/f.
• APW121417 comes in a and b. b replaces a; a does not replace b.

How many spares to keep

Our recommendation from the training program: keep a minimum of 4% in accessories per 100 units on site — control boards, PSUs, cables and fans, in roughly the proportion they fail. For a 1,000-machine facility that is 40 sets of spares, which sounds like a lot until the first PSU batch fault takes down a row on a Friday.

Kept in the building, spares turn a multi-day outage into a swap. They also make the diagnosis above possible: without a known-good part to try, every fault looks like a hash-board fault.

Not sure what you're looking at?

Send us a photo of the board label or the PSU sticker and we'll tell you what it is and whether we have it. Contact us — and if the part turns out to be a hash board, we repair those too.