How to Read Your Miner's Stats: Hashrate & More

Once your ASIC miner is running, you'll have access to a web dashboard — either through the miner's built-in interface or your mining pool's reporting page. Both surfaces show the same core metrics: hashrate, temperature, fan speed, accepted shares, and rejected shares.

Most new miners glance at these numbers, confirm something is happening, and move on. That works fine until something goes wrong — and by the time a problem is obvious, it's often been silently affecting performance or hardware health for days.

This guide explains what each stat actually measures, what normal looks like, and what to do when numbers fall outside expected ranges.

Hashrate: Your Miner's Core Output Metric

Hashrate is the number of SHA-256 calculations your miner completes per second. It's the primary measure of how much computational work your hardware is contributing to the Bitcoin network, and it directly determines your share of pool payouts.

Hashrate is expressed in multiples of hashes per second:

MH/s — Megahashes per second (millions). Seen on very low-power devices.
GH/s — Gigahashes per second (billions). Common on small desktop miners.
TH/s — Terahashes per second (trillions). Standard unit for most ASICs.
PH/s — Petahashes per second (quadrillions). Used for large fleets.

Nominal vs Real-Time Hashrate

Your miner has a rated (nominal) hashrate — the figure on the spec sheet. Your dashboard shows two hashrate figures: real-time (or instantaneous) hashrate and average hashrate over a rolling window (typically 10 minutes, 1 hour, or 24 hours).

Real-time hashrate fluctuates constantly. This is normal — SHA-256 hashing is probabilistic, and short-term variance is expected. What you want to watch is the average hashrate over time. If your 10-minute average is consistently sitting 10–15% or more below the rated spec, that's worth investigating.

What Causes Hashrate to Drop?

Thermal throttling — The miner reduces performance to protect chips from heat damage. Usually accompanied by high temperature readings (see below).
Failed hash boards — Most ASICs have multiple hash boards. If one board fails or degrades, overall hashrate drops proportionally. A miner with three hash boards losing one will typically drop to roughly two-thirds of rated output.
Chip degradation — Over time, individual ASIC chips can fail. This produces a gradual, steady decline in hashrate rather than a sudden drop.
Power delivery issues — Insufficient or unstable power input can cause the miner to run below rated performance.
Firmware or configuration issues — Running the wrong power profile or outdated firmware can affect output.

For guidance on firmware and whether updating makes sense for your setup, see: What Is Mining Firmware and Should You Flash Yours?

Temperature: The Most Important Health Indicator

Temperature is the single most important metric to monitor for hardware longevity. ASIC chips run hot by design — but there are clear thresholds beyond which heat causes accelerated degradation or outright failure.

Your dashboard will typically show temperatures for each hash board (sometimes called PCB temperature or chip temperature) and may also report inlet air temperature separately.

Normal Operating Temperature Ranges

Acceptable chip temperatures vary between manufacturers and models, but as a general guide:

Under 70°C — Ideal. Your cooling setup is working well.
70°C–80°C — Normal operating range for most ASICs under load.
80°C–85°C — Elevated. Acceptable for short periods but warrants attention to airflow and ambient temperature.
Above 85°C — High. Most miners will throttle performance at this range. Sustained operation above 85°C shortens chip lifespan.
Above 90°C — Critical. Immediate action required — check fan operation, airflow, and ambient temperature.

Always cross-reference with your specific miner's documentation, as Bitmain, MicroBT, and Canaan each publish their own recommended operating ranges.

Why Australian Conditions Require Extra Attention

Australian summer ambient temperatures — particularly in WA, QLD, and NSW — can push poorly ventilated mining environments well above 35°C. At that ambient temperature, even a miner with working fans may struggle to keep chip temperatures in the safe range. If you're running miners through an Australian summer, monitoring temperature becomes especially critical.

For a full guide to thermal management in Australian conditions, see: Thermal Management for ASIC Miners: Cooling in Australian Summer

Fan Speed

Fan speed (reported in RPM) is closely related to temperature. Most miners automatically ramp fan speed in response to chip temperature — if temperatures are rising, fans should be spinning faster. If you see high temperatures alongside low or unchanged fan RPM, suspect a fan fault. If one fan is reporting significantly lower RPM than others on the same unit, it may be failing.

Accepted Shares: Confirming Your Work Is Being Counted

When your miner finds a valid partial solution to the mining puzzle — called a share — it submits that share to your mining pool. The pool verifies it and, if valid, records it as an accepted share. Accepted shares are how pools track each miner's proportional contribution to determine payouts.

Your accepted share count should be steadily climbing while your miner runs. The rate at which shares are accepted is set by your pool's difficulty target, which is usually adjusted automatically to generate roughly one share submission every few seconds per miner.

A rising accepted share count confirms:

Your miner is hashing and submitting work
Your pool connection is active
Your pool account is receiving credit for your hashrate

Rejected Shares: What They Mean and When to Worry

A rejected share is a share your miner submitted to the pool that the pool did not accept as valid. A small number of rejected shares is completely normal and expected — the question is what percentage of total submissions are being rejected.

Normal Rejection Rate

A healthy miner connecting to a well-configured pool should see a rejection rate below 1–2%. Some pools and configurations run at effectively 0% for extended periods. A rejection rate consistently above 2–3% warrants investigation.

Why Shares Get Rejected

Stale shares — The most common cause. When a new block is found on the Bitcoin network, all work in progress toward the previous block becomes stale. Shares submitted after a new block is found are rejected. Higher network latency between your miner and the pool increases stale share rate.
Hardware errors — Faulty or degraded ASIC chips can produce incorrect hash computations that fail pool validation. A rising rejection rate alongside stable latency often points to chip-level hardware problems.
Pool connectivity issues — Intermittent connection drops can cause share submission delays, increasing stale shares.
Overclocking — Pushing a miner beyond its rated performance increases hardware error rate, which typically shows up as more rejected shares before other symptoms appear.

Hardware Error Rate (HW Errors)

Some dashboards show a separate hardware error (HW) counter distinct from rejected shares. Hardware errors are computations the miner's own chips flagged as invalid before even submitting to the pool. A non-zero HW error count is normal in small amounts. A rapidly climbing HW error count — especially if correlated with a hashrate drop — is a strong signal of chip degradation or thermal stress.

For guidance on overclocking and how it affects error rates and hardware health, see: How to Overclock Your ASIC Safely Without Voiding the Warranty

Pool Latency and Connection Status

Most miner dashboards display the connection status and latency (ping time in milliseconds) to your configured mining pool. This is worth checking when troubleshooting elevated rejected shares.

Under 50ms — Excellent. Minimal stale share contribution from latency.
50ms–150ms — Acceptable for most setups.
Above 150ms — Elevated. Consider switching to a geographically closer pool server. Most major pools (Antpool, Foundry USA, F2Pool, ViaBTC) offer Asia-Pacific stratum endpoints that typically deliver lower latency for Australian connections than US or European servers.

Power Consumption

Higher-end ASIC dashboards — and third-party monitoring platforms — may also report real-time power draw in watts. This is useful for:

Confirming the miner is running at its intended power profile
Calculating your actual electricity cost in real time
Detecting unusual power draw that might indicate a PSU or board issue

If your miner is drawing significantly more power than its rated spec without a corresponding increase in hashrate, something is wrong — common causes include a failing hash board drawing excess current or a PSU fault.

For context on how power draw maps to profitability at Australian electricity rates, see: Home Mining in Australia: What Electricity Rate Makes It Profitable?

Reading Stats on Specific Miners

The layout of the dashboard varies between manufacturers, but the underlying metrics are consistent. Here's where to find the key stats on the most common ASICs in our range:

Bitmain Antminer (S19K Pro, S21, S21 Pro)

Bitmain's web interface (accessible at the miner's local IP) shows real-time and average hashrate, per-board temperatures, fan RPM, pool connection status, and accepted/rejected share counts on the main dashboard. The Miner Status tab is the primary monitoring view. Hardware error counts appear in the Kernel Log for deeper diagnostics.

MicroBT WhatsMiner (M30S, M31S+)

WhatsMiner's interface organises stats across a Real-Time Status panel showing hashrate and temperature per board, and a Miner Configuration section for pool and power settings. MicroBT also provides the WhatsMiner Tool desktop application for fleet-level monitoring.

Canaan Avalon (Nano 3S, Avalon Q, A1246, A1346)

Canaan miners connect via the AvalonMiner Controller or directly via IP. The dashboard shows hashrate, temperature per module, fan speed, and pool stats. The Nano 3S also has a small built-in display showing live hashrate and temperature without needing to access the web interface.

Open-Source Solo Miners (Gamma 602, NerdQX)

Both the Gamma 602 and NerdQX run AxeOS, which provides a clean web dashboard showing real-time hashrate, chip temperature, best difficulty found (a proxy for how close you've come to a solo block), accepted and rejected shares, and uptime. The best difficulty stat is particularly interesting for solo miners — a high best difficulty reading means your miner came close to finding a block on that session.

A Quick-Reference Troubleshooting Guide

Use this as a first-pass diagnostic when something looks off on your dashboard:

Hashrate well below rated spec → Check temperatures first. If normal, check for failed hash boards in per-board breakdown. Check pool connection status.
Temperature above 85°C → Check fan RPM — are all fans running at appropriate speed? Check ambient temperature. Verify airflow path is unobstructed. Consider adding exhaust ventilation.
Rejected share rate above 3% → Check pool latency. If latency is low, check HW error count — rising HW errors suggest chip-level issues. Check for overclocking settings.
One hash board reading zero or much lower temp than others → Probable board failure. Reboot and recheck. If persistent, the board may need replacement or professional repair.
Miner not appearing in pool dashboard → Verify pool stratum address and port are correctly entered in miner config. Check that your wallet address is correctly set as the pool username.

Setting Up Your First Miner

If you're just getting started and haven't yet configured your miner's pool settings and network connection, our setup guide walks through the full process: How to Set Up Your First Bitcoin Miner in Australia

To browse the full range of Bitcoin ASICs available for Australian delivery, visit our Bitcoin Miners collection or our complete ASIC Miners collection. If you have questions about a specific machine or what stats to expect from your setup, get in touch — we're based in Perth and happy to help.

How to Read Your Miner's Stats: Hashrate, Temperature, and Rejected Shares Explained