// blog · · by Nathan Baldwin
// Bitaxe Gamma vs Apollo BTC, Avalon Nano 3S, and used Antminer S9 on hashrate, efficiency, noise, and price — the real numbers a spec sheet won't tell you.
If you’re shopping for a small home Bitcoin miner in 2026, the options haven’t gotten less confusing. A Bitaxe Gamma sits at 1.2 TH/s and pulls 17W from the wall. A used Antminer S9 does 13 TH/s for $80, and pulls 1200W. An Apollo BTC splits the difference at 3.8 TH/s and 125W. None of these are the “best” miner. They’re different tradeoffs, and the spec sheet only shows you one column.
This post compares the four small-scale SHA-256 miners most people actually consider — Bitaxe Gamma, Apollo BTC, Avalon Nano 3S, and used Antminer S9 — on the numbers that matter (efficiency, noise, openness, total cost over a year) instead of the headline number that doesn’t (raw hashrate).
Round numbers as of 2026:
Bitaxe and the Avalon Nano 3S are the only two on this list that beat 20 J/TH. Everything else pays for hashrate with electricity.
Hashrate decides what you mine. Efficiency decides whether you keep any of it. At a $0.12/kWh residential rate, the monthly power bill of each:
The S9 hashes 10x the Bitaxe and costs 70x more to run. At pool payouts in 2026, it’s net negative after the second power bill. The Bitaxe and the Nano 3S are the only two on this list that won’t bleed money at residential rates.
If you want to pencil it out yourself, mempool.space’s mining calculator takes hashrate and electricity cost and gives you a daily revenue number against current difficulty. Don’t trust the manufacturer’s calculator. They benchmark at industrial power rates.
The number nobody publishes honestly:
Heat scales with power. A Bitaxe dumps 17W into a room and you’ll never notice. An Apollo dumps 125W and your office is warm in winter, uncomfortable in summer. An S9 needs its own room, its own window, and its own breaker.
If the miner can’t live where you live, it doesn’t matter how cheap the hashrate looks.
It isn’t TH/s. It’s openness, hackability, and a low enough power draw that you can run it 24/7 without thinking about it.
Bitaxe is open source. Schematics, firmware (AxeOS), PCB layout, all on GitHub. When AxeOS ships a new tuning option you flash it the same day. When something breaks, the Discord has the answer in an hour. When you outgrow the stock setup, you swap the heatsink, bump the fan, flash a third-party firmware, or wire the API into whatever monitoring stack you want.
Apollo BTC ships closed. The firmware is FutureBit’s. Updates come on FutureBit’s schedule. If they EOL the product, you have a paperweight with a UART header and no path forward.
Avalon Nano 3S sits closer to Apollo on openness. Canaan firmware, locked tuning ranges, but the hashrate-per-watt is real. It’s the right answer if you don’t want a hobby, just hashrate.
Used S9 is open in the sense that the community reverse-engineered every part of it years ago, but the fundamental hardware (16nm process, 2017 silicon) can’t be tuned out of inefficiency. It is what it is.
Firmware churn. Bitaxe gets updates monthly; you spend some weekends retuning. That’s a feature if you like tuning, a tax if you don’t.
Resale value. A used S9 is worth $50 because it always will be. A Bitaxe Gamma holds most of its value on r/Bitaxe and the OSMU Discord secondary market if you decide to sell. Apollo’s resale market is thin because the install base is small.
Spare parts. A Bitaxe is a single PCB; if something dies you order a new one for $200 and move on. An Apollo has more parts to fail and a vendor-locked supply chain. The S9 has cheap parts but you’re now maintaining a nine-year-old industrial machine.
Time. A Bitaxe will eat 5–10 hours of your first month if you want to tune it well. An Avalon Nano 3S will eat 30 minutes. Decide whether that’s a cost or a feature before buying.
If your goal is solo lottery mining and learning the protocol: Bitaxe Gamma. Best single device for understanding what stratum, accepted shares, and pool difficulty actually do, and cheap enough that you can run two or three for the price of one Apollo.
If your goal is maximum hashrate per watt at modest scale: Avalon Nano 3S. Newer process, tighter tolerances, USB-power simplicity. Not as fun to own.
If your goal is household-heater hashrate and you don’t care about efficiency: Apollo BTC. The form factor and all-in-one design are real. The efficiency tax is real too.
If your goal is cheap hashrate at industrial power rates: Used S9. Only at $0.04/kWh or below. Anywhere else it’s a money pit dressed up as a deal.
There is no single “best.” Pick the column that matters to you, and the answer falls out.
Pick the column before you pick the miner. Look at your power bill before your wallet: the $50 S9 costs more in three months than the $230 Bitaxe costs in a year. If you already own one of these and you don’t know its J/TH number, you’re flying blind. Check it against the numbers above and decide whether what you have is what you want.
Try it yourself: Bitaxe Baller is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows that surfaces these recommendations automatically across your fleet — live monitoring, tuning suggestions, pool config, all in a native window. Open source on GitHub.
