FutureBit Apollo II

Most people who want to mine at home without deafening the house end up here, or wishing they had. The FutureBit Apollo II is a desktop miner with a full Bitcoin node baked in, built in the US, and quiet enough to sit in the room with you while it hums along. It’s the step up from a Bitaxe when a lottery ticket isn’t quite enough.

The take

This is the one I point people to when they’ve outgrown a single-chip board but still want the miner to live on a shelf rather than in a shed. You get proper hashrate, a real Bitcoin node, and a tidy web dashboard, all in one box you can actually stand to be near. It isn’t the cheapest terahash you can buy, and a farm operator would laugh at the efficiency. But that’s not who it’s for. It’s for the person who wants to solo mine against their own node, quietly, at home, and understand every part of what’s happening. On those terms it’s lovely.

The node is the actual point

Strip away the hashrate and what’s left is the reason to pick this over a cheap loud ASIC. The Apollo II isn’t just a hashboard, it’s a small Linux computer, a six-core ARM with 4GB of RAM and a 1 to 2TB NVMe drive, running FutureBit’s Apollo OS 2.0 with Bitcoin Core underneath. Zero-config solo mining points the hashboard straight at the box’s own built-in stratum pool, so you’re mining against your own node with nothing in the middle, and if you ever do find a block the whole reward lands in your wallet with no pool between you and it. The catch owners meet on day one is that the node has to finish syncing the full chain from block zero before that built-in pool will accept a single share, so the first few days are download-and-verify rather than hashing. It’s not a fault, it’s the design, but it does mean the box earns its keep as a node long after the mining stops being a novelty, which is really the honest case for owning one.

Standard or Full - which box you’re buying

FutureBit sold it two ways and the names matter. The Full Node package is the one people picture when they talk about the Apollo: hashboard plus the ARM controller, the RAM and the NVMe, the whole node-in-a-box. The Standard package is the hashboard, heatsink and power supply only, with no controller and no storage, so it cannot run on its own. A Standard plugs into a Full over USB and borrows its node, which is how owners daisy-chain two or three boards behind one controller to stack hashrate without running a node per box. If you want the node story, you want the Full; buy a Standard by mistake and you’ve got a hashboard looking for a brain. Prices sat around the high-700s for a Standard and into four figures for a Full when the line was current, so treat any figure as indicative now the range has moved on.

What the numbers actually mean

Around 6 TH/s in its quiet eco preset puts the Apollo II roughly five times a Bitaxe, which meaningfully improves your solo odds while still being a genuine long shot against a network measured in hundreds of exahash. Efficiency of about 29 J/TH in eco is respectable for a home box, though nowhere near a modern industrial machine, and the marketing maths never quite held up: the headline efficiency and the headline power figure pointed at different operating points, and independent testing lands the real-world number closer to the low 40s J/TH once you leave eco. SerpentX measured about 7.8 TH/s on the balanced setting for roughly 273 to 318W, which is the honest middle of this machine. The important number for home use is the noise: roughly 40 dB in eco mode, so a soft whir you forget about, not the hairdryer scream people dread. Power draw of about 175W in eco means it costs pennies rather than pounds to run, call it well under a pound a day in the UK. On solo, treat any block as a genuine surprise. On a pool you’ll see steady, small payouts that roughly track your electricity, which is the realistic baseline for a machine this size. Push it into turbo and you’ll pull up to 9 or 10 TH/s at around 375W, with more heat and more noise, so most people leave it quiet.

Living with it - noise, heat, and what goes wrong

Noise is the reason people pick this over a shed ASIC, and the honest version is that the quiet number and the fast number are different modes. Eco sits under 40 dB, a soft whir you stop noticing; turbo is nearer 55 dB and warmer with it, and owners flag that the cooling doesn’t really keep up once you push past eco, so most leave it quiet and take the lower hashrate. The failures owners actually hit are software and storage rather than dead silicon. The nastiest is a node that reaches the chain tip, falls over and rolls back a chunk of blocks, then loops, which halts mining outright because the built-in pool needs a synced node; the fix people report is formatting the NVMe from the Apollo OS interface and re-downloading the chain over three or four days. One reviewer corrupted the SSD by powering the unit on and straight back off during its very first boot, and had to open the case and swap the drive to recover it, so let that first sync run rather than interrupting it. On the Standard units the USB bridge to the Full is fiddly and can take ten or fifteen minutes to hand-shake before hashing starts. Dead hashboards are not the common complaint here; it’s storage, node sync and the occasional controller or port fault.

The Apollo III in the room

Worth saying plainly: the II is last-generation now. FutureBit has moved on to the Apollo III, a 3nm part the company quotes at 10 to 18 TH/s and roughly 12 to 15 J/TH, with a beefier eight-core controller and dual NVMe slots, sitting in the four-figure bracket. Those are manufacturer figures, and the launch ran late on thermal assembly, so independent numbers were still thin at the time of writing. What it means for the II is simple: you’re buying a quiet, capable, well-understood last-generation box, often cheaper than it once was, with a much more efficient successor sitting next to it on the shelf. If efficiency per watt is the number you’re buying on, look hard at the III before you commit.

Who should get one - and who shouldn’t

Get one if you run, or want to run, your own node and like the idea of pointing real hashrate at it from a box that lives on a desk. It’s ideal for someone graduating from a Bitaxe who wants more without giving up the quiet, and for anyone who values self-custody hashrate and learning over a spreadsheet return. The all-in-one node is the reason to pick it over a cheap loud ASIC, and it keeps that value long after the mining stops surprising you.

Don’t get one if raw efficiency is your only measure, because an industrial miner will out-hash it many times over per watt, and the newer Apollo III will too. Skip it too if you’re strictly chasing profit at home rates, since the sums rarely land in your favour. And if what you want is a heater or a farm workhorse, this dainty desktop box is the wrong tool. For a quiet, capable, node-first home miner, though, bought with eyes open about eco versus turbo and the odd sync headache, it’s hard to beat.