Thor X1 review: the first BM1373 chip at home

The same machine is sold as Thor X1 by some and BC01 Pro by others: same board. But Thor on its own means the BC04, a completely different machine with four previous-generation chips. Check the chip, not the name. US units have a red board, mine is black: same board.

The main heatsink is big for the machine’s size, and a second heatsink sits on the back, on the power stage: exactly where it gets hot. That is the kind of detail added so a machine lasts for years, not just day one.

There are two USB-C ports, one for the screen and one for the board; the screen’s port has a rubber plug to avoid mistakes. A thick 3D-printed stand with a cable clip and a 65 W USB-C power brick complete the box. I have handled a lot of desk miners: this one feels premium.

The Bitaxe runs AxeOS, built on ESP-Miner, an open-source project: the code is public, anyone can read and fix it. The Thor X1 runs ThorOS, Hammer’s in-house system, whose code is not published. Being newer, it still lacks a few AxeOS features.

Setup is standard: change the machine’s name (essential once you have several), then the pool: address, port, your Bitcoin address as the user and x as the password. For solo, the FindMyBlock settings are in this guide.

Two traps that waste hours: if the machine runs but no shares go out, turn off TLS, which many pools do not support; and make sure there is no space before or after your Bitcoin address.

A colour AMOLED screen driven by two buttons: the top one turns it off, the bottom one cycles pages. You get hashrate with a small chart, power draw, fan speed, temperatures, the bitcoin price, the pool setup and frequency and voltage settings.

My favourite page: the latest blocks found, with the pool that mined them. When a solo miner hits the jackpot somewhere in the world, the machine shows you.

Measured at the wall after a good half hour of warm-up. Check the firmware before measuring anything: before version 1.0.1, a known bug reported an incomplete hashrate to the pool. Updating is one button at the bottom of the interface, and the machine restarts by itself.

The lesson of this machine: the mode advertised everywhere, the one with the biggest hashrate, is also the least efficient. Overclocking adds about 50% hashrate but more than doubles the power draw. On a machine running around the clock, that is what matters.

Do not trust the efficiency shown in the interface: it reads about 10 J/TH even in overclock, because it only measures the chip, not power supply losses. Some reviews quote 9 J/TH from that number: it is wrong. A wall meter does not lie.

In normal mode the fan is perfectly fine. In overclock I find it quite loud for a desk miner: I will swap it for a Noctua.

I also tried pushing the chip: on my unit, the BM1373 is temperamental and tends to cut out as soon as you leave factory settings.

For the price of a Thor X1 you get almost two Bitaxe Gammas. Two Gammas make 2.4 TH/s for 36 W, at 15 J/TH. The Thor X1 does 3.2 TH/s in overclock, or 2.1 TH/s for just 22 W. It wins on hashrate, efficiency, size and price per TH/s.

What the Bitaxe keeps: open software, fine tuning, a huge community, and redundancy, since two machines do not fail at the same time. Neither has Ethernet: 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi on both sides.

In overclock, about 1 chance in 5,450 per year solo, and about 1 in 8,350 in normal mode (network as of 24 September 2026). It is not an investment, it is a lottery ticket; stacking machines does not change the game, it only moves the decimal point. The full math: How much does a Bitaxe earn?

Buy it if you want the best efficiency on the market in the smallest format, with a careful build, to set up once and leave alone. And keep it in normal mode: that is where it shines.

Skip it if you want to audit the software, you enjoy tuning your machines, or you prefer spreading the risk over several small open machines. The hardware is excellent, the efficiency is stunning: the software is the compromise.