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Hi community,

I have already ordered one Antminer S5 to test it out, especially the noise.
As I'm living in germany i had to pay about 440€ for one unit, which is quiet a lot as I saw the start prices. Anyway I don't have to pay for electricity.

On the other hand I saw that Spondooliestech is selling 3 SP20 Batch 1 Units for 1195$, which equal about 1050€ + customs. Can anybody tell me how much I have for taxes to import them? Per unit price would be about 400-450€ I guess, so the same as the S5 to me.

I have 3 PSUs (2x EVGA G2 Suprnova 1300, Corsair AX1200i) that I can hook up to. What would be the best setup (even considering underclocking the SP20) that I could use.



In other words: which is the better miner, when

• hashing on same speed (1,1-1,3 TH/s)
• powering 2 units by one of these PSUs
• having the same prices per unit to me
• regarding the noise

Appreciate your help.

I'm in the UK and I think I have an import tax bill off around £220 to pay (that's what the courier told me but I haven't received it yet).

I run 3 SP20s off 2 EVGA 1300w G2's underclocked to about 1.2Th/s - heat is my enemy right now

Ok. So have you measured the noise already? Maybe via an app on smartphone? That would be my main concerning.

thank you

Make no mistake, the sp20 is loud. Its just bearable in the house on 30% fan with fan in another room

I have been running my R9 290s at about 60-70dbA which was the limit to me. If underclocking the SP20 (to about 1,2-1,3 Th/s) at a decent quiter noiselevel would be possible, this should not be a problem to me. - Anyways: the s5 has the possibility to be modded via a 2 Fan setup to a pretty quiet level I guess.
 
I just dont know in what to invest the money..Want to keep mining, but can't decide which to buy at the moment. It would be possible to hook up 2 Sp20 onto one EVAG Supernova when underclocked, right?

Just found this post here:


Would be interesting what hashspeed is reachable with these settings.

the s-5 is less polished then the sp20 I have been able to get them down to  58 db and mine at  freq 387 giving me 1271 gh .

or at 62 db and freq 412   1331gh.  but they are  a bit messy if you want to push them to overclock.

I've been mining since the ATI 5870 days and the SP20s are far, far louder than any GPU fan IMO.

If you read on the unofficial Spondoolies thread (and I just checked my 5 out) and running around 1.2Th/s will draw around 650-700 from the wall. I think you can probably squeeze 2 units off one PSU, but I played it safe and ran 3 off 2 PSUs to allow for some headroom. When my new house is ready in a few months these units will go in the garage where noise/heat won't be a problem so I plan to crank them up to about 1.5Th/s

taxes are 19% plus 10 EUR handling fee for DHL.

Running sp20 in automode reaching as low as 10% with stock fan at 1,2 TH/s means 56 db(A).

if you replace the fan with a smaller PWM (means getting the right connector; use search or PM me) you can get it as quiet as slightly above 40 db within a cool room, but you have to underclock.

If the heatsinks are the same as the SP30/35, they've got a 4-5mm copper base do they not? Its inset from the footprint of the main alu heatsink so isn't visible from above. I wasn't able to remove my SP20 heatsinks as they're aggressively glued to the PCBs and would have likely caused damage.

There is a copper base plate, but it is connected to the aluminum heat sink by a layer of thermal compound, without any mechanical binding, this defeated the purpose of that material

- at about 1.16TH, the units are about equal for power consumption (~580W)
- for 2 units on a 1300W PSU, either would work fine, as you would be running at about 2.35-2.4TH/1.2kW with either system
- for the same price, take the SP20
- noise-wise, you can turn the SP20 down to 10% or less fan speed within its OS. on the S5, you need to physically modify it to provide lower voltage to the fan (ie: use molex 7V adapter instead of PWM)

the SP20 is a far better OS by a long shot. If you want a device thats about 1150-1200GH/600W its the winner.

where the SP20 excels:
- if an altcoin comes out or BTC price sharply rises, you can push the SP20 to 1.65TH/1.2kW if extra hashrate is worth the lost efficiency
- fan control and custom power settings

where the S5 excels:
- overclocking to 1300GH/660W (whereas the SP20 is about 1300GH/700W) or as high as 1400/720 (Sp20 is 1400/800)
- can be undervolted to 10-11V to achieve even better efficiency - in the range of 900/360 (SP20 doesnt really get any better than 900/420). This requires uncommon 12-10V voltage regulators though and generally there's 5%+ losses in doing so


Bitmain's next step is to use the S5 chips in a longer chain to achieve something like 1.5TH/500W. I don't think spondoolies is capable of improving the current rockerbox chip any further than 0.46w/GH unless they also go with a chain design or create a chip that's better suited to lower voltage

What was the lowest voltage someone has verified the chips start at? I had a look at getting a variable PSU in but they were stupidly expensive.

someone tinkered with it and found it really wasnt stable or capable of the advertised 9V = ~0.25w/gh, and that the lowest settings were somewhere around 10.5V or ~0.4w/gh.  I almost want to say it was phillipma, but am not 100% i think its in one of the S5 review unit threads

MR Teal got 9.6 or 9.7 volts 
it is on these threads somewhere.   sidehack is working on a plug n play adapter for a standard atx psu should go to 10 volts and be solid.  still waiting for one for testing.

Right now the sp20 is the plug n play choice.  the s-5 is the choice if you want to get your hands dirty.

1x 11 dollar delta fan which can run pwm via splice to a pwm will overclock to 1275gh  okay for noise 60db

 or splice to  molex 7 volt   will run stock at 1150gh pretty quiet 53db

First prototype of that adapter is assembled and was tested today, but it's giving me some fits and needs more work. I should have good news soon though.

Okay. Thank you all for your responses. Unfortunately the S5s delivered straight from shops in Germany rose up yesterday in price as up to 489€...
I think the choice will fall for the SP20. As its price even went down from more than 799$ already? The S5 is just getting more expensive and therefore I will suffer a bigger pricecrash once they start to fall off.

I read that there might be a problem with uncentered pins of the PCIe-plugs. Mine are like that. Anybody tried to "mod" the case for them to fit? And what is the difference between batch 1 and batch 2?

can you link to such experiments, where the gains of the S5 are higher than the losses of the DC2DC step down devices?

there is no such experiment posted. 


 once sidehack gets his build to work correctly  it will be 95% so

10/12  is 83.33% divide by 95%  =   87.71 

so a 10 volt setting would  use  87.71 percent of the normal watts. (not  83.33%)

 as sidehack says he is close.

If he gets it to work this gear should allow newer designs to use it.  like a psu it will move from generation to generation of miners.

   It may influence  asic design to be like the  s-5 in string

at the end only J/GH counts. at the wall. and undervolting S5 by PSU is topic since 2 month but without results.

Are those heat-sinks fairly "standard" ? Is it possible to buy higher quality replacements that might work in the SP20's ?

its possible, but not even remotely worth it.

16x heatsinks = $25 if you get a bargain
time spent opening a case, melting the glue holding down the curent heatsinks = 1hr, voided warrenty, likely at least 1 cracked or snapped component
time spend properly cleaning, pasting, and applying a new heatsink to the chips then re-assembling = 2hrs

if you are lucky and do it all properly, you will either be able to reduce fans at full speed by 10-15%, or otherwise perhaps push the unit to 1800/1350W at the most extreme. Thats about a gain of 100GH/150W for the cost of 3hrs + $25.  For reference, $25 put towards the cost of a new $400 SP20 would be effectively worth 150GH/100W

if you're unlucky you will re-assemble the device and find that multiple chips no longer read due to various errors (you cracked the asic, nicked a resistor, w/e), and effectively lose a large amount of your device functionality

its not worth a mod

Today I ordered 4 SP20s!
Guess I will have them here by next week.

Anybody can send me the config for getting it to about 600-650watts? :D

I believe there's a thread for it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=933536.0

Good luck with the SP20's.  As an owner of many S5's, I would say probably a good choice to go with the SP hardware.  The build quality of the S5 has gone way down from the S3.  Although it's a more favorable comparison on paper for the W/GH, you can undervolt the SP20 to achieve basically the same numbers, from a product that seems to be much more well built and capable of hashing solidly at those speeds.

I'm down 1/6th of my original purchase of S5's due to various problems - mainly having a whole chain die and leaving the machine running at half speed.  I'm not going to bother replacing them and just ordered a couple SP-35's instead as replacements so as the S5's die I'll just slowly switch to SP gear.

sure

this will give you 595 watts at the wall

you can run 2 on an evga 1300 g2  each will be in the 1100-1150 gh range

make sure to set your firmware to 2.6.7 that allows for auto fans

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1024x768q90/540/SNVgVp.png


 fan is 6%  hash  is  1123gh  wall watts = 597
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1024x768q90/903/D93HWy.png