No, that's part of the Gekko driver. Hopefully VH will explain all the details, but he's added flags for start, step and running frequency because these guys tend to work a little better if you ramp up from a cold start rather than driving straight to full speed.

They're bench-tested at 200MHz (88GH) for an hour before shipping out. I can't guarantee they'll run faster than that, but like the 2Pacs, they'll probably run faster than that.

However, you're limited by a 20A peak draw through the main regulator, so depending on the chips and ambient temperature, about 275MHz is the practical upperbound.

The USB signal port does not draw any power at all, so a powered hub isn't necessary.

"higher than expected performace for hashing" Please explain.

I'm gonna guess your hub sucks. Unless it's the same stick not working every time, in which case you might consider turning up the voltage. I'd read the most recent 5-10 pages in this thread because similar issues have come up at least once or twice lately, with discussions about diagnosing the issue.

The first post of this thread is the guide for setting it up.

Are you passing in --gekko-2pac-freq or gekko-compac-freq? Because these are 2Pacs so they want the 2Pac flag.

One of these days I'll get back around to working on my own USB hub. It'd only be 8 ports, 7 with signal and one dummy port which would be good for a fan or Pi, and good for up to 3A per port with a user-adjustable cutoff. Hopefully that's available this summer. I should have a better stickminer around then as well.

By the way, it's been mentioned elsewhere but I have opened general 2Pac sales (with limited stock refreshed weekly) so resellers are no longer the only option. If you're interested, email Laura the awesomely delightful salesperson laura@gekkoscience.com
She's talked about setting up a forum account for improved communication but I don't think it's been done yet.

I've got three Eyeboot hubs we use for 2Pac initial testing, two of the orange ones and one black. I don't know if it's the hub or the computer it's attached to, but the black one is the least stable. I don't know what the voltage is on it though, and since the two others have external power supplies I have it pushed up a little bit so that could be a part of things. The black one is pretty sexy though.

My original idea was 4x4 inches, until I noticed that for the board house I was getting PCBs from, 100mm square boards in prototype quantities cost about half as much as 101.6mm boards. Doesn't matter a lot for production quantity.

Or 100mm, which is less than 4 inches.

Have you looked at any of the troubleshooting steps from the first post?

Back when chips were available from the factory, that's how it was done. The only reason I licensed the original Compac design to bitshopper was because he was making them in Germany specifically for EU market.
But not everyone with SMD infrastructure also has chumps available to scrub, strip and sort used chips from retired miners, and not everyone likes to go through all that trouble for what's considered pretty small batches.

Maybe when we catch up with new stuff using new chips, but for the time being there's only the one source (my factory, my people) and in Europe just the one reseller.

It does go with something I've been saying since we started manufacturing them, that Zombies are caused when the miner goes unstable in part due to unbalanced loads by the two chips not being exactly matched for specs. Hence why the first advice when someone has Zombie issues is "turn up the voltage a bit", because adding a bit of extra juice can help make up for the weakness in the weaker chip.

It's a fundamental drawback in single-wide chip strings. Nothing can be done about it except individually testing and binning every single chip to match them on a per-stick basis, which, from where I'm sitting, is in no way worth the time, effort and equipment required.

Yeah but if he bought it more than a month or so ago, bitcoins were trading for roughly twice the current value and all miner prices were stupid.

But yeah that's still a bad price. I wouldn't have bought an S5 for that.

This one's a bit more obvious. Roughly 0.7 inches long. I had to make a change to how zombie recovery was handled in hardware once I got the firmware written, which necessitated a change to the PCB. So I still have all the previous not-as-good PCBs, which can be exactly as functional with the aid of two trace cuts and a jumper wire. But if we can use those, it basically doubles how many I can sell before a restock of PCBs arrive.

Between S1, S3 and S5 chassis I have probably 150-180 miner cores laying around.

They're mechanically compatible. All the heatsinks are the same size with the same screw positions. So a board for one will work on all 3. That's the whole point, and a question I've been answering for roughly 3 years.

Try testing with incrementally more and more sticks. See how many you can get to run at rated speed before adding another one starts slowing things down.

Could be what's happening (though it's unlikely) is your power sucks. Or it's your USB bus isn't able to support enough traffic. Or it could be yet another "Windows 10 blows goats and you should use something different" problem, because Windows 10 blows goats and you should use something different. Not just for 2Pacs, I mean, in general. For everything.

I'll do that, someday, when they exist.

Yep.

The guy "organizing" that group buy vacated Canada middle of last year, and I believe it was for Bitfury stuff that doesn't yet exist. Far as I'm concerned, it's defunct and irrelevant.