I have seen people asking here about which courier and would like to know.
Is it possible to choose courier when you order from Bitmain directly?

I suppose I could let it be, but it seems to be running per my "normal" now I have turned it down a notch and thus far a touch above the hash-rate I got when overclocked at the higher freq (with 4.6 upgrade).

This, however, is the proof of the pudding (to me at least) that 4.6 is worthy of getting, if not just for the security bug-fixes.


And the proverbial chicken and egg situation:
The smoother hash-rate variance is due to stable submissions thus accurate dynamic Diff allocation, or is it the other way round?

It is unusual, 4.6 has been out for justa acouple of days for starters, and I was running ar 262.75???
But I'd say there certainly is an improvement in the hash-rate, if only (as attested above) attributable to a reduction and hash-variance.

Yep I can. I got the OK, not so good and bad news I am afraid.
1. The OK news
Upgrading to the latest cgminer clearly reduces the load and that definitely slightly improves the hashing. It may not be significant, but it certainly does.
I have not been able to collate any empirical evidence to this effect (see below), but I have no doubt cgminer 4.6 hashes faster than the stock one.
2. The not so good:
a) I have NOT been able to run a full un-interupted 24hr stretch with cgminer 4.6
b) The S3 that I updated cgminer on was overclocked to 262.5 and had been running very well without any significant HW errors.
3. The BAD
a) Having left the unit to hash as usual, I logged into the GUI the next day and was greeted with HW errors counting in the 100,000 ! In the panic, I immediately clicked the system tab and selected reboot. (I forgot to take a shot of the screen).
b) Yesterday, I gave the unit close observation for the few hours I had and the errors kept cropping up over time. This had thown me off until late last night I noticed a pattern.
The unit will hash as usual after a reboot without any issues and single digit HW errors for 2hrs. Between 2 and 3 hrs, there are two scenarios that can develop.
1. HW errors creep up into double digits and past 3 hrs they'll shoot up at will! A refresh would give any additional number from single to three digits!
2. The other scenario is one of the chips is marked X - when this happens, the HW errors remain normal BUT the hashrate decreases.
In both the scenarios above, I noticed the GUI hash-rate reduced to approx the one I had before updating cgminer at 256.25, so early this morning I decided to reduce my speed to 256.25 and so far, running like a champ! I believe by early tomorow I'll have the numbers to show against my earlier tests (barring another HW error panic ....!).

One thing that is still whirling away in my mind is why the same chip always comes trumps with the X? Also this may have something to do with power, as I am running the S3 off a 550 watt server PSU. If the unit is drawing anything over 460 watts, then that might be the reason.

Finally, I noticed that after updating to cgminer 4.6 if I do a power cycle or a reboot via the GUI, the miner status is screwed up. At times it will say its been up for hours and show a puny avg GH/s (say 12 GH/s avg) whereas I have just rebooted! But when I reboot via SSH (putty) this does not happen.

Yipeee! And I just pointed away my entire 14GH ... could have been me!

Still, for a guy who's owned 41 S1's, I am sure you can rope in a few friends to amass the few heatsinks that you'd need to get the S3+ kit up and running for less than the price of an S3+. I reckon one can fashion a set of heatsinks for less than 0.04BTC, and if you do away with the stock temp control system and simply blast / pull fresh air through all would be well! But hey, just a thought!

Just get the S3+ upgrade kit then, you'll have a very short lead time (shipping before / by 20th)

Again, something interesting here. thanks for sharing.

Whatever.

Now YOU are talking!
allcoinminer promised something in a week, did not / could not fulfill his promise but rather (cheeky of me) gave another smokescreen. But the initial promise seemed substantial, only now I realize it was nothing!

Back to the hacking, I was thinking of the simple USB interface connected to a computer as the lowest cost (both financially and knowledgewise) because I currently run my S1's in a box detached from their puny temp control. I have their stock fans on one side of the box as inputs and on the other side I acquired a set of 150CFM server fans (for GBP 5.00 @) sucking all the heat out (aka exhausts). On an average hot summer day (I keep them outside under a tree) they average temp of approx 34 - 38 on any unit. Also, I power the fans independently.

So there you have it, keep hacking ma friend, but once I have a look over the Kano driver, I'll be in a better position to say whether I can keep on this hacking path. But I like your approach very much!

If you'd asked me (I know you did), I'd say the S3+ is the S3 from around batch 6, and ofcourse, you'll also get a firmware upgrade.

I've got my ear to the ground on that ma' friend!
I am convinced that those ribbon cables are simply rx/tx lines from a USB chip on the controller board. In my scheme of things, I was actually looking at running the boards without the bitmain controller board and simply powering them up and connecting to my own laptop's USB via a custom USB chip (I am guessing there are going to be at least 4 tx/rx lines per board) that can handle 4 lines then looking at kano's driver (I already have a miner) to run on a windows PC.

But hey, mine is probably more suited to me and will be in the works for a while now, nevertheless I await your results in a couple of days when you get your S1 (I personally want to use the boards from an S1 that I will be upgrading with the S3 kit).

Ahh! you found the post about version checking .... good on you.
As far as the frequesncy of the S3+, check the product web page on bitmaintech, off my head it is 440GH/s but overclockable to 500GH/s.

Hash spikes are not un-usual when your Diff is still low. Let it run for a while and these will become more reasonable (and these will be in the 5s data). Check again after several hours and again after 24 hrs to get a better picture.

PS. Is there any S3 cgminer 4.6 support thread aside from this?

After updating cgminer, I think there is another way to ascertain the version than the one installed which was mentioned earlier in the thread. If you use the wget method, ensure you chmod+x the new cgminer before rebooting.

I'd expect the miner connected via wifi to have a higher DiffR (i.e rejected shares) because of the higher latency inherent in a wifi connection, and your numbers thus far bear this out.
The cat5 connected unit, though showing a lower poolside hash-rate, should have a higher Accepted number (and / or DiffA) compared to the wifi one.
All in all, I would highly recomend updating to the latest cgminer though I have noticed some wierd things since I installed it on my S3's, but in any case, sort your bits and bobs out and get a more accurate picture.

Don't get in a muddle here. Decreasing CPU load does NOT decrease the power consumption of the unit to any significant level.
*** START PINCH OF SALT *** I could argue that it creates "freedom" for the CPU to process even more data thus increase power consumption. *** END PINCH OF SALT ***

I'd say stick to a 500 watt PSU or even better a 550 watt PSU for a single unit.

The biggest load is on an Antminer is cgminer, because it does all the work.
Installing the latest cgminer (which does NOT void your warranty) will, it has been shown, reduce the load by a significant margin.

I am actually surprised at your results, I would have thought the wifi connected antminer would have a higher load than the cat5 connected one, and that it would be reflected in the Diff that has been allocated by the pool, aka I would have expected the cat5 connected ant to have a higher Diff. Could you check your pool-side speeds and see if they reflect the GUI speeds? Also, what are the DiffR numbers for each? (PS. I'll expect a slightly higher DiffR on the wifi connected ant, assuming they are connected to the same pool)

Forgive me, but that sounds like a load of trite! What on earth does the S3 upgrade kit (that you are waiting on) have that the existing S1 and S3 do not have?
I was actually holding out for your solution, but looks like this is real pie in the sky! Shame upon you.

Thanks for clearing that up. It seemed a bit far-fetched and clearly bobsag3 has a history with Bitmain.

Crikey, there's no frequency! Never seen anything like that.
Also, you forgot to obscure your details....
Also, why don't you use:

stratum+tcp://stratum.btcguild.com:3333

as your mining URL as opposed to the http:// .... ?