I like it. Are you getting any wicking effect of the oil seeping up the cables at all? I had an oil cooled build (not a miner) a few years back and I found that I had to run the cables straight up about a foot and a half to stop the wicking.
The hub and power splitter were origionaly hot glued to the back of the removable plank of acrylic the miner cards are attached to (like a blade). The Oil does not play nice with the hot glue and has essentialy deteriorated it and I had to remove the hub from the "blade" to troublsoot an issue. I did have wicking but I have not put much effort into getting rid of it yet since it is pretty minimal and I have been messing arround with it. I have seprate connectors for both the power and USB and I plan to make a connetor box on the back and epoxy seal everything on the oil side to eliminate seepage. |
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 Temps are (bottom to top) 33-36-36-37-38-38 @70f ambient. I will be playing with improving the cooling and adding more boards in the future. |
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Here is my mineral oil setup I have been working on a long time. I had a bunch of different problems and spent way more money on it then I care to admit.. My goals were for it were to be silent, clear (cosmetic), expandable, designed for convection. I like silent PCs and the last year of GPU mining was torture. The basic design is a chimney column with thick material in the center with an outer shell with a thinner material and more surface area to try to dissipate the heat. I knew cooling could be an issue so the plan was to have additional cooling options for the “lid”. The mining boards are secured to acrylic planks that fit into grooves and were supposed to act as “blades” with a power splitter and USB hub included on each blade and 3 6500’s and there are slots for four (so 12 6500’s in theory). The design had changed on the fly so it is not perfect, if I were to do it again I would have room for 4 on each blade and more room for the power connectors because the dimensions got pretty tight and I had to split off the USB hub (might get it back on though) and the power adapters cut into the other planned blade slot. It is connected to my mod Apple G4 Cube/AMD Brazos MiniItx Windows7 Media Center in my living room with a long USB cable. This computer was already on 24/7 and is low power. When finished it took about 4 gallons to fill. When pouring in the Oil a loose cable from the 1 unused power adapter shorted out the bottom board. Fizzisist was very kind and repaired the board for me and switched my resistors for the voltage. Now with all three boards and a good ambient temperature I think my temperatures are decent. I am running the 200mhz bit stream with zero invalids. The overclocker bit stream gives me a ton of invalids at 200mhz for some reason so I don’t use it. The oil seems too thick to have a strong convection current and I thought that might be a problem so the internal lid has a 140mm fan for active convection and you can visibly see the current going from the top of the inner enclosure down along the sides of the outer enclosure and up the bottom of the inner.. it looks very cool. My temps right now with 70f ambient is (from bottom to top)~ 33c-36c-36c-37c-38c-38c. With two boards temps were in the low 30’s. Oh and there is also a heat sync and a fan at the top that would be built in to the lid. So now that it is essentially done I will just be playing with dropping the temperatures and I have a bunch of ideas for that such as Peltiers and or a metal top with heat sinks. Expansion with additional miners will happen soon. Thanks to Fizzisist and crew, you guys are great.    |
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Bah. I use a 5870 in my gaming PC, and I'm currently troubleshooting SSD nonsense, which requires me to unplug the card to get to the SATA ports. That would really get troublesome with restrictive tubing, unless there is a way to unhook pieces within a loop without causing it to leak horribly. Otherwise I would be interested  I have never done a water cooling setup before, but I have seen quick connects.. not sure how much I would trust them especialy inside a case. |
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I purchased three Koolance VID-AR587 58XX used water blocks a while back for a project and now I am not going to use them. I don’t know much about them I bought them off eBay on a whim but never used them. These are for reference models. Two blocks with the block out inserts (nothing else included). 30$ each in btc shipped USPS flat priority rate to the US only. One is a black sheep and has a nozzel with a cap that screws over it and one normal block off insert. It is also missing one of the threaded nuts that the back plate screws into (nothing else included). 25$ in btc shipped USPS flat priority rate to the US only.  |
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Hey there, quick update from the mineral oil cooling front. This is what my setup looks like now:
That board on the left is a Beagle Bone which I use to run MPBM (Beagle Bone + X6500 use 20 Watt in total). I wanted to get rid of the fan, but still keep the temperature down, so I added this water tank, which helps to dissipate the heat from the mineral oil container. This way I can even add a lid to the container and still have the heat dissipate quickly enough to have the FPGA stay at around 43 to 45 °C. The miner has been running without any problems so far. There have also not been any problems with oil running along cables or anything like that.
Now, in my chemical newbness I haven't accounted for the following effect though, that I see in the water tank:
I'm not exactly sure what that stuff is, that is floating around the water. Is some of the mineral oil evaporating and then condensing again in the colder water? But it seems a little bit much for that, as I thought that mineral oil evaporation would be pretty minimal, from what I read. Or is the mineral oil attacking some of the container material? But why would it be on the outside then, where the water is, instead of on the inside of the mineral oil container?
Does anyone have an idea what is going on here?
I am not done with my oil setup but right now with 2 boards I am at 39/40c with active convection (the oil seems to thick for good natural convection). Just a bit ago I took two heatsinks and mashed them together with epoxy and submerged 1/4 of the combined heatsink (not half due to space). So far in the past few hours it lowered the temp 1c (with the same ambient temp). I have since in my inpatience put a fan on it and now it is down 1.5c. I am working with about 4 gallons so it takes some time for results. 2 days and no invalids with the 200mhz firmware. Maybe you don't care about temps but perhaps with two good big passive heatsinks you could ditch that outer tub. In my mind mineral oil is a good setup for expandibility. 1 fan internaly for forced convection and when you have your setup done you can just add cards to it with no need for more fans or waterblocks (heatsinks?). I don't know if a heatsink on the chips is needed but I am going to try it and see how it works. that right there would have saved me about 40$ per card. Update: No heatsink doesn't seem like an option. The temps were going up extremly fast so I pulled the plug after about 30 seconds @ 42c (highist I have ever been). |
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What heatsinks are those?
The heatsinks are these http://www.enzotechnology.com/cnb_s1.htmI don't think putting these in oil is of any use. The oil heats up and eventually you will need to take out the heat out of the oil too usually with an air fan which you use directly anyway.
Looking at your setup, I can guess you can use just one fan for all three boards. Why don't you experiment to see if you start getting invalids when you remove some of the fans.
We were discussing changing the resistor to bump the voltage to the now standard level for these boards. I mentioned mineral oil only as a reason why I wanted to do it now rather than later. There are many things you are not considering with the oil. I don’t really care to argue about it, I have done a lot of research and planning and I am doing it. Hopefully next week I can share results. |
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I am at 0 invalids on the 200mhz firmware with copper and air but would love to push it a little after I get really good cooling so figured I might as well make this change. What kind of head room are you guys seeing?
In that case, I'd wait before attempting this until you actually hit invalids. It might well be possible that if you were lucky and got a board with an extraordinary stable power supply and fast silicon, you can get away with >200MH/s at the stock voltage, which is likely to be more energy efficient than a couple MH/s more at a higher voltage. Remember, increasing the voltage increases the power consumption even at the same hash rate, so there's no point in increasing the voltage as long as you can't push it to the frequency limits anyway. All three of my boards have never gotten an invalid @ 200mhz. I am guessing it is because they are well cooled. I don't know what they are seeing for speed headroom but I have to guess it must be enough to make the bump to voltage standard. The couple additional watts is not that big of a deal to me and I think it would be best to be the same as the other r3 boards that have the voltage bump. One big reason I would like to do it sooner rather then later is I will be putting them in oil soon and I don't want to take them out and clean them to do it later. Hopefuly the resistors will be here tomorrow.  |
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R2 and R8 are 0805 sized resistors. They are not terribly hard to solder, compared to say 0402 sized parts, but replacing R8 might be more of a challenge because of it's location.
A small soldering iron, good light, some soldering (not plumbing) flux, desoldering braid/wick and a pair of tweezers (failing that, a toothpick) should make short work of this.
Hi, sorry to be a pain but can you link me to the right resistor? There are some options and I want to be sure I am getting the right one. I checked Radioshacks website and looks like I am going to have to order them. Amazon has this http://www.amazon.com/Thin-Film-Tech-Precision-Continuous/dp/B0015DZIGC . Or would you guys just consider selling a few and shipping usps priority for some btc (would like to attempt this weekend)? Most the other stuff I have but I may need to get a smaller tip for the iron or upgrade. I am at 0 invalids on the 200mhz firmware with copper and air but would love to push it a little after I get really good cooling so figured I might as well make this change. What kind of head room are you guys seeing? |
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In the last couple weeks, we've been experimenting with different FPGA core voltages (VCCINT). Our measurements have shown that on most rev3 boards, performance can be increased significantly by slightly increasing this voltage. Because of this, all rev3 boards starting today will be shipped with VCCINT set to 1.23V (instead of the original 1.20V). This applies to all boards shipped on or after 3/29/2012. While this increases the board's power consumption slightly ( data here), it also increases the potential limit on clock rate, which is especially useful with the new "overclocker" bitstreams. If anyone would like to increase the core voltages on an older board, it simply means swapping two resistors (R2 and R8). You can either attempt this yourself or send it back to us and we'll do the work free of charge. We only ask that you pay the return shipping charge. I am contemplating this… Just to be clear it is taking the resistor from the R2 spot and putting it in the R8 spot (both by the upright voltage regulators?) and vice versa. I think that is what you are saying but better safe than sorry. I don’t have a magnifying glass but it looks like it says 1911 (or 1161) on both of them and I did not see them in the schematic. They are pretty small and in a semi tight spot. If they were one of the bigger ones I would not hesitate to do it. I am going to do some research on how to solder this myself because the shipping and downtime sounds like a costly pain. Do you have any tips off hand for working with these tiny resistors? I may look to find a local place to do it if I can’t or just not rock the boat at all. NM found some good Youtubes on surface mount soldering .. still looks pretty small to me though. |
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That was just mean.... Respect
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Yup, I got the oil from their partnered vendor. Mineral oil has the general opinion that it is not worth it in the PC arena and water cooling is better. I think mainly because people would like to use it to cool high end gaming rigs. For FPGA's we have significantly less wattage to worry about. |
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Some mining rig photos: I went through with my plans for a mineral oil cooled setup. :-)    What you can't see here: The USB and power cable is rising up to the top, as I placed a nail there above the whole setup to run the cables along that. This is an attempt to prevent oil from trickling through the cables. So far the oil stays where it should, hopefully that will last. All in all it seems to work fairly well. I would like your input though on what is an acceptable temperature to run the FPGA at. First I tried running without a fan and the oil would slowly start heating up and after about 30 minutes the thermometer showed 46 deg C (you can see in the picture that the thermometer is measuring in the middle of the heat sink). At that point I stopped and added a fan. It's not really helping all that much, but it is keeping the setup at about 43 deg C right now. On the other hand I have yet to see a single invalid share. The system has been mining for over a day at 200 MHz (per FPGA) with 0 invalids. So would that indicate that I can risk a slightly higher temperature? I would really like to run this completely passive. I was also thinking that this might be a good excuse to play around with 3d printing a little bit and maybe build something that would increase the surface area for the oil to cool down and maybe even have some kind of circular setup driven by convection. Although if I do that, which seems like a fun project, it would probably be just me guessing how to do that rather than being based on actual physics. =) You beat me to it, I just received my tech grade mineral oil yesterday and the rest of my parts should arrive by the end of the week. I think I have a pretty good design, building it completely out of acrylic glued like a fish tank. I plan to include the cooling into the lid. One lid will be two heat sinks connected through the lid. The other plan is the nuclear option with a peltier cooler sandwiched between them. The enclosure itself is designed for convention so the cooling in the lid may be completely unneeded.. we will see. |
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Why use acrylic if you are going to be using sound dampener material. You will just be looking at the glue side. Maybe try aluminum?
Agreed Acrylic makes no sense for this. |
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As the rest of my singles are due to arrive soon, I am contemplating the issue of where exactly I am going to put them. I would eventually like to have them on their own computer (Raspberry Pi or a small Atom HTPC), but for now they will have to be in my room attached to my main rig. Now, even though they are quiet and don't produce as much heat as GPUs, even a couple are enough to raise the temperature of my room too much for my liking. So I'm trying to devise an enclosure for them. My best idea as of now is making a cube (2 layers stacked on top of each other) or a rectangle (1 layer) out of clear acrylic and putting peel and stick soundproofing on the inside. Then drilling holes in the back for a usb and power pass through, as well as holes on the top and bottom for ventilation. Does anyone have any ideas to make something like this? I want to really think it through before making it. I was even thinking about using flexible dryer vent pipe to route cool air in from outside and hot air back out. Let's discuss.  I am working on something similar with acrylic (dam that stuff is expensive)... plan is to put 4 cards (not BFL's) in a single enclosure with an internal 4port USB and internal 1-4 power spliter. Just got my cards so I can make proper mesurments. Will be ordering my acrylic tonight probably. |
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Whatever happened to that guy that figured out how to implement BF_INT (or something) on the GPU miners before the rest of the coders did shortly after?
I looked for a few min on to forum and did not find it as if people have completly forgotten.
I am the guy. What happened to me? Well for a while I was selling my BFI_INT-enabled GPU miner. My strategy to prevent it from being leaked and pirated (I think the only strategy that can work) was to price it quite high (400 BTC which was about $200 at the time), so that the buyers would feel they had a valuable, exclusive product that they would not want to leak. AFAIK it worked and was never leaked. At the time I was 10-15% faster than the other open source miners. Then the open source ones progressively caught up, so I discounted the price down to 300, then 250 BTC. And eventually I stopped selling it altogether. I am glad you saw this. I know I would have used your miner if I could have (I was and still am pretty small time). I don’t know if other people do but every piece of open source software like miners and desktop gadgets or free pools and bounties I have used for this hobby I have contributed with BTC. Not windfall amounts but respectable at the time. Would you have done it the same way again? Maybe what you did was the best way to go about it. Do you feel you were properly compensated for the time you put into it? (perhaps after the rise in btc value) I don’t really care what is decided with this new FPGA approach. I know eventually people are going to find every way possible to squeeze every bit of performance out of these chips as possible. I only mentioned the BF_INT thing because the situation sounded familiar. One thing is certain, this community has people that are very passionate about the related technologies and you can’t really compete long term with people who work for free. |
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Whatever happened to that guy that figured out how to implement BF_INT (or something) on the GPU miners before the rest of the coders did shortly after?
I looked for a few min on to forum and did not find it as if people have completly forgotten.
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I am looking for stock AMD heat sinks that have the strip of copper at the base and connected to 4 copper pipes with aluminum fins. There are two versions of this that I have seen. One version that has like enlarged ears on the corners of the copper base and one is a standard rectangle. I am looking for the ones that are just a standard rectangle as shown in the pics here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004DR2TDC/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&m=A1H9NMCPZH97BO
I only need these for the heat sink.. I don’t care about the fan or the thermal goo. As long as they are not mangled I will take them. Would prefer to by many from one person to save on shipping costs and somebody probably has these lying around … I know I had 2. |
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I am planning an enclosure for 6500’s (up to 4). I want this to be very self-contained with only ports on the back for 1 USB and 1 Power and then have it distributed to cards. Is it recommended to have a powered USB hub?. The plan is to have USB distributed with a 4 port hub internally but if it needs to be powered it will complicate things for me but should be doable. For the power I wanted to get an adapter that splits 1 into 4 such as http://www.aartech.ca/cb-cctv-p4-power-splitter-1-input-4-output-barrel-connectors.html?utm_source=googlebase&utm_medium=googlebase&utm_campaign=export_feed For the power I was looking at something like this ( 102w (12v/8.5A) AC-DC Power Adapter) http://www.mini-box.com/110w-12v-8-5A-AC-DC-Power-Adapter with an adapter to change the barrel size. I am not seeing very much that will provide the power I am looking for. I have used these adapters and power supplies from Mini-Box for other projects and I was thinking of just going with an internal power supply but it seems unnecessary and I am not sure how the power would be divvied up from it. Still looking but I was hoping somebody may have input on the power/usb. |
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I have been using this for a few weeks and I have noticed something odd but I don't know if it is just me. It seems like the longer I leave it open less shares get submitted back to my pool. The hash rate that the pools report based on returned work has generally been pretty accurate over time . However the longer I leave phoenix 2.0 open the lower it goes until I close and restart it. The lowest I have let it go was around 30% off the expected. As soon as I restart it immediately goes up to where I would expect it (and correlating share of block). The miner always reports the expected full speed hash speed.
This is not a big deal as long as I remember to restart it every few days but thought I would mention it so people could tell me I was crazy.
NM, one of my cards was messing up and not hashing even though it was somehow counting towords the total. Running 1.75 for each gpu stalls one miner, looks like you can't go by what is being reported for the hash rate. The missing 30% matches up with the cards hashing power.Lowered the OC 10mhz and all is well. |
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