What I will probably do is put two of the new chips on one board, one on the other, and run 7 chips on one water cooled, six on the other with air cooling. Then hold the last chip in reserve to see if I want to go to 8.... :-)

C

Yes, but I am just too damn lame to order a molex socket from somewhere. So what I have been doing is picking up old D type connectors from Radio crap, wiring those to power whips from these crap supplies, then plugging them into my power supplies. Problem is I have two of the 20gh class systems using the one string of D subs, so I finally gave up and clipped the cable on the supply so I could use one of the SATA lines. (They are all on the same rail, but one should still balance the wires since those have resistance as well)

Well, I have 4 chips coming, two old style chips in the box, and three chips that need to be reballed (one old and two new). The problem now with the old style chips is that fitting them on a board could be tough; since they are tall the newer chips all have to have heat pads on them to even up. What I might do is try putting the first reballed tall one on the "danger board" (the one that some poor guy nuked to try and put chips on it) and if that works put the three on that board and call it "done" (5 of the chip pads are seriously damaged. Sad.)

The problem with the FTDI IMO is not that it generates heat, but since it's on the ground plane it has to deal with the plane's heat load from the FETs and chips. Add to that the genius idea of blowing 50-60c air right on it (with the fans down) and you have a recipe for fail. My next cooler is going to be the corsair big one, I'm thinking of just strapping it to the bottom of the board so it can pull the heat off the bottom. In theory I should be able to get away with only a little AL sink on the top, which will have to be the bottom since I bet you can't run a water block upside down.

The corsair and 120 that I am using now are sealed units, so corrosion inhibitors are probably in there. What I really *should* do is take them outside, then immerse the radiator in a 5 gallon bucket of water in the shed with a garden pump circulating the water to the 60 gallon rain barrel outside. Even better would be to immerse the radiator straight into the barrel, but in either case if the water froze solid I'd lose cooling power. Hm.... That is crazy actually...

C

5 days of mining and I think I am about to hit .5 catcoin! This is truly amazing, I'm burning the laptop at 80 watts to do this.

Go little cpuminer, go!

C

(now running 10kh/s)

Another unit up to 20gh. To minimize heat near the FTDi chip and the FETs I have been placing 5 chips as follows:

2,3,4,7,5 (use the map in the previous pages for locations). 60c temp with stock heat sink and a very warm power supply. Wish I had my darn PCIx cable from BFL....

Otherwise seems to work well. Tomorrow I should be having 4 more chips come in and the water cooler, we'll try for 7 on one jally with water cooling...

Thank you! I'll put that towards the water cooler research. I've got a pretty big thread on supercharging jalapenos over here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=336782.0;topicseen

Just took another one to 20gh.

C

Makes sense. With these three new jallies, I ordered the 3 wire PCIx cable so I wouldn't have to use the power supplies. Guess what didn't come :-)

Oh well, so I get to cut off the wires and hook them into my corsair. Man that thing is under a serious load right now, especially with 20gh per jally.

C

Pounding away at 10kh/s here dude. You need to allow withdrawls in a smaller size, like .4cc or so.

Lightfoot.

Stock power supply can handle up to 3 chips, beyond that it gets too hot to use properly.

Wish I had my 3 cable PCIx thing, need to get that shipped ASAP. In the meantime I'm starting to cut the cords and splice them onto the Corsiar 500.

C

No clue. How do I move my thread?

I do not know about the CPU speed ability, to be honest I cheated. My Noctura 92 fan came with a wonderful assortment of cables including one with an in-line resistor to slow the fan down. Works perfectly on the pump line, I use the splitter cable to power the fan at full speed, and the pump at reduced speed.

If you want to buy a resistor, you just need to use the r=e/i answer to find the right size. The question is how many watts does the pump pull? Then watts=i*e (current*voltage), volts is 12, solve for current, then put 2/current in the top equation to get the resistor size in ohms. (if you want to drop the voltage by 2 volts or 20ish%)

C

Hm. I have thought about cutting up an old 486 heat sink; the key here is surface area.

What would really win would be water block cooling of course, and one of the reasons I bought a big corsiar block is the thought that I could mount it on the back of the board (the large bracket *just* clears the sides of the LS board) and then just put the stupid AL heat sink on the top.

The full surface area cooling ability of a block might then allow me to cool the whole bottom of the board including that massive ground plane. Since I'll move it forward as much as possible, it might be able to cool the fets from the bottom, and remove the heat sink need on top.

We shall, as they say, see. But I'm convinced that water cooling is the way to go.

I am going to Butterfly Labs hell. :-)



This is the 4 chip+1 dead chip "Danger Jally with a much... bigger... cooler. 5 chips of heat.

Temps went from 80c with the stock fan down to 38c and holding. Now wait till I get water cooling. :-)

Note: You do have to do a bit of stuff. First you need to bevel the edges so it will not touch the caps right around the chips. Then you need to drill and tap two new holes, try to center it as much as possible so you don't hit one of the heat pipes with the drill.

But man, this solves the heat problem. I'll try taking this one up to seven chips as soon as I get the little heat sinks for the FETs.

C

Agreed. My big post here on Jallies is really about hardware. No reason it should be in a subforum.

Note to all: I am going straight to jalapeno hell :-)


This is the 4 chip+1 dead chip "Danger Jally with a much... bigger... cooler. 5 chips of heat.

Temps went from 80c with the stock fan down to 38c and holding. Now wait till I get water cooling. :-)

Note: You do have to do a bit of stuff. First you need to bevel the edges so it will not touch the caps right around the chips. Then you need to drill and tap two new holes, try to center it as much as possible so you don't hit one of the heat pipes with the drill.

But man, this solves the heat problem. I'll try taking this one up to seven chips as soon as I get the little heat sinks for the FETs.

C

Just a quick recap: What do I have here:

Jally 1: 19gh unit, 5 chips, the first jally. Running with a BFL type 1 sink, runs great.
Jally 2: 14gh unit, 4 chips. This is the crap jally, one I bought from a UK person for full value that turned out to have the blown FTDI chip.
Jally 3: 16gh unit, 4 chips. One of my new jallies, 4 chips in a cross pattern.
Jally 4: 12gh unit, 3 chips. The other new jally, I don't want to push the power supplies if I can help it.
Jally 5: 8gh unit, 2 chips. This is a stock "control" jally for a friend.
Chili 1: 36gh unit, 8 chips. Bought for .7btc, this is a cool little thing.

At this point I'm getting good enough to start thinking about offering this as a service. I have done 8 chips in a row here with no problems, and the combination of flux, heat, preheat, and my loupes to ensure every chip is perfectly on the balls has reduced my failure rate to zilch.

Need to figure out a price though; going from a 2 chip to 3 chip jally seems to add about $200 in value on Ebay. No one has sold a 4 chip jally.... So message me; what would be a fair price in your mind to turn your jallies into more money?

Any thoughts?
C

Well, more chips in the boards. Because I am waiting on heat sinks (always something...) I am running my crummy jally (the one with one temp sensor, the one that blew up the FTDI chip, etc etc etc) with a total of five chips, 4 running and one not. The not was the one I need to reball; I really should have taken it off the board. Because board temp is at 73.

Now it was going to 80, but I put this super fan+heat sink+pipes on the unit and it's down to 73, which is good but still high. And it's only hashing 14gh because at least one of the factory chips was crap (it hashed 6gh stock). Oh well, you take what you can get in this world, and this keeps me from selling the poor little thing on Ebay.

In fact one of the side fails of all this is I am not going to be able to sell this stuff on Ebay; it's requiring bigger sinks and a lot of thought. In retrospect this will probably be a mistake but fuck it, such is life. Actually I could turn off the extra chips in software and sell them in stock boxes as three chip jallies. We'll see.

I have two cooling units on the way; another 120v unit and a $70 corsair one with two fans and a big heat sink. That's going on the 7-8 chip unit I think... :-)

Never dull.
C

Well, yes. BFL runs the chips as units, within each chip is up to 16 sub processors that the work is farmed out to. So each chip shows up as a computing node, not the sub processors.

Chili takes this a slight step further by dividing all the work to all the chips as one big shot. Thus it looks to bfg like one big-ass chip. It's more efficient in some ways, probably about 4gh extra per 8 chips I think.

C

By the way Drug: 1.3% errors is really pretty reasonable, have you tried reflashing it with a speed of 5 or something?

All my new jallies have two chips, so yours may be a special case. However I'm curious to see if you can flash any of the others, the boards do not look different and can take chips with this software load.

C

4gh is the most you will get out of a chip in normal operation. The Chili I have gets 5 (39gh total, 37gh submitted after errors) but that is using exceptional chips, is running Mr. Teal's software, and adjusts core speeds per chip based on chip temp and actual chip frequency. It is amazing.

Right now my 3 chip turbo jally is getting 12gh, and my 4 chip is getting 15.9, and my five chip jally with a really crummy chip is getting 19gh. So it depends.

This morning's job is going to be boosting my 4 chip to 5 and maybe flashing the 12gh one to see if it goes faster or slower with the level 9 code.

C

And thanks to an incredibly generous Christmas donation (more in a bit) I think I'm going to need to research the heat issues a bit more.

I'll be taking a unit here to at least 7 chips this weekend, which is going to be complex. I think I will use this on the bottom of the board:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005SEZBXY/ref=oh_details_o03_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

To control the heat with the traditional AL heat sink on the top (running this mess upside down). I'll also be buying another water block cooling system for $64 and see how that works as well.

Ok, I picked this unit up. Big. Big big. But big could be good; I could put this on the back of the board and use it to cool the FETs and the main chips in one shot. We shall see.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/CORSAIR-Hydro-Series-H100-CWCH100-RF-Extreme-Performance-Liquid-CPU-Cooler-/291044040581?pt=US_Water_Cooling&hash=item43c3939f85

And on a side note the ebay guy just added canadian shipping. If you want it from another country just PM him on Ebay and he will add the country. 4 more coming by Monday, maybe even this new water block....

C

This will be interesting.

C