Honestly, miner manufacturers should just have us buy our own PSU's and avoid all the issues of fires, cables, CE markings, customs issues, not to mention the extra weight to ship it out. If they want to recommend a PSU and provide a spot in the case for it, so it can be racked properly (For those units designed for racks) great. But stop with the wholesale PSU market, somebody is going to die before too long and that's the last thing we need in the Bitcoin negative news of the week. Just one man's opinion.
As long as the PSU fits inside the unit like the S2 and S4 I'm fine with that. You have to remember that a lot of us, myself included need a rack mount solution. Now for the bad news, due to the rate of increase on difficulty and the amount of chips required in these units, Bitmain is going to be pressed to keep future home miners in these small cases like the S1, and S3. There will be a day where you will need 2 THs as an entry level, that day is coming. Bitmain from what I can tell is TRYING to keep the home miners in the game but more people need to support the form factor of the S2 and S4, That WILL be the future … As I stated months ago, Bitmain needed to STRONGLY focus their R&D on the form factor of the S2… The S4 fit that bill, and I believe that they will resolve the issues… going forward, I suspect they MAY have to look into another controller, or look into a split brain setup of some type… I hope that this water cool unit is a novelty, I don't see it being a long term solution . |
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Did you see the video I posted? http://youtu.be/uiZPOZcI20oThis wasn't a burnt smell only. visible smoke billowing and this was after it had calmed down a bit. Here is where smoke comes from …. http://postimg.org/image/3ulmdi42d/As you can see the case did its job in preventing the flash point from going any further. |
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Why are my S4 going up in flames an off topic discussion as opposed to hate on Dogie and BAN? This is a S4 support thread is it not
sorry about that, I have no clue how that appended to your message… I was talking about the back and forth bickering. I personally think Dogie needs to just stop responding to certain people… That would be the professional thing to do . |
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Did you see the video I posted? http://youtu.be/uiZPOZcI20oThis wasn't a burnt smell only. visible smoke billowing and this was after it had calmed down a bit. Nice video, looked about the same as my setup… |
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Did you see the video I posted? http://youtu.be/uiZPOZcI20oThis wasn't a burnt smell only. visible smoke billowing and this was after it had calmed down a bit. I had the smoke as well, but on inspection I feel it came from the grey pad that is attached to the inside of the unit… I still feel there was no risk of a real fire, short of having a ton of news papers around your miner… |
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For the record I was on a 230v during my psu burn. This is no joke...and no inverted commas...frickin thing almost brought the whole place down if I wasn't there.
I think these units are UL certified so that should limit any risk on the house going up… I had one blow in my rack on a rolling reboot of all the units. It made a noise and had a burnt smell. On inspection I can see where it tried to burn but the steel case that the PSU is in prevented the spread of fire nicely . This is off topic, take your back and forth somewhere else please . |
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For the record I was on a 230v during my psu burn. This is no joke...and no inverted commas...frickin thing almost brought the whole place down if I wasn't there.
I think these units are UL certified so that should limit any risk on the house going up… I had one blow in my rack on a rolling reboot of all the units. It made a noise and had a burnt smell. On inspection I can see where it tried to burn but the steel case that the PSU is in prevented the spread of fire nicely . |
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I had one of those "exploding" PSUs. After contacting Bitmain it only took ~1 week after getting the replacement PSU, but unfortunately the miner still does not work.
When starting the fans are running at highest speed all time, without slowing down (not even after 10+ minutes). Furthermore the display does not show anything and the device can not be found on the network, even not after resetting it. I assume the controller board also has problems after the PSU "explosion", in fact it stinks a bit as the PSU did. What can I do now?
Is there a safe way to disassemble the controller board without destroying it? I tried to pull one of the cables which lead to the hashing units carefully and had a feeling that the whole connector is going to come out...
Kind regards
P.S.:
Already contacted support yesterday, but did not get a response yet.
Do you have some pics? Another miner I know had the same issue with the S4 PSU catching on fire using a 110V source. He got the runaround from Bitmain who offered only to replace the PSU; he even talked to the Bitmain rep at the booth at Hashers last week. This seems like more of an issue than Bitmain is willing to let on. I don't think there is any reason to blow this out of perspective, I have 4 units and one of the PSU's exploded. Bitmain told me that they are sending me replacement PSU's but I have not seen anything yet. I also provided them with pics of the unit and I have not yet got my 10 day return on my downed miner but I'm content on waiting a little bit for that. My only concern right now is that I have one unit completely off line.. I know it will get resolved, my ONLY concern is the amount of time it takes.. Due to the price and cost of shipping of these units I'm REALLY up against a wall for ROI … In short I'm trying to say, I feel Bitmain will resolve all of this but its going to cost me money in the end … |
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I had one of those "exploding" PSUs. After contacting Bitmain it only took ~1 week after getting the replacement PSU, but unfortunately the miner still does not work.
When starting the fans are running at highest speed all time, without slowing down (not even after 10+ minutes). Furthermore the display does not show anything and the device can not be found on the network, even not after resetting it. I assume the controller board also has problems after the PSU "explosion", in fact it stinks a bit as the PSU did. What can I do now?
Is there a safe way to disassemble the controller board without destroying it? I tried to pull one of the cables which lead to the hashing units carefully and had a feeling that the whole connector is going to come out...
Kind regards
P.S.:
Already contacted support yesterday, but did not get a response yet.
Take a VERY close look at your control board. there is a good chance that when the PSU blew it took the control board with it . If you have a good working S4 Bitmain will advise you to try and switch it out with a known working control board .. |
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I assume you will be replacing the underpowered controller in the next batch also?
can you give us details on this ? only reason I ask, the Bitmain tech is asking me to switch boards from one of my working miners . Ckolivas was quoted a few pages back about it: It turns out the controller is so low powered that it can only process ~30 shares per second which mean that unless diff is set higher, they work their way into a death spiral before diff catches up. Great...
EDIT: Which presumably means that it can't be fixed by any new firmware releases - it's a hardware issue. Thats interesting, I wonder if as a work around you could use something like a RbPie to offload some of the work from a daughter board perspective . |
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I assume you will be replacing the underpowered controller in the next batch also?
can you give us details on this ? only reason I ask, the Bitmain tech is asking me to switch boards from one of my working miners . |
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This is a great step of goodwill .. I will wait to cheer until I see the full execution… I do have a question about the controller ? Is the controller 100% affected ? The reason I ask is the person I'm working with wants me to take a controller from a good miner and put it in my bad miner with the power supply of a good miner… I'm continuing to jump threw Bitmain hoops so I'm very interested in the 10 days mining compensation .. I still am not to the part where they RMA me the PSU for my current broken one  I guess today I play musical parts with my miners per Bitmain request . |
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The power supply is bought in, its not a Bitmain product.
You could say that for pretty much 80% of the components in an S4 - it's no excuse. Bitmain should have tested the components properly. Even the other 20% of stuff in them that that Bitmain did make themselves, ie firmware, drivers etc don't work properly - again because they didn't test it. The S4 is a box of nails, easily the worst miner they've cobbled together so far. Don't expect anything neutral from Dogie, he\she is on the payroll! I own 4 S4's other then the power supply and the CGminer issues it is a good build . I don't work for Bitmain. I have already had one PSU failure but that aside the unit is a nice build. The thing that pisses me off is this, I sit here going back and forth to get my unit fixed, "still no RMA" and as every hour rolls buy I take a hit on ROI … Bitmain offers ZERO compensation for their failure. with their shipping rates, their 50 dollar coupons are worthless, so I ask whats the point … I like the S4 concept, but I see poor execution … |
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Just an additional side note to frustrated S4 users Slush pool now allows for setting min. difficulty while creating a worker so very easy to add 2048 min diff to keep up with hash  Thank goodness! Just switched my S4 back to slush's pool after hearing this. The payouts from my S4 at BTC Guild and GHash.io were only half what I'd expected -- it earned the same as my two S3's (1 TH) were earning on slush's pool... Guess I'm just spoiled :-) Will let you know how it goes. thanks! -dave ps: guess i got the only working PSU they shipped in batch one... so far so good. Well, house not burning down anyway (crosses fingers, hopes he didnt just jinx it!) Should I open it up and inspect it to look for signs of trouble? Where would i look? What would i look for? ...besides, y'know -- smoke and fire and melted stuff and such. out of my three units, only one has went south so far and they are seven days in… From what I understand Bitmain will only replace PSU's that pop… Be very careful with these things they could very well burn down a home .. I posted pictures of my PSU and you can clearly see it had a significant arc of electricity . |
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Just an additional side note to frustrated S4 users Slush pool now allows for setting min. difficulty while creating a worker so very easy to add 2048 min diff to keep up with hash Works great… My two remaining S4 units now show the correct hash rate . |
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Those S4's are fine......really.......nothing to see here......  Hi all,
I am very disgusted with S4 quality. I ordered 10 psc, 6 working fine (not well) 1 miner have a lot of xx in Asic status (more than 60 xx) and 3 PSUs burnt. I am really curious how bitmain will compensate ours losses! I do not recommend S4 for buy.
I enclose pics of burnt PSUs.
Fire extinguishers at the ready people........ They're aware of the problems, this manufacturer makes PSUs for a number of ASIC companies now and they've certainly messed up. I don't recommend anyone opens up a PSU, you never know the discharge times. I would also like to re state what Dogie said here about opening up a PSU… The "ONLY" reason I opened mine was to confirm my issue… To be clear even when a PSU is NOT plugged in there is enough energy in the capasitors to stop your heart… BE VERY VERY VERY careful with these things… I can't stress this enough, people have been killed opening up PSU's and poking around in something they knew nothing about… I could repeat this a 1000 times and it would not be enough… I know most miners are just in this to have some fun, but its not worth going to hospital because you didn't know that a unplugged PSU could still be energized to the point where it can stop your heart ... |
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I just don't understand why they went with a PSU that could not be changed out with aAX1500 or something like that . I understand that the S4 is a TAD bit smaller then the S2 but it wasn't worth it ! I don't understand who made these decisions.. they had the bugs in the S2 worked out ! There was no reason to re invent the wheel here… I have a feeling they will drop support for the S4 like they did the S2 and say there were "production issues" so stick with our S3…. Its not that hard to make this rack mount option work ! The S2 was WORKING ! they worked out the shipping issues ! … all they had to do was STICK with their darn upgrade path .
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The people that had their s4's shipped to Bitmain's hosting facilities should speak up about their experiences.. either fixes are being provided before the home miners' machines are being looked at, or this facility is already burned down to the ground.
After looking at my PSU I suspect they burnt that facility to the ground… LOL …… I know its not funny, but after looking at my less then 7 day old PSU and the black marks I'm glad I didn't burn my rack to the ground . |
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