First, I have tried overclocking my card with not very good results.  I didn't install MSI Afterburner (as I don't have an MSI card - not that it probably matters...) but instead installed ASUS GPU Tweak II overclocking software.  (Yes, I even downloaded the ROG skinned version since I have the ROG card...)  I also installed GPU-Z, which is more just a hardware monitor than anything else (which it turns out that GPU Tweak II has a built-in hardware monitor as well for the video card...).  I have tried a few different overclocking settings with Genoil Ethminer (both cranking up the GPU core clock and the GDDR5 memory clock speeds as well as underclocking the GPU and overclocking the memory) and no matter what I do, I can't seem to get an average hashrate better than about 26MH/s out of my card.  In fact, my card seems to get roughly the same hashrate overclocked as I get with the stock settings, which seems very odd to me.

Secondly, I recently purchased a second video card for my computer to try to mine with.  I do still use my computer for many things, including gaming, and I have to close Ethminer and stop mining when I want to play games online with friends as it will kill my framerate if I mine and game at the same time.  I was HOPING that with two cards, perhaps I could set it up to mine with one card and I can use the other card to play games with and have it not affect the performance of the game at all.  Then, when I am at work, sleeping, or just not gaming, I can set it back to mine with both cards and get double the hashrate that I have been getting.  However, this has not been the case at all and for some reason I can't get Ethminer to actually mine with both cards!

I am not sure if the problem is that I now have a mixed environment of AMD and nVidia cards in my computer or if there is some other underlying issue?  I figured since I keep hearing how the AMD Radeon cards are so much better at mining Ethereum that I would try to find one.  Since the AMD cards are still hard to find anywhere, I managed to buy an older used card to throw in my computer.  I bought an ASUS ROG Radeon R9 380 4GB GDDR5 video card.  I now have both cards in my computer (the GeForce GTX 1070 and Radeon R9 380) and I have both AMD and nVidia drivers installed.  I also tried to install the AMD OpenCL APP SDK (which I am not 100% sure if I need that to mine or not?), but the automated installer for version 3.0 doesn't work worth a damn, so I had to install version 2.9.1 instead.

However, even with all of this installed (and multiple reboots) and running Ethminer with the -G option (for OpenCL), the only card that is detected to mine with is still the GeForce 1070!  That's right, even on OpenCL mining mode, it still only detects my GeForce GTX 1070 card and tries to mine with it in OpenCL mode, rather than in CUDA mode!  This is very weird to me and I figured that if I ran Ethminer with the -G option, it would only use the Radeon card to mine with and I could use the nVidia card to play games with.  There is also an -X option in Ethminer that will set it to mixed mode for a system with both AMD and nVidia cards in it.  Even when trying that mode, it still only detects the GeForce 1070 card and mines with that.  It seems like it is mining with it on BOTH OpenCL and CUDA mode though as I get status messages that it is accepting work for both OpenCL #0 and CUDA #1, but the hashrate I get is still only the same 24-26MH/s that I get from the GeForce GTX 1070 card only.  I get no increased hashrate at all that would make me believe that it is actually using both cards to mine with.

Just about the ONLY way that I have managed to try to get Ethminer to use the Radeon card at all was I had to switch the monitor cable over to the Radeon card, rebooted the computer, then went into Device Manager and actually disabled the GeForce card entirely so Windows wouldn't even use it, and then started Ethminer with the -G option.  However, even when doing that, Ethminer didn't seem like it identified the card properly or something.  When using the GeForce card, Ethminer knows exactly what it is and says that it detected a "GeForce GTX 1070 with 8589934592 of memory".  However, it doesn't properly identify the AMD Radeon R9 380 card and instead just says that it detected "Tonga".  What is even weirder is that if I run Ethminer.exe -G --list-devices, it actually lists THREE OpenCL devices.  OpenCL #0 is the GeForce GTX 1070.  Then OpenCL #1 is Tonga with a memory size of 2147483648 and OpenCL #2 is Tonga again with a memory size of 2147483648 as well.  So, for some reason, it is splitting the Radeon card into two separate video cards each with only 2GB of memory rather than a single card with 4GB of memory!!  This is very bizarre to say the least!  But anyways, even trying to run Ethminer with the GeForce GTX 1070 card disabled in Device Manager, it started trying to mine with the Radeon R9 380 card but shortly after it built the DAG, I kept getting 0MH/s readouts on it for about a minute and then my monitor just went totally black.  It didn't go into power saving mode or anything and the monitor still detected a signal as the monitor was actually on the whole time, but it just stopped displaying anything at all.  So, I had to do a hard restart on my computer and when Windows loaded up, it said that a critical error occurred with the video card and it had to be shut down.

So, for right now I am using my system backwards from how I was anticipating using it, lol...  I have my monitor plugged into the Radeon R9 card and using that as my primary display card.  Then, I am using Ethminer in -U CUDA Mode to mine with the GeForce GTX 1070 card only on Alpereum Pool (which BTW, as soon as I joined, they stopped doing the 0% miner fees and now have a 0.2% miner fee, but they lowered the minimum payout from 0.1 ETH to 0.05 ETH, which is fine since it takes me all week just to mine 0.05 ETH anyways with only one card getting 26MH/s...).  So, at least I can still use my computer with no slowdowns using the Radeon R9 card and last night I was playing BattleField 4 with the Radeon card with no problems while mining with the GeForce GTX 1070 card.  Like I said, not exactly how I had envisioned making this setup work on my system, but it is working somewhat at least.  I am still pissed that I can't get BOTH video cards to mine and now I feel like I got ripped off paying a premium for another video card that I can't even mine with!

Well, apparently not...  They are still holding my funds and I cannot withdraw them yet:



It isn't just me though.  They have posted an alert at the top of their website that says:


However, it has already been at least three days (maybe longer that that, I'm not sure how long this has been an issue, I just know I have been trying since Friday with no luck...), so I don't know how long their idea of fixing something "As Soon As Possible" is, but this is pretty ridiculous I think.  I have also seen a lot of people complaining about this in their forums and in the chat window on their main webpage.  Hopefully they lose a lot of customers because of this (and their crappy software and high fees).  Hopefully no one will want to keep mining for a pool that holds their mining rewards and they can't withdraw their funds from.

Well, I know I just started mining tonight a little while ago, so I don't have a ton of data to come up with a decent average hashrate yet, but so far the highest numbers I have been seeing in the Command-Line window that ETHMiner is running in are 25.15MH/s and 26.20MH/s.  (In fact, it seems to alternate back and forth between these two numbers for the most part...)  See the screenshot below:



This isn't bad by any means, especially compared with what I was getting before, but it isn't averaging around 30-32MH/s like Zac said that I should be getting in his post above.  Does anyone know of how I can tweak the output from ETHMiner to try to increase my hashrate from my Video Card?  Can I do any overclocking of my Video Card with ETHMiner and if so how?



Thanks!  I'm glad that I got it working quickly and easily as well!  Like I said, I don't know what I was expecting, but it turned out to be MUCH easier than I was thinking to get this working tonight!
$4.00-$4.50 per day isn't bad for one Video Card, I guess, but I'd like MORE, obviously!  lol...  If I can tweak ETHMiner somehow to give me a better hashrate and/or overclock my Video Card to try to boost my hashrate, I'm hoping that I can improve that estimate as well...

It is still a good time to be a miner, I will say, but I still feel that I am getting started WAY TOO LATE.  The BEST time to have been an Ethereum miner was probably a year or two ago, when it first launched.  That is where all of the BIG money was made on Ethereum, I have a feeling...  Now is the time when all of us NooBz start getting into it because the price went way up and people have just started hearing about it now and want to get in on the Gold Rush now, even though a lot of the Gold has already been mined...

Well...  Unfortunately, as much as I hate to admit it, I honestly have to say that...

                              I'M A DUMBASS!!

There, I said it...  

I just feel like such an idiot for procrastinating for as long as I did before ditching that stupid MinerGate and using some mining software that actually WORKS!  I think part of it was I was just psyching myself out earlier in the week thinking that it was going to be this long, involved process installing and setting up another miner software package on my computer and getting it to work with a new mining pool.  But it just...  wasn't!  It was actually so much easier to download and run the command-line miner than MinerGate, it is kind of embarrassing.

Well anyways, moving on then...


So, what did I end up doing then you may ask?  So, I basically flipped a coin and it came up heads, so I went with Alpereum for a mining pool.  (0.0% Pool Fees was actually pretty attractive too, I have to admit...)  They are an anonymous mining pool too, so there was no account to create before I could start mining there or anything.  (You just use your wallet address you are going to use to receive your payouts as your "account name" when you configure the miner software to point at the pool.)

Then the next step was to pick the miner software to use.  Again, I kind of flipped a coin on this one and it came up tails this time, so I went with the Genoil ETHMiner.  (The Alpereum Pool even has a link to their own "flavor" of the Genoil ETHMiner right in their Help Center.)  Once I downloaded the ZIP file, there was nothing to even install.  It is just an EXEcutable with a few .DLL libraries and that's it.  I mean it was just stupid how easy it was to get running.  I just created a .BAT file in the directory to call ethminer.exe with the correct options to get it to mine to the Alpereum Pool and that was it - I'm up and mining!  

For reference, here is the command line statement I used to call ETHMiner:

So far, it seems that I am getting around 25-26MH/s on average with ETHMiner now...    That's MUCH better than the meager 8.87MH/s I was getting from stupid MinerGate!  Now I will have to see what kind of payouts I can get with that hashrate from the Alpereum Pool...  Hopefully better than only $6 for an entire week of mining!  lol...



So, MinerGate is now officially uninstalled and permanently deleted from my computer and I'm not looking back!  I just hope they will let me transfer my paltry 0.03004086 ETH to my other wallet and then close my account down with them.


Thanks again to everyone for their help in pointing me in the right direction!

Well, thank you all for the feedback, help, and guidance so far! ...


Thanks, will do!



Well, it is not so much that I don't know what I am doing (even though I don't REALLY know what I am doing just yet, lol...), it is just that I haven't quite found the best solution to mine Ethereum with using the setup that I have.  This isn't my first time mining in general or anything...  I have been mining BitCoin since 2013 and I have gone through quite a few different miners since then.  I only wish that I had gotten into mining Ethereum years ago when it was $11-$12 before the price really skyrocketed recently...  I would be all set now if I had!  lol...  However, I was still actively working on my BitCoin mining farm trying to get the most out of that and adding new miners, etc...  I think I am finally at the point where I can go no further with my BitCoin mining farm (for now anyways), so that is why I am now turning my attention to Ethereum.

However, unlike BitCoin mining currently, it seems that it is a bit trickier and more time consuming trying to get setup to mine Ethereum.  It's not just like go out and buy a miner, plug it in, configure it to point at your mining pool, and let it run to start earning BitCoins.  There is a little bit more to it than that in order to mine Ethereum and that is what I am trying to figure out now.  I know it may be relatively simple to those of you who have already done it and have been mining Ethereum for years, but when you don't know exactly what to do, it can be confusing to try to figure it out on your own, especially since there is not just one single way to do it and no one way is really the "right way" to do it or anything...

I did look into NiceHash, but I think I will stay away from that as I am already mining BitCoin currently with six AntMiner S9's and one AntMiner S7 in my basement (approximately 87-88TH/s average on the pool right now...).  However, it is an interesting business model, allowing people to rent out their mining equipment (whether they are ASICs, GPUs, or CPUs) to get a steady income of BitCoins.  However, I don't really understand why anyone would do that when you can just mine the currencies yourself with the mining hardware you have and keep all the earnings for yourself?  (Unless for some reason there are some people out there who either don't want to or can't figure out how to mine themselves who are willing to pay more for the hashrate than you can earn from it if you used it to mine with yourself?  But if that is the case, that seems overly opportunistic to take advantage of people like that who don't know any better...)

About the only thing interesting about Nicehash though is that they have their own mining software as well, called Excavator.  I have no idea if it is more optimized than the crappy MinerGate software and will work better or not?  I haven't played around with it either to see if you can use their software to mine on a different pool with so you can keep the Ethereum that you have mined.  With the Ethereum price having gone up as high as it has (and I'm thinking it will continue to go up more in the future), I really want to mine ETH to try to add to my position as much as possible before the next major price increase.  (I already cashed out all the BitCoin I had around the end of April and bought Ethereum with it when the price was around $76-$78.  I ended up buying 30 ETH at the time for about 1.73 BTC.  (You can do the math on it to figure out how much I made off of that purchase in about a month...  )



Thanks a lot for that explanation as well, Zac!  That does make a lot of sense and I will definitely be moving away from MinerGate as soon as I can.  I haven't researched Alpereum's Pool yet, but it sounds very promising.  Another pool I was contemplating using is Nanopool.  I also saw that the AntPool has recently started offering Ethereum, LiteCoin, and ZCash mining on their pool as well, but apparently no one is using it for mining much else other than BitCoin right now.

As far as MinerGate goes though, I thought that they only have a 1% PPLNS fee (or a 1.5% PPS fee) on their pool?  However, like you said, they do end up sending all of your mining revenue to their own wallet, which you then have to withdraw your funds from to put it into your wallet so that you can use it (or sell it or whatever you plan to do with it...).  So, I'm not sure if that is where you came up with the 2% fee for MinerGate that you stated above?  Obviously the lower the fees the better.  It does seem sneaky though too that MinerGate holds onto all your mining revenue in their wallet instead of sending it to your wallet as you mine like just about every other pool on the planet does.  It definitely seems that they are trying to target beginners who are just getting into mining and may not have their own wallet setup yet.  (Plus they advertise their site everywhere it seems as it came up very quickly and repeatedly when you start searching for Ethereum Mining Pools...)

I am still debating between Genoil's ETHMiner and Claymore's Miner right now to setup on my computer...  I'm not really sure if either one is better optimized for nVidia graphics cards than the other or not?  Still, it sounds like anything will be a major improvement over MinerGate anyways, so I better just pick one and go for it!  I will update once I have set something up and started mining on a different pool to let you know how I made out.  (I have just been very busy this week and have been kind of lazy by the time I get home from work and I don't feel like messing around with installing and configuring mining software until midnight...)




BTW - So far trying to mine Ethereum for almost 5 days on MinerGate with my GeForce GTX 1070 card only averaging about 8.87MH/s, I have only mined a total of 0.02914652 ETH (worth about $6.46).     I figure I should be getting more than that out of it!  

Yes, thank you very much for the help, tdipd!  I will definitely look into other options as far as miner software goes.  So, is this Genoil basically the latest stable build of ETHMiner then?  (Otherwise it looks like the "original" ETHMiner cannot be used anymore to mine with, at least from what I read here: https://github.com/ethereum/webthree-umbrella/releases  and here:  https://github.com/ethereum/cpp-ethereum.)

It is too bad that MinerGate's own software sucks to mine with because it looked to have a nice interface and it would be great if it actually worked worth a damn!  lol...  Perhaps it works better with Radeon cards, but it just plain sucks with nVidia cards!  Other than their software, how is MinerGate as a Pool in general?  Are their payouts pretty good?  I have heard some complaints from others on these forums (not necessarily about MinerGate in particular) that one pool may report better hashrates mining on it than another and/or people have noticed that their mining revenues are higher for the same hashrate on one pool over another, etc...  Just wondering if it is worth sticking with MinerGate to mine Ethereum on once I am running better mining software or if I should switch to a different pool?

Thank you all for the help so far.  I will look into installing Genoil (or possibly another mining software) on my computer as soon as possible to see if that makes any difference in my mining hashrate with my Video Card.  I will let you know how I make out.


          -Thanks!





(Actually, you did quite well.  I probably would not have even known that English wasn't your native language unless you mentioned it as I have seen plenty of native English speakers butcher the language pretty badly, lol!  It definitely isn't an easy language to master.  I made some grammatical edits to your original post when I quoted you too so you can see how I changed it to make it read a bit better.  Otherwise, it was pretty good!)

Is that part of the problem is MinerGate's software is not optimized for GeForce cards or something?  I had heard about using Ethminer to mine with, but then when I tried to research it further, I read that you cannot mine on the current blockchain with Ethminer for some reason.  (Not sure if this had anything to do with the fork of Ethereum that created both ETH and ETC?)  Otherwise, I was coming up short trying to find decent mining software to run in order to try to mine Ethereum with.

I believe that I do already have a separate Ethereum wallet that I can use for mining payouts.  I created a Mist Ethereum wallet and I also have an ETH wallet on Coinbase, but I am not sure if I can use that for mining as Coinbase for some reason advises against using your account for sending mining payouts to.

As far as using Dwarfpool, I had also read to NOT use them as they are accumulating way too much hashing power (close to 50% of the total Ethereum network hashrate, if not more than that now?).  In order to help decentralize the Ethereum blockchain, it is highly advised to find other, smaller pools to mine on.  For BitCoin, I'm mining on Kano's pool as they are still a relatively smaller pool (and they actually have VERY good payouts!).  I wish Kano would also develop an Ethereum Mining Pool (or even for other altcoins as well), but I know that is a lot of work and is probably asking a lot.  If I could mine Ethereum on Kano's Pool though, I definitely would.


          -Thanks!

No, unfortunately not.  I think at this point, most (if not all) Cointerra miners have been smashed, ground up, and melted down to create new cars with.  They are pretty much useless at this point as they use way too much power for what little hashrate you get out of them.  Even with the BitCoin price at record highs right now, I don't think that a Cointerra machine could be profitable to run.  I still have one Cointerra machine in my basement right now, but it hasn't run since about 2015 and I gave up trying to work on it a long time ago, lol...  I sunk way too much time and money into trying to keep my Cointerra miners working for as long as possible when it would have been much more sensible to have abandoned them long ago and just upgraded to newer mining hardware.

I recently upgraded my whole mining farm to AntMiner S9's and decommissioned all of my old miners and have never looked back.  I'm getting much better and more stable hashrates and I'm pulling down the best revenues that I ever have since I started mining BitCoin.  I sold off several of my old AntMiner S5's already as well as one of my Cointerra's and a Spondoolies SP31 I had.  All I have left right now is one broken Cointerra for parts (that won't mine at all anymore) and a couple of parts AntMiner S5's (that each of them had one of the hashing boards stop working for some reason).

If anyone wants any of these miners to play with or to scavenge parts off of to keep their other miners going, let me know and you can have them!

I am not sure if anyone else mines on MinerGate for Ethereum (or other altcoins as they support a lot of them!), but I have been beating my head against the wall all weekend trying to figure out why my hashrate is so low mining with a GeForce GTX 1070 Video Card.  I just started getting into trying to mine Ethereum with my new gaming rig.  I did a bunch of research on how to start mining Ethereum and I came across MinerGate as a pool that I could mine ETH on.  I thought that it was pretty cool that they had their own mining software as well to handle mining to my account for me.  So I downloaded and installed their MinerGate v.6.6 software as well as NVidia CUDA v.8.0.61 SDK (although it says that I cannot install Nsight because I do not have any compatible versions of Microsoft VisualStudio installed, which I am not sure if I need or not?).  I also installed GETH v.1.6.1 and Mist 0.8.10, although now I am not sure as if I even needed to install them unless I was planning to solo mine directly on the Ethereum blockchain instead of mining on a pool?

For reference, my gaming rig is running Windows 10 Pro, Version 1703, OS Build 15063.296 on an Intel Core i7-6700K 4.00GHz SkyLake CPU with 32GB Crucial Ballistix RAM and an ASUS STRIX ROG GeForce GTX 1070 8GB GDDR5 Video Card.

In any event, once I got everything installed and setup on my computer, I ran MinerGate to see how well my setup would mine.  After disabling "Smart Mining" (which automatically starts mining whatever altcoin it feels you will have the best results with, which is annoying that it starts that by default...), I manually started mining Ethereum.  I figured it couldn't hurt to try to CPU mine at the same time that I GPU mine, so I enabled both to see what I could get out of my rig.  However, all I am able to get out of MinerGate is about 420-440kH/s from my CPU (running on all 8 threads - as it is a 4 core, 8 threaded processor) and 8.75-9.25MH/s from my GPU (running on Intensity 4)!  When I Googled what the estimated hashrate that my Video Card should be capable of mining Ethereum, it says that I should be averaging 25MH/s!!!  I also tried disabling CPU mining just in case that was bottlenecking my system, but at best I only got about a 0.25-0.50MH/s boost from GPU mining only with my computer.  So, why am I not able to mine on MinerGate at even 10MH/s when it says that my Video Card should be capable of mining at a much higher hashrate than that?  At this point it seems like I'd be better off trying to solo mine if GETH can give me double the hashrate that MinerGate can...

Any help in getting this figured out would be greatly appreciated.  I am very frustrated that I cannot figure out why I cannot get a decent hashrate out of this Video Card!

I received the following E-Mail last week from BitMain:



I have also heard of people receiving $300 coupons from BitMain, I am assuming for either placing larger orders or for ordering different batches of miners (for instance the 13.5TH/s models instead of the 13TH/s models.)

Has anyone else here received any such coupons?  If so, how many?  Does anyone know for sure which batches of AntMiner S9 miners are eligible to receive these coupons?

I see also that you can trade these coupons to other BitMain users.  Does anyone have any coupons that they do not believe they will use before they expire at the end of April?  You can only use ONE coupon per AntMiner S9 that you are ordering.  I only received one coupon myself, but if I could obtain other coupons, I might end up purchasing more miners from the current batch (within reason based on what I can afford to purchase as well...  At most maybe 2 or 3 miners tops.)

I would REALLY love to get my hands on some of the $300 coupons as that would save me a lot of money on each miner versus the $150 coupon I have.  Still, $150 is better than nothing!  I would love to upgrade more of my older S5 and S7 miners to the latest S9 miners!

Well, it looks like possibly overclocking my AntMiner S2 plus the sudden heat wave that we got this week killed it.  I have no idea what happened to it, but all of a sudden I noticed on Friday that it just stopped hashing.  Now, it had been mining overclocked at 215.625 MHz and averaging 1,092 GH/s without needing a reboot for over 35 days straight.  It had been running rock solid with temps only in the 48-56 degree Celsius range.  However, this week the outside temperatures really skyrocketed all of a sudden (along with the humidity).  We had 75-80 degree Fahrenheit days all week, and then this past Friday [May 8], it hit almost 90 degrees out with like 78% humidity!  I hadn't had a chance to dig out the air conditioning units and install them yet, so my house was pretty unbearably hot.  It was around 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit upstairs and in the basement where my miners are it was around 94-95 degrees, despite the natural cooling that a basement can provide in the summer.

Because of the heat and humidity on Friday, I had a bunch of my miners go down, including my AntMiner S2.  (I also had problems with one of my CoinTerra miners and one of my AntMiner S5's also overheated and shut down.  I had one board in my S5 go over 80 degrees Celsius, so it shut down.)  However, my AntMiner S2 acted very weird.  The web interface went down so I couldn't remote into it anymore, but the miner was still on (or at least the power supply was still running).  The red light on the front of the miner was on and the display on the front of the miner was blank.  So, I unplugged the miner and left it off for about 10 minutes to cool down (as I assumed it overheated, even though I never saw the temperatures go over about 60 degrees on it).

However, when I plugged it back in, it is only mining at about HALF capacity for some reason!  The temperatures are also MUCH lower than they were - only around 42-48 degrees Celsius.  The weird thing though is that I have all 10 boards up and all 64 ASICs per board are showing as good (Displaying "o" in the ASIC Status and not "x").  So, there seems to be nothing that would be preventing the miner from running at 1 TH/s, yet I am only getting 511.6 GH/s out of it!  I have no clue what is holding it back, unless I fried some of the chips in it.  However, if that was the case, then shouldn't it be showing a bunch of dead chips in the ASIC Statuses?

Does anyone have any ideas on what could have happened, what to look for, and/or how to get this miner back working at full capacity again?  Should I just pull out and reseat the boards and try to clean it up a bit?  How can I tell what is preventing this miner from hashing at 1 TH/s?  Also, when I had to restart the miner, it reset back to 200 MHz per chip from being overclocked at 215.625 MHz, but it should still be running a lot faster than 511.6 GH/s.  It has been running for almost 2 days now since it shut down on Friday and the hashrate has still not increased on it at all and the temperatures are still only in the mid 40 degrees range.  Any help getting this miner back running again at full hashing capacity would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

Yeah, I'm not sure either, sLide...  It has been over a week since I posted and no one responded back to me either...  I have been having a hell of a time with my CoinTerra miners as well and thought I did all the right things and I'm still not getting them to mine at optimal output and they are still overheating.

Just from my very basic understanding of these machines and from what I have learned from this forum, I would think that perhaps either you have some blown or about to blow or burn out Mosfets or other electrolytics on the board (the medium sized to small electrical components soldered into the outsides of the boards around the GoldStrike chips and liquid cooling blocks).  The chips could also be having serious instant-overheating issues, so the board is shutting them down before the BeagleBone boots up all the way so your CTA's are not even coming up at all when you boot it up.  The best thing to check is to take the cover off and power it up and see what the LED chaser lights at the front of the boards are doing.  If they light up and promptly go out, it could be from overheating the chips.  If they don't light up at all and/or the fans aren't running at all, there could be another issue with the board that has basically killed it. Either something is causing the board to short out or otherwise stop the flow of electricity from flowing though all of the circuits.  It does seem kind of surprising that both boards would be dead in the machine though - usually I have seen that only one board will go completely down but the other will tend to keep working for whatever reason.

Good luck with it...  You'll probably need it as I haven't had too much luck with these things myself! lol...

I have just about HAD IT with these stupid CoinTerrible machines!!!  I'm about to rip out all my hair trying to figure out how to fix these stupid things...

I finally received the LiquidPro Thermal Compound that I bought off of Amazon a while ago.  So, I figured that I would first apply it to the chips on the TerraMiner that I had the dead board in to see if I could get it working.  So, I very thoroughly removed all of the old thermal compound off of the chips with the Arctic Clean Thermal Compound Remover and the Thermal Surface Purifier and then used a whole syringe of Liquid Pro on each board (half of it went to each cluster of 4 chips, or what CoinTerra calls a "core"). I spread it around evenly and put the liquid cooling heat sinks back on.  I started it back up and - basically no hashing!  The cores were getting so hot that it was instantly shutting down and the board would barely hash anything.  At most I got maybe 15-20 GH/s out of it.  I also could not get the dead board to start back up again.

So, I took it all apart again.  I cleaned all of the LiquidPro off of the chips and heatsinks.  I completely disassembled the liquid cooling system and drained it out, removed the copper heatsinks from the liquid cooling blocks, cleaned out all the fins and removed the little plastic/rubber coolant diverter from each cooling block.  I bought some reinforced clear 1/4" tubing and some radiator clamps to replace the black plastic tubing that I had to cut off to drain the cooling system and refilled the radiators with PC liquid cooling coolant (which was basically just pure water made through reverse osmosis, but it has something added to it to make it glow under UV light, which I don't have a black light anyways, so...)  I then decided to try this other thermal compound that I bought since I didn't seem to have any luck with the LiquidPro last time.  I had bought some tubes of GELID Solutions GC-Extreme Thermal Compound (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002P5W4RU/) at the same time that I bought the LiquidPro, so I had a backup just in case.  So, I decided to slather some of that all over (and around) the chips and then re-install the liquid cooling blocks on the chips.

Well, at first I was having a hell of a time nursing it along trying to get it to work.  I think part of the problem was trying to get enough coolant in the system so that the pumps would circulate it properly.  I had to shut it down a couple of times and carefully try to remove the top hose and add some more coolant into the system.  Thankfully, I had the clear tubing now so I could see the coolant level and if it was flowing at all, which it didn't really look like was the case.  However, I could see that it looked like it was trying to suck the coolant through the hose - so I could tell from this that the way it was designed from the factory was that it pulled coolant from the TOP of the radiator into the cooling block and then discharged it into the bottom of the radiator.  This seemed very odd to me, since that is backwards from how it works in a car's cooling system.  In your car's engine, the water pump sucks coolant from the lower radiator hose and pumps it through your engine and then discharges it through the thermostat and the upper radiator hose back into the radiator.  So, I figured there wasn't enough coolant in the radiator for the pump to suck it in (at least through the very top hose - the bottom hose seemed to be getting some coolant through it at least).  So, I decided to "re-engineer" the system and flipped the radiator upside-down so that the pumps would suck coolant from the bottom and discharge it into the top of the radiator.  Plus, then you had gravity working on your side to help push the coolant through the system if the intake was on the bottom of the radiator.  The pumps still have their work cut out for them though to try to pump the coolant up the hoses back into the radiator.  However, this did seem to help as I could now see more coolant trying to flow through the hoses at least and I did manage to get it to start hashing again.  

The next problem though was that it seemed like I was ONLY getting one core to work after all of this.  (Plus I never got the dead board to start working again, so I just disconnected it and I'm only running it on the one "good" board for now...)  When the board starts up, I can see all 8 green LED lights light up, but then only the right 4 turn off in sequence and the left 4 stay on for a few seconds longer.  Then all the lights turn off and when the Miner 2 light turns on, only the right 4 LEDs start lighting up in a sweeping pattern, but the left 4 stay off.  This means that only half the board is working.  In the status page when I remote into the machine, I get normal temperatures from Core 1, but Core 2 has temperatures in the 20-30 degrees Celsius range, meaning it is not turning on at all.  Plus, for the pump speeds, I get a high number of about 3,092 RPM and an average of 1,546 RPM, but I get a low reading of 0 RPM.  I figured that meant one of my pumps was dead.  The connector on the pump has 3 pins, so I figure one must be to either regulate the speed or to report back to the board what speed the pump is operating at.  I used a voltmeter to test the voltages at the plugs and I was getting 12 VDC through each plug to the pump motor for the power, but on the signal wire for one pump I was getting about 5 VDC and the other one I was only getting about 2-3 VDC.  So, I took a new 80mm computer case fan that I had lying around and cut the plug off of it and put the 3 wires into the plug for the pump that didn't seem to be working so that the wires were piggybacked into the plug.  Now, I have an extra fan in the case and when I boot it up I'm getting the other core to turn on and start hashing.  I'm getting 7 out of 8 LED lights to turn on now and start sweeping, and in the status page I now have a low pump speed of 1,454 RPMs.  This means that the cheap case fan I put in there is only capable of probably 1,500 RPMs max, which is much lower than the cooling pumps are supposed to be running at.  So, something must be wrong with the signal wire on the one pump as I can tell the pump is working as it is moving coolant through the hoses, so it is getting 12 VDC and the pump is turning on, but it is not telling the board that it is running or what speed it is running at, so the board shuts off the power to those cores to help protect them.

Well, meanwhile as I was messing around with this one miner, my other TerraMiner, which had previously been the "good" miner that was cooperating, started to die on me.  Oddly enough, the one board in it is still working at peak capacity and I'm getting 810-812 GH/s out of it with no problems!  However, just as with the other TerraMiner, the board closest to the power supplies has slowly started to die (CTA1 or Miner 1).  It WAS working at 810-812 GH/s when I first bought it as well (1,620 GH/s total output from both boards), but now it was slowly decreasing to 600, then 500, then 400, then 300, etc. and then finally I was barely able to get 30-50 GH/s out of it!  So, I decided to take this machine apart as well and try to fix the one board in it that wasn't working anymore.  I know I hadn't had much luck with the LiquidPro before, but I still had 2 syringes of it left, so I figured I would give it a shot on this board to see if it would work at all.  So, I pulled the cooling blocks off, removed all the old thermal compound, and used two whole syringes on just the two cores (8 chips total).  I thought maybe the last time it didn't work because I had used too little of the LiquidPro on the chips, so this time I put it on as thick as I could and I even applied it to the copper heat sink as well as to the top of the chips.  I then installed the cooling blocks back over the chips and powered it back up.  But I was having the EXACT same problem - no hashing due to too high of temperatures!

What the hell gives?  I thought this LiquidPro was supposed to be THE BOMB stuff to use and it would cool off my chips so they would be ice cold...  I wasn't getting this AT ALL!  In fact, it seemed to make my chips run even hotter!  According to the status page, I was seeing average temps in the 110-115 degrees Celsius range with high temps peaking at around 125-135 degrees Celsius!  Granted, it would only run like that for a few seconds before shutting down.  When the board did try to hash, it would only end up running at like 9-15 GH/s at most for a few minutes, then it would shut down and go to 0 GH/s again for a while.  Then it would start going through a bunch of CTA's on that board - it would start out as CTA1 and then go through CTA2, CTA3, CTA4, etc., etc...  The most I saw it run through was all the way up to CTA32 in about 4-6 hours before I caught it and restarted the system again to try to see if it would stabilize.  But, I just couldn't get it to work right and I kept having problems with the chips overheating.

Well, then this morning I found that the board completely died on me now!  I wasn't getting it to come up at all and it now has the same fate as the second board in my other miner that I can't get to start up.  I tried restarting the miner about half a dozen times this morning and it just kept coming up with only CTA0 mining at 810 GH/s and the CTA1 board would not show up at all anymore.  I had been thinking of cleaning the LiquidPro off of the chips and trying some Noctua thermal compound out on it as I just ordered a few tubes of that off Amazon to see if that stuff would work any better, but now it seems like it would be a waste of money if this CTA1 board has stopped being recognized altogether now by the control board for whatever reason.  I could redo the thermal compound on it all I like, but somehow I doubt that the board will start up and begin hashing again now after the way it has been acting.

I am just so frustrated and fed up with these stupid things!!!  I am about ready to go all Office Space on them with a sledgehammer for all the headaches they have caused me!  I just don't get why the LiquidPro ended up being a TOTAL waste of time and money and did NOTHING at all to help cool my chips off.  The GELID thermal compound did a MUCH better job than the LiquidPro, although even that isn't perfect.  I am now only getting about 335-375 GH/s at most out of the one TerraMiner that I completely rebuilt at power stepping 9, which is a hell of a lot better than I WAS getting out of it, but it is still nowhere near 800 GH/s, which is where it SHOULD be if the board was running at peak capacity.  I suppose at this point I could just combine the two boards that I have working right now into one case and consolidate them into one working machine and then either junk or try to sell the other components to someone with more time and patience than I have to see if they can get them to start working at all or not.  I am just very disappointed and frankly disgruntled with these machines that for all the time, effort, and money I have put into these just to STILL have them not working right!  I have wasted about $90 just in thermal compound alone on these stupid CoinTerrible machines only to still have them overheat and not mine properly.  I have had it with these things!!!  I just don't understand what is wrong with them and why all the supposed "fixes" to get them working again have failed miserably!  I think these things just don't like me...

So, no one has tried to change the voltage regulator(s) in one of these before or knows how to do it?  It has been a while now and I haven't seen any more replies to my posts.  Just thought I'd try to bump this back up in case anyone else hasn't seen it who might be able to help out.  Thanks!

Really?  So that voltage field in the Advanced Miner Configuration is bogus then and it does nothing?  Is it actually possible at all to modify the voltage from within the software at all (possibly as easy as just modifying some code or as complex as having to rebuild the firmware or something...) OR is the voltage regulated physically on the boards like you said?  So, I would have to buy different voltage regulators to solder into the boards then to try to overclock it further?  Has anyone ever tried this before?

Does anyone know if there are any voltage settings that could be passed to cgminer that might control this then?  Maybe that is all it would take?  One could hope at least, right?

I notice there haven't been a lot of replies to this thread lately, so I'm not sure if anyone is still messing about with these Antminer S2's or not.  But, I'm having a bit of a problem with successfully overclocking my Antminer S2 that I bought a few months ago and I was hoping some pointers from this forum might get me on the right track.

I was actually overclocking my Antminer S2 with some success on the STOCK power supply (1,000 Watts Enermax).  I took the clock frequency values posted on the first page and played around with them and found I had the best luck with 216M (215.625 MHz per chip).  With this setting, I had increased my average hash rate on the miner from around 1,008 GH/s or so stock to around 1,092 GH/s overclocked.  My hardware error rate only increased to 0.96% or so (under 1%, so not bad...) and I was even getting mining pool side hash rates reported from this machine in the 1.09-1.12 TH/s range!

But, I wanted to see if I could get more out of it than that.  I had read on this thread that if you wanted to overclock the Antminer S2 more, you would need to get a bigger power supply so you could supply all the ASIC chips with more power to run them at a higher MHz clock speed.  I also read that the ASIC chips used in the Antminer S2 are the same ones that were used in the Antminer S3, but that there were fewer chips per board on the S3 and they were running at 400 MHz instead of 200 MHz like they are on the S2.  So, in my mind, I figured that if I was able to supply more voltage and wattage to the boards in my S2, theoretically I should be able to overclock the chips to 250, 300, 350, or maybe even 400 MHz and try to approach 2TH/s with my miner!

However, unfortunately that has NOT been the case!  I purchased a LEPA G1600, which is a 1,600 Watt continuous (1,700 Watt peak power) fully modular power supply to swap into my Antminer S2.  I completed the swap Tuesday night (March 31) and have been playing around with the chip frequencies and voltages since then and I just CANNOT get it to run any better than it already was on the stock power supply at 215.625 MHz chip frequency!!  What gives here?

I tried being overly ambitious at first and jumped the chip frequency right up to 250 MHz, but it would not even hash at that speed at all!  I was only getting 32-45 GH/s reporting out of the machine and I had hardware errors in the 154-175% range!  This was crazy!  How could such a relatively small increase basically break my miner and it wasn't working at all?!  I should have the power to back up this increase in chip frequency, right?  Then I tried backing it off to only 225 MHz, but that didn't seem to work much better either.  I was still getting hash rates below 100 GH/s and hardware errors in the 75-120% range.  This is ridiculous!  Then I tried backing it off to only the 219M (218.75 MHz) chip frequency and even at THAT setting I was getting a worse hash rate and more hardware errors than when I was running it at 215.625 MHz!

So, I switched my settings back to the 215.625 MHz chip frequency for now and I am still running at 1,092 GH/s average for the time being.  But it just bothers me that I was able to get that on the stock power supply and now that I have severely beefed up the power supply in it, I am unable to get any more output from my miner through overclocking it.  What gives?  Am I more limited now by cooling than I am by power?  The weird part is, even when I tried running it at 250 MHz, my reported board temperatures weren't any higher than they were at 215.625 MHz!  They were still reporting between 49 and 58 degrees Celsius, which is what they are reporting when the chips are running at 215.625 MHz as well.  So, it didn't seem like they were overheating and throttling back to me at least.  Is there some built-in limit that they programmed in so the miner won't run at all at higher frequencies?  Maybe there is a limit to how much power can be transmitted to the boards through the PCI interface and that is where it is choking now?  I notice that the Antminer S3 and S5 boards have power connectors that plug right into the ASIC boards themselves.  However, on the Antminer S2, the power plugs into the big controller board that the 10 ASIC boards plug into through PCI slots.  Could that be part of the problem?

I would really like to have my purchase of this massive power supply for my Antminer to not be for naught.  Does anyone know if it is possible to get more out of these Antminer S2's or am I pretty much at the limit of what it can do right now for some reason?  Do I need to modify the voltage field in the Advanced Miner Configuration settings in order to successfully overclock it further?  I have tried changing that setting from the stock 0725 volts to 0750, 0800, 0850, 0900, and even 0950 but it didn't seem to make any difference.  If this value is somehow actually used to do something, I'm kind of wary of setting it to a value over 1000, but something tells me that this value is not used since I don't see any difference in the way it mines regardless of what value I put in there.

Any help towards maxing out my Antminer S2 would be greatly appreciated!  Thanks in advance and I look forward to any advice you guys can give me!

If you read back a couple of pages to my original post about my TerraMiners, I had already tried all of those things that you mentioned prior to first posting.  I read through this thread and tried some of the "quick fixes" first to see if I could narrow down the problem.  Both power supplies work fine and are supplying good power to the boards.  I tried swapping the power supplies and the problem stayed with the board closest to the power supplies not turning on.  I have two solid green lights on the back of each power supply.  I tried swapping the pump connectors and couldn't get the board to start up that way either.

Now, on to what I have NOT tried yet since my first post about this due to lack of time:  I have not yet tried physically switching the locations of the two boards.  I have not even tried removing the bad board to check out underneath it yet.  The top of the board looks good though and I can't see anything out of the ordinary.  The tops of both boards look identical and nothing seems blown.  I haven't tried removing all of the Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste that I slathered on all of the chips yet either.  I THOUGHT that stuff was supposed to be non-conductive, but is it possible that the thermal compound could be shorting out one of the chips or something?

For now, I have it running on the one "good" board.  The Arctic Silver 5 compound SUCKS @$$ though and I have to run the board at power stepping 7 and I'm only getting about 200-260 GH/s out of it right now.  Even if I can't get the bad board to start running again, if I redo the thermal compound on the chips with the Liquid Pro and get it running on one board at 812 GH/s, I'll be happy with that for now, I guess.  It's better than nothing and better than what I'm getting out of it now, lol.

Even my other "Miner formerly known as the good TerraMiner" has gone down the drain and I haven't even touched that one.  It was running at the full 1,622 GH/s when I first got it and set it up to mine.  In less than a month (and dozens of reboots to try to get it to start mining better, which only seemed to result in losing more hashing power each time, which is annoying...) it is now down to barely 1,000 GH/s!  (It is currently running at 1,035 GH/s at the time of writing this.)  It looks like CTA0 is still running at max capacity as I am getting 811 GH/s out of it, but CTA1 is the problem.  It is throttled WAY back to only 220-225 GH/s and it is still running temperatures around 60-75 degrees Celsius.  Looks like it is time to redo all of the thermal compound on that machine as well.



Haha, small world, right?  I've been mining on CKPool as well with my miners.  It has been pretty decent for me, but the guy who sold me the AntMiner S5 told me to switch to the AntPool for better payouts.  He said they don't charge any pool fees, as opposed to CKPool's 0.9% pool fee.  IDK, for some reason I still like mining on a smaller pool to help distribute the hashing power of the network more so everyone isn't just mining on the same big pool, but the no fees is definitely a big lure for me...

Lol...  Yeah, I think that is just from shipping.  The sides on the S5 are very flimsy plastic.  They are not metal or anything.  I guess as long as it just helps direct the airflow, who cares what they look like?  (Of course, me personally I'd like it to be nice and straight looking, but what can you do?)  To aid in cooling the S5, I'd actually like to put a rear fan on it too to help suck the air out from the back instead of just having one fan to push the air through the front of it.  But even so, it is still running fairly cool, despite being in close proximity to all those TerraMiners.  It seems odd to me though that one board in the S5 is running "cool" (relatively speaking...) at 52 degrees Celsius, but the other board is running "hot" at 68 degrees Celsius.  Both of the boards have their heatsinks facing inwards with the fan blowing on them, so I would think it should equalize the temperatures better than that.  Maybe at some point after I'm done fiddling with my TerraMiners, if I have any Liquid Pro left, I can redo the thermal paste on my AntMiners to see if they will run any cooler as well.  Couldn't hurt, right?  At least for right now, the AntMiners are running about 20-40 degrees cooler than my TerraMiners, so I'd say they aren't really an issue.

I may have to try this in an attempt to resurrect the dead board in my TerraMiner as well.  As you recall, I have one machine that is only running on one board as well.  It kicks on for like half a second and then immediately turns off.  So, why do you need to run it on a car battery to "fix it" (or, rather, from the sounds of it, to blow up the one bad mosfet or chip that it preventing the board from working and then the rest of the board will work) like you explain?  If you try running it off of the power supply, is the board just telling the power supply to stop supplying power because of a short, but the car battery doesn't care and will keep supplying power until it blows up?  That doesn't seem to be my experience though as when my machine is running, I checked the voltage at the big power connectors to the board and I was getting 12 VDC to the dead board, it just was still not turning on and working.  I would think then that this would be the same result if I apply power to the dead board from a car battery - it will try to turn on for half a second and then turn right off to try to "save" the board.  (Which, in actuality, is still ruining the board since I can't use it either way! lol...)

Thanks for the tips and pointers though!  I know I definitely appreciate it as a CoinTerra noob, lol...


(Which, BTW - due to being very busy with work lately and coming home at 8:30-9pm at night, I still haven't had a chance to open up one of my TerraMiners yet to try to redo the thermal paste with the Liquid Pro that I bought.  Hopefully one day this week I will get a chance to do it.  If not, definitely by Friday or Saturday then.  I'll keep you all posted with how it turns out whenever I get a round to it.  In the meantime, I just bought a used AntMiner S5 off eBay for (probably a bit too much money, but...) $600 with a Corsair 850 Watt power supply.  I just hooked that puppy up and got that mining away at 1,156 GH/s or so for a couple of days now.)

I also found a sale on metal shelving on eBay last week, so I bought a 6-tier, 500 Lbs per shelf rated tubular steel shelf with casters for $69.99 with free shipping to put all my miners on.  The cheap $14 4-tier plastic shelving I bought at Home Depot to temporarily put my miners on wasn't working out and the weight of these CoinTerra monsters was bowing the shelves pretty badly, even though I put them as far out on the edges of the shelves as possible and staggered them to try to prevent that from happening.  Well, at least I have a more safer shelving solution to put my miners on now that is a lot more sturdy and stable.  I should have just bought one of those in the first place.  Oh well, live and learn, I guess.  Now I have a nice, purdy, shiny rack in the corner of my basement for all my miners, lol!  Check out some pictures of my setup:

Here is the old plastic shelving I was using (BAD!):


Look how bad the TerraMiner is bowing the shelf!


Even my AntMiner S2 did a number on the shelf it was sitting on:


Here is half of my new shelving that I assembled with the wheels on it (All 6-Tiers was just slightly too tall to fit in my basement, unfortunately.  Thankfully, this shelving was semi-modular, so I could construct two 3-Tier shelving units out of it, which came in handy.):


Now, the guy who sold me the AntMiner S5 told me that it is important to have the bottom closed off to improve airflow so it will cool it properly.  Since these shelves are open wire mesh, that wouldn't be the best to put my S5 unit on.  So, rather than buying some wooden boards to put it on, I cut up the box that my shelving came in to make a decent base to put my miner on:


The box was obviously slightly larger than the shelving unit, so I had to round out the corners so the cardboard would fit between the posts that the shelves mount on:


Here is my new shelving with my two AntMiners mounted on it:


And finally I added the TerraMiners to the bottom shelves and powered everything on:



I just still can't get over how quickly these miners are improving though.  Look at the AntMiner S2 next to the latest AntMiner S5.  The S5 is WAY less than half the size and weight of the S2 miner and it has about 100-150 GH/s more mining power to boot!  It also uses almost HALF of the power to do so (not quite, but pretty close...).



(Oh, and sorry to hijack a thread about fixing CoinTerra miners with pics of my mining setup, but I figured it is somewhat topically related at least...)

YAAAY!!!  I finally got my Liquid Pro today!

Now I'll have to find the time to re-do the entire cooling system in my TerraMiners sometime this week.  It may not be until the weekend though, depending on how busy I am with work.  I'll try to update (with photos, if possible...) once I find the time to crack open one of the cases...  Fingers and toes crossed that this actually helps me get improved performance out of these things!