What makes you think that there is a slight chance you can even be taken into consideration by chinese authorities? You are dealing with a comunist regime who participates in every aspect of local and national economy and business. The comunist party owns every company in China even bitmain which is highly profitable in every aspect of the chinese economy and energy industry. Not even in your wildest dreams any action against bitmain will go thru using the Chinese authorities. However, in the USA there is a legal figure called "Class Suit Action" and in this particular case it perfectly fits what it was created for.

All what is needed is several of us all together to file a legal suit against bitmain in the USA for wrongful and deceiving selling practices by selling and distributing defective merchandise and offering no warranty in the USA.
Bitmain is registered in the USA as a company so if there is a substantial number of people filling for a class suit action we may, at least, receive a full refund even if some time have passed.

mikeywith, from my personal point of view as you said about S9, those are the best miners from Bitmain and that tool was released after the S9 was first released. However, taking into consideration the connections this provider may have and more specifically inside Bitmain, the only fact that they are developing a software update to cover something that hasn't even hit the markets yet, thus nobody should know how those series will perform, it tells me they know something about it or may have a beforehand information and want to be ready when that happens, specially the Chinese.

Tell you something, my parts supplier for bitmain miners just sent me a message last night related to the Universal Test Fixture software... They are working on an update to attend the new S19. So, what this tells me is that S19's are about to be the same story of the deceiving S17 series.


You are absolutely correct !!!

They were shipped overclocked straight out from Bitmain. Among the several tests I have been performing the last 10 months with those S17 series I have discovered that they are overclocked for several reasons but I am going to mention a couple of them.

1- The HW error factor is unusually higher than average, if there are no problems with the internet connection the next cause for this to happen is aggressive overclocking

2- The working temperature factor of the miner is too high even on controlled environment ( 23 degrees celsius  ) or winter time, plus the fan speed is also too high 90% of the time.

I wish you the best of luck with that my dear friend.

Hello good friend Scorpyy, to begin with visual inspection is paramount. The most probably is that you will find at at least 1 chip falling off the hashing board, although I'm shure there is going to be more than one. The thing here is to touch, press and shake every heat sink on the hashing boards in order find those that are almost loose but not enough to fall by gravity. Most of the time if there is a complete hashing board not showing, if that is the case, chip number 1 and chip number 65 should be checked.

This is because the way the hashboards are designed, the chips circuitry works  in series so if the first or the last chip of the chain fails the whole chain fails.

Some people say that if the temperature sensors on the hashing board fail the controller board does not activates that hashing board, the thing is that if there is 1 out of 4 temperature sensor working the controller stills start that hashing board and is very unlikely that all 4 temperature sensors fail all together.

Now, if you want to take this to the next level in order to be absolutely and completely sure about which component is causing the failure on your miner then you have to buy an special diagnostic device called universal test fixture that connects in series between the miner and a laptop or pc, from there you can start to determine what is exactly causing the hashing board not to start.

Depending of how many hashing boards you expect to repair and assuming that you are going to use the universal test fixture device along with a top quality soldering paste, soldering flux and hot air solder you may be spending around $400 dollars. However, I put you this way, there is a place in the U.S. that claims they repair S17 series hashing boards, they charge for EVERY hashboard repair service $350, plus shipping.

If you send at least 1 complete miner to Bitmain in Hong Kong you may be end paying $150 or $200 on shipping costs plus customs fees when they send back a new crappy miner which is not guaranteed to be 100% free of failure within the next 15 days of first start. However, if there is more than one complete miner to be shipped to Bitmain then do the math between buying the repair/diagnostic equipment or paying either 3rd party repair or shipping/customs costs to and from Hong Kong, you may be ending paying more than $400 and if your miner or miners fail again you are ready to fix them right away on the spot.

Also, I have found that the S17 series are shipped from Bitmain overclocked and that is one of the reasons they fail so much. All S17 use the same hashing chips, what makes them different is the clock speed and the number of chips on hashing boards. I have been running some testings with this S17 and S9 and I have been able to reach consistent and almost zero HW errors overclocking to 100 Th on S17+ and 20 Th on S9. Don't ask how I do reached those numbers because there is time and money invested on those tests that I am not willing to share. All I can tell is that if the above instructions, specially    re-soldering the chips, are followed higher overclocking speeds can be safely achieved. By saying this I am really suspicious about the S19 series and their so called 110 Th. From my perspective it seems those S19's are nothing more than the same S17 with maybe couple of more chips per hashing board with an aggressive overclocking. Only time will tell if I'm wrong or not, I can't wait to see massive failure claims about those S19 in the coming weeks.

To end this post my advice to everyone ...save, your time, your money, your mental health and your soul STAY AWAY FROM BITMAIN PRODUCTS.

PS: Buy Kester soldering paste and soldering flux. Some people here maybe thinking... "this person works for Kester and that is why is recommending it" I don't work for that company but in my years of experience Kester soldering products have proven to be highly reliable.

Mikeywith, what really disturbed me is the part the guy says, "Because new miners rarely have such problems in China, it is likely that they have been injured during transportation"

So how do they transport the miners within Mainland China? By teletransportation as in Star Trek? Scotty beam up the miners to Shinchong farm? Nahhh they ship them the same way the do to other parts of the world.

So thinking about the way that people operates, cheating and lying all the time, I have come into a conclusion that Bitmain have two assembly lines, one for their own farms and customers within China, the other for the rest of the world which is low quality and compensates the extra costs invested into the "domestic production assembly line".

Moreover, they don't want more competition so they take your hard earned money, send you a crappy machine and in 3 months max you are out of the business either because you ran out of money or you are not willing to spend more in some other brand of equipment and in the top of that you have no working miners either.

Well after pushing and pushing at every known e-mail address at Bitmain I finally got in contact with somebody on a high rank at service dept. He confirmed what I have been suspecting about the quality of soldering is very likely the root of the problems on all S17 series, even on prior from S series as S9K and all the way thru S17. I got in touch with him via whatsapp here is the conversation: https://ibb.co/LdPzMyc

So, being that said, all my dear friends is useless and futile send you S17 to Bitmain even under warranty because is very likely that as soon as you receive them back other chips will come off, so learn how to solder using soldering paste and flux with hot air solder. Other than that, find yourself a local electronic tech near you to avoid and expose the miner to shipping "kick handling" even if shipped to Bitmain's Service Center in the USA.

Hope this clears out all theories about this equipment since the root cause of failure have been revealed.

Jbillk, don't throw them to the garbage, find someone near you that have soldering skills using hot air guns, buy yourself a good soldering paste and bring one hashing board and ask the tech resold the chips and most of the components on the hashing board.

here is a top notch soldering paste

https://www.digikey.com/products/en/soldering-desoldering-rework-products/flux-flux-remover/266

I understand what you are talking about, you are referring to the chips that are on the other side of the hashing boards, the small ones with small heatsink. However, what I am doing is putting upwards the chips with the long heatsink which are the ones that creates most of the heat and thus are prone to fall off the board due to this high temperature. The ones on the opposite side have a small heatsink which tells me they develop less heat. I am testing this position on several miners and see what happens.

My friend mikeywith, I really appreciate your good words, thanks. About your question of keep it stock or overclocking, I rather underclocking them cut the blue wire from the fans and place the miner in a horizontal position instead of vertical so the chips on the boards also stay in horizontal position and that might help to keep them from falling easily. Also I observed that the base plate where the fans are attached are not completely open to the airflow as those in the S9. Those plates have metal fins forming squares in front of the fans and let me tell you those fins cause a disruption and some blockage of the airflow into de miner. In the past I did some experiment placing a simple air filter in front of the intake fans on S9, after few minutes of operation the miner's temperature raised exponentially in relation with a no air filter condition.

Based on that, I suspect that any obstruction of the air flow, no matter how small is can cause the temperature on the miner to raise abnormally high and relatively quick. The solution to this is to cut those stupid square fins that are in the fan base plate and leave them as those that come with the S9. Just keep the outer frame of the plate which is in reality where the plate and fans attach to the aluminum body of the miner.

About your question of which soldering paste to use, the BEST choice all over the board hands down is  Kester TSF-6522. it can be bought on electronic specialty stores such as Digikey. This compound is specially good since is a tacky and NO CLEAN class which is very important. Due to the limited space between the hashing chips is absolutely necessary to leave no trace of soldering material around and within the chip that is about to be soldered.

Here is the link: https://www.digikey.com/products/en/soldering-desoldering-rework-products/flux-flux-remover/266

I hope this have helped many people around to understand what is really going on with this miners and to suggest to those that are willing to fix by themselves their miners to do it. Instead to spend the money by sending your machine, as Bitmain expects to do it, to Hong Kong, I rather buy the chips, the hot air soldering machine and soldering compound and do it myself. Yet, if you feel you are not able to do such a job find an electronic technician that have hot air soldering skills and ask to do the job, you can supply the hashing chips and the soldering paste.

To all good friends in this community I tell you guys WE ALL are on our own on this and if I were a lawyer I will be filling for a class action lawsuit against Bitmain. By the time and in the best of our interests let's find out how to solve our miners problems by ourselves so we can be back in business in a safe and low cost manner.

Best regards.

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Friend Favebook, I already did and I'm really sick of  "copy and paste" answers by someone called Jessica L. who is in charge of technical department.

Hello, I have been reading every single answer to this interesting post. This is because I have also been framed by Bitmain with those S17+ antminers. I have some background in electronics and analyzing those intermittent failures that these miners have just got me a little confused, specially during a time that I checked control boards and data cables by disconnecting back and forth. At times the miner was full throttle mining just to drop after few hours. That in electronics is called a "cold soldering". Although there are not visible cold solderings I discovered that the soldering material that is being used on this S17 have 2 problems.

First, high amount of lead and low proportion of tin, and of course zero silver in the soldering material. This can be observed under the microscope used to soldering circuit boards. All of the solderings showed a greyish mate color and no shinning finish.
 
Second, below normal temperature of the soldering material, also leaves traces, specially on the hashing board chips. Also analyzed under the microscope there are traces that look like an sponge along with tiny cracks surrounding the chip's area at the surface of the hashing board.

So, this takes me into the conclusion that somebody at Bitmain's is trying to cut ends and by doing this they have compromised 50% of the S17, T17 series. The use of soldering with high percentage of plumb just tells me that they are throwing the cheapest crap they have to solder the components on those miners. Also they are trying to reduce electricity costs by not heating well enough the soldering material melted at the trays and this is specially true because the soldering material with higher proportion-ratio of lead instead of tin and silver takes colder temperatures to melt.

So taking all this into consideration I really recommend to all of those that are willing to throw the money into shipping costs, customs fees and no mining income, just don't do it because Bitmain still uses the same bad quality materials to fix it.

Since that soldering material is all over the hashing and controller boards is just a matter of time chips keep coming off the boards, the only and costly solution is to desoldering them all and soldering back with a good quality soldering flux, other than that those miners will keep failing over and over.

Basically most of the S17 series are doomed.