When you do please PM me and I'll buy.  For the PowerEdge I hacked a couple of terminal lugs in place but can't really trust them.

You are absolutely right.  The Dell PowerEdge is registering (and the miner is on a 12 gauge line I ran for miners closer to the breaker box) 122.1VAC, .98PF, ~59.9/s, 248VA, 244 watts, 2.04 amps.  So, if it had both hashing boards the current would be in the 4.08 ballpark compared to the cheap supplies 4.62 amps.  Cheap supplies are running at 113% of the Dell server supply.  Wow.  Thanks for point it out.

I have half an S3+ running on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 750W supply right now, the other blade went bad.  I'll move the Kill-A-Watt over and get back with a reading.

Wow, I never thought a Kill-A-Watt could read a PF that high except on an incandescent light bulb!  Is .97 PF an actual Kill-A-Watt reading on a bitcoin miner?

Yes I know.  I owned a KNC Mercury back in the day and they were having Jupiter users with burned up supplies.  They were jumping the connector.  Those supplies were designed for motherboards not miners.  The respective voltage loads are way different.  I suspect some supply manufacturers were using a low voltage rail for the maximum current ramp circuit as the low voltage would reach its limit quickest but jumping the connector and never putting a load on the low voltage rail, when a user would turn off the miner, the supply's low voltage rail wasn't brought to ground quickly enough then the user turned the Jupiter back on while the maximum current ramp was still high and bam the voltage spiked blowing the capacitors on the miner board sometimes causing the board to burn.  

By the way the solution there I think was the pre-fab jumpers with a resistor to the low voltage rail allowing it to be drawn down to ground when the miner was shut down.  They sell those on Ebay.

You guys with good power supplies would know.  What power factor does a Kill-A-Watt give for a good supply?  Personally I've always gone with cheap LED supplies then added a heat sink to the bridge rectifier, changed out the single turn trim pot for a 20 turn, improved the thermal paste on the power transistors then replacing the fans when they get noisy.  Also I add 3½ LEDs measuring the voltage at the PCIE connector.  With a C1 I use four 360 watt 12v LED supplies, one on each blade and a fifth to power the radiator fans and pump.  While I was considering the buy of an Avalon6 I was considering buying four new 5v or 6v 360 watt power supplies for under $30 each, putting a digital readout on each and again at one of the two PCIE connectors on each blade, putting two in series for each blade.  Putting 12v supplies in parallel burns them up.  So, with two of these improved cheap LED 12v supplies on an S3+ right here that I have a Kill-A-Watt monitoring, I get 120.2VAC, 0.70 power factor, 59.9~/s, 554VA, 388 watts, 4.62 amps.  So, I figure the losses using cheap supplies would show up in the power factor figure and wattage.  Can someone tell me how this compares with quality supplies?  Thanks.

What I'm powering with these really doesn't matter.  The 12vdc would appear as a resistive load so power factor doesn't apply.  I really can't get a good reading on the DC current.  I considered buying shunts but then the cost...

A few years ago my electric utility replaced the old power meter with a phone home communicating power meter that doesn't require the utility to stop at my home and read the meter.  I wonder about its accuracy.  I know I can shut down everything in the home and put a few hundred watt incandescent lamps as the only use and accurately measuring the current and voltage get a resistive load comparison to compare with the meter reading but my miners might run with a power factor of 0.70 according to my Kill-A-Watt.  Of course I could shut down everything and only run a single miner for some hours and get a comparison but shutting down everything isn't something I want to do. 

The utility station is maybe 20 miles away, provides power to the entire southeast, and at the time of construction was the largest natural gas power utility in the world.  Before the entity purchased the local utilities, and there is some not-too-distant hydroelectric, this rural property was seeing AC voltage levels at 126VAC-128VAC but since the new utility I see voltage pretty close to 120VAC. 

When it was 126-128VAC the old incandescent lamps would draw more current and use more power than at 120VAC but air conditioning and refrigerators ran more efficiently and this being the south and hot it made a difference.  Now with the power savings lamps the load is more refrigerator, freezer and air conditioning and the lower voltage has those running less efficiently.  Interestingly when the voltage was dropping from 126-128VAC, the power lines were falling to the ground mid-summer in Pennsylvania.  Apparently there had been a trickle up effect and I think they got caught with their voltage down.  The profit change probably saw them lowering their voltages which heated their lines and caused them to break.  But that's neither here nor there. 

Another aside - when a large company moved down here in '80's, they had electric problems and had their local utility out to the factory in the middle of the night not infrequently until the problems cleared up.  The company used a lot of electricity in the production of their product.  They knew their usage from having run the same machinery up north.  I don't know but suspect there was some kind of overcharging going on and when it was fixed the late night problems requiring the utility visits stopped.  But I don't know. 

So, the new power utility may be selling more power at 120VAC rather than the 126-128VAC but I would guess the power meters may be better than under the old system.  But I don't know.

I should mention that years before the change I had the old company shut off my yard light atop the power pole saving me, I forget, $10 or $15/month.  A few years later I saw the charge on the bill again but the light had never been turned back on.  I brought all my bills to the utility, showed them the charges and was compensated for the $200+ overcharge.  That being the case there would possibly be motive for an installer to 'tweak' this power meter when it went in.

 How would I find out if the power meter is accurately computing the power factor and how much would that calibration check cost? 

January 11, 2016 and still no movement from the Miami USPS.  November 23, 2015 to present, 50 days.  And because Bitmain asked the value to be displayed as <$20,  if the USPS says they've lost it then guess what I'd get for it.  Probably would get postage refunded too tho.  That would be an S5 board with 2 ASICs dead for $37.

If I were to buy a single Avalon6 in this group buy, when would I actually have it?  (Georgia)

soy

1/1/2016, starting the new year and the S5 hashboard sent back for repair is still sitting in Miami at the USPS facility, there since 11/25/2015.  Wonder if the problem is that the Bitmain rep said to write on the package that the value was $20 or less which then begs the question why spend $17 on priority mail postage.  Or perhaps the USPS just doesn't want to engage in mail service to China.
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Put a trace on it yesterday.  It's still there tonight 1/6/16, 42 days since being mailed, no indication of having been moved from USPS Miami to US customs.

Sent the board back to Bitmain via US Postal Service Priority Mail on Nov. 23rd and it arrived in Miami on Nov. 25th.  Today was Dec. 14th and there has been no further movement in Miami.  It would appear the US Postal Service is not the carrier to use to China.

11/23/15 mailed, priority post

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11/25/15 package arrives at Miami

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12/22/15 package still in Miami.

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12/26/15 package still in Miami.

This C1 has a higher temperature on chain 3.  I use separate supplies on each card.  I've lost two supplies on this machine, this card, so obviously one or more of the ASICs on the card is drawing higher current.  About 10 minutes ago I disconnected power to the supply on the card that blows supplies and the temperature on chain 3 came down and of course the hashrate dropped by 25%.  Curiously, ASIC status shows all to be o's, even the chain with power disconnected!

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Interesting, here it is sometime later, I changed my miner config for a misspelling in a pool, now chains 2,3, and 4 are alive while 1 shows dashes.  The hot chain was #3, was disconnected, is now chain 1.

I just fixed a similar problem.  The power was momentarily interrupted and restored to the C1.  The controller card stopped communicating.  I downloaded the stock image.  Putting the SD card into a reader on a Win7 machine.  The machine asked to scan and repair the card.  I said no.  Using the HDD Raw Copy Tool, I started to write stock image to the card.  It hung very quickly.  I shut down the process and ejected the card then reattached the card reader.  This time when Windows asked to scan and repair errors I said yes.  When I ran the HDD Raw Copy Tool it wrote the stock image to the card 100% no problem.  Then of course I had to reconfigure the card which woke up at 192.168.1.99.  Afterwards I wondered if I had run the scan and repair then put the card directly back in the machine if it would have worked with all the original settings.

No way.  I see no more S5's for sale by Bitmain.  To sell this perfectly working board running at half speed for money toward somebody else's 2 board castoff that in all probability would be a can of worms and nothing but headaches is not a smart idea.  If an S5 is working good who in their right mind would sell?

And notice the difference between an ASIC going x with the others o's but when the ASIC goes short to ground the whole chain goes bad.

I use to change ASICs on the thumb miners, sometimes the crystal.  These ASICs are of course even smaller, closer pins.  I would remove an ASIC if I thought there was hope but not try to replace one of these.

So, the board is sitting here.

Saw btc hit $500 today so tonight before dinner I took a C1 and got it up and running.  Tried to get my second up but in the process partly cut power to the first and stupido turned it on quickly perhaps losing the controller.  Tomorrow I'll try resetting.  Bother, my miners aren't on the .1.0 subnet.

Thanks.  That's what I thought.  Any way to get the board running without those 2 ASICs?  Removing one or both of the ASICs should clear the short but I hear they run in a chained operation.  I see the R39/D92 - R45D98 could be jumped, say removing D92&R45.

Is there another good reason that the resistance across the diodes is measurable above 4 ohms except in the quadrant of ASICs 19 & 20 where the resistance measured is well less than 1 ohm?  There are a relatively small number of filter capacitors to ground, but my money's on one of the two ASICs.  The large diode is good.  Other diodes are good.

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Sorry, long day working on car, 4.99 ohm resistors in parallel with capacitors but my meter reads resistance of between 4 and 5 ohms except for 19/20.

Dust impeded cooling - hotter ASIC became inefficient - inefficient ASIC drew more current - internal ASIC component or conductor couldn't stand up to the higher current, melts and shorts to ground.

The U19/U20 pair seem shorted to ground.  There's a 4.99 ohm 1% resistor across the caps mounted between each ASIC pair but across that cap C12 there appears to be a short.  A close inspection shows no debris on the ASIC pins.  

This board has a T09 round sticker in the upper right.  It's heatsink screws with springs were torqued less snug than the other board.  On the inside, the heat sink side, perhaps as is true on all the boards (will think to look one day), the positive rail comes thru to the inside to that ASIC pair in clusters of thru holes.  One of those thru holes is not coated for contact purposes when troubleshooting.