Antminer S5, Spondoolies SP20 or 3 x Antminer S3?

[RichBC]

Not wanting to stray off topic..... But am interested in how you are measuring the Power on the Sidekick USB? Are you measuring it at the input to the stick? If so this may be making things look better than they are as it factors in nothing for the generation & losses in the USB supply in the PC. However if you are powering it separately and measuring the power taken by a separate USB PSU then that is then a fair comparison with traditional miners "at the wall power"?

Rich

[philipma1957]

Not wanting to stray off topic..... But am interested in how you are measuring the Power on the Sidekick USB? Are you measuring it at the input to the stick? If so this may be making things look better than they are as it factors in nothing for the generation & losses in the USB supply in the PC. However if you are powering it separately and measuring the power taken by a separate USB PSU then that is then a fair comparison with traditional miners "at the wall power"?

Rich

At the stick but  my pc runs a node and is on 24/7/365

  So I don't count the pc. it uses 32 watts to run the node and 1 more watt to run cgminer.

 I have a hub that is very high quality.  It loses 5 watts and can run 16 sticks..

So basically  I am 6 watts in the hole once I start the first or the 16th stick.

I figure I will run 6 and I will have to add 1 watt per stick.   brings numbers from .31 to .35 if you run 6 sticks. (in theory)

 my 2 sticks do 14 watts/ 29 gh

[QuintLeo]

In the USA Washington state has 3 to 5  cent power.

 To be picky, there are 2 counties IN the state of Washington with electric BASE rates around 3 cents/KWh (Chelan and Douglas) - actual cost will be a little higher due to meter charges and such, but they're both still easily under 4 cents/KWh and probably close to 3 if you use a lot amount of power. Do note that they've been having drought conditions in the Columbia river watershed upriver from that area, so the local PUDs have been adding surcharges for part of the last 2-3 years due to the lack of the usual water flow.

 There is a third county (Douglas) where you can easily get a little under 5 cents/KWh (base rate a bit over 4 unless you use a LOT of power, then you can get a little under) on a smallish farm. Same surcharges issue for the same reason.


 Watch out for the rents though, especially in/near Wenatchee itself. They're not SoCal or SeaTac level high, but....


 MegaBigPower's actual farm location is not actually in Wenatchee, I'm pretty sure, based on comments they've posted - I suspect they're on the other side of the river somewhere in Douglass county like East Wenatchee or Wenatchee Beach areas, perhaps further north.



 Most of the REST of Washington state has quite a bit higher power rates.

[RichBC]

I decided to try my hand at Undervolting the S3, I would like to play with the S5 but am hoping the second hand prices will come down a bit first.. Although there are posts around that say you can change the core voltage using the Advanced setting field, like some others have found on my S3 & S3+ it seems to make no difference to the voltage.

I wanted to be able to easily adjust the voltage so I soldered in 2 x 4 channel 5K digital pots across the VFB resistors. These are setup with an Arduino, which also measures the voltage set..



In practice I have just rediscovered what other have found, but it's good to see the numbers for yourself.  

The Standard S3 with 218.75MHz clock had a core voltage of 0.8V hashed at about 440GH & took 321W at the wall giving J/GH of 0.73

After trying a lot of frequencies and voltages I decided it was possible to continue at 218.75MHz with the voltage reduced to 0.73V. This gives a small number of hardware errors .001% but improves the J/GH to 0.65. I soldered 4K7 resistors into the S3 an am letting it run, while continuing to play with the S3+ with the digital pots.

At my electricity cost this moves me from Break Even to about £1 Week profit. I am happy with this for the moment as it's buying BTC and my Wife is happy as it's drying the washing.

As would be expected as you drop the frequency and Core voltage the efficiency increases and the J/GH drops.

The best I have seen was at 125Mhz, 0.64V Core Voltage, giving a hash of about 254GH which is J/GH of 0.48. This was with 270 Ohms across the VFB resistor and at this point I run out of adjustment on the core voltage as we are very close to the TPS533355 0.6V reference voltage. However I am actually surprised that the chip was still hashing at this voltage.

I could probably squeeze a slightly better result by doing away with half the DC-DC converters and moving to 4 chips per, as the currents are now much reduced. I may try this later?

Rich

[Lituation]

I was having same questions these days. I'm so unsure about buying new mining equipment. Should I buy Antminer S5 or should I wait S6's to come? My electricity is not cheap.

[philipma1957]

I was having same questions these days. I'm so unsure about buying new mining equipment. Should I buy Antminer S5 or should I wait S6's to come? My electricity is not cheap.

what is not cheap power?

 21 cents a kwatt? = loser  with any gear.  as the power costs more then the coin mined as soon as your start.

so the question is how much do you want to lose.


the lower then 21 cents means more time before power costs kill your profit.

so what is your power cost.

if you tell me 20 cents I would say do not spend much and mine a little.

[ingiltere]

I was having same questions these days. I'm so unsure about buying new mining equipment. Should I buy Antminer S5 or should I wait S6's to come? My electricity is not cheap.

what is not cheap power?

 21 cents a kwatt? = loser  with any gear.  as the power costs more then the coin mined as soon as your start.

so the question is how much do you want to lose.


the lower then 21 cents means more time before power costs kill your profit.

so what is your power cost.

if you tell me 20 cents I would say do not spend much and mine a little.

I guess it's 13-15 cents around as he's living in Turkey. I wouldn't mine for these rates though, there are cheaper places to mine such as East of Turkey. (They don't pay electricity fee )

[jonnybravo0311]

I decided to try my hand at Undervolting the S3, I would like to play with the S5 but am hoping the second hand prices will come down a bit first.. Although there are posts around that say you can change the core voltage using the Advanced setting field, like some others have found on my S3 & S3+ it seems to make no difference to the voltage.

I wanted to be able to easily adjust the voltage so I soldered in 2 x 4 channel 5K digital pots across the VFB resistors. These are setup with an Arduino, which also measures the voltage set..

http://www.slotforum.com/forums/uploads/1438442843/gallery_2150_2322_164157.jpg

In practice I have just rediscovered what other have found, but it's good to see the numbers for yourself.  

The Standard S3 with 218.75MHz clock had a core voltage of 0.8V hashed at about 440GH & took 321W at the wall giving J/GH of 0.73

After trying a lot of frequencies and voltages I decided it was possible to continue at 218.75MHz with the voltage reduced to 0.73V. This gives a small number of hardware errors .001% but improves the J/GH to 0.65. I soldered 4K7 resistors into the S3 an am letting it run, while continuing to play with the S3+ with the digital pots.

At my electricity cost this moves me from Break Even to about £1 Week profit. I am happy with this for the moment as it's buying BTC and my Wife is happy as it's drying the washing.

As would be expected as you drop the frequency and Core voltage the efficiency increases and the J/GH drops.

The best I have seen was at 125Mhz, 0.64V Core Voltage, giving a hash of about 254GH which is J/GH of 0.48. This was with 270 Ohms across the VFB resistor and at this point I run out of adjustment on the core voltage as we are very close to the TPS533355 0.6V reference voltage. However I am actually surprised that the chip was still hashing at this voltage.

I could probably squeeze a slightly better result by doing away with half the DC-DC converters and moving to 4 chips per, as the currents are now much reduced. I may try this later?

Rich

Funny that you mention the DC-DC converters as those were the original problem with the S3s .  When Bitmain first announced the S3, they were promising 504GH/s hash rate.  Later, they tuned that down to 478GH/s and finally on launch, they were only 440GH/s.  All because the DC-DC converters they obtained were unreliable and shoddy.  Sure, some of the units will hash at 504GH/s (one of mine has been for a year now).  Some of the others won't even hit the advertised 440GH/s (one of mine has to be down clocked to run stably at 400GH/s).

[Lituation]

I was having same questions these days. I'm so unsure about buying new mining equipment. Should I buy Antminer S5 or should I wait S6's to come? My electricity is not cheap.

what is not cheap power?

 21 cents a kwatt? = loser  with any gear.  as the power costs more then the coin mined as soon as your start.

so the question is how much do you want to lose.


the lower then 21 cents means more time before power costs kill your profit.

so what is your power cost.

if you tell me 20 cents I would say do not spend much and mine a little.

I have 15 cent per kw electricity cost. Do you think I shouldn't mine with that price?

[RichBC]

At 15 cents you are just into loosing money territory with an S3. If you want to have a play, as I am, best value for money is a 2nd hand S3 with an undervolt mod & the frequency turned down.

I think that with 15 Cents power any existing  S5, or new hardware S6/7 etc will not ever pay for itself, particularly with Bitcoin halving less than a Year away.


Rich

[Lituation]

At 15 cents you are just into loosing money territory with an S3. If you want to have a play, as I am, best value for money is a 2nd hand S3 with an undervolt mod & the frequency turned down.

I think that with 15 Cents power any existing  S5, or new hardware S6/7 etc will not ever pay for itself, particularly with Bitcoin halving less than a Year away.


Rich

Thanks for your tips. I don't want to buy old mining equipments. I give up on S5 dream, too. I should save my money for better investment plans.

[QuintLeo]

Nothing on the market currently will ROI at 15 cents/KWH electric cost. Even turning the SP20E down to it's lowest undervolt setting isn't profitable enough to ROI before the bitcoin reward halfing next summer kills it's profitability.

 Technically, you CAN mine profitably right now at 15 cents/KWH with the S5, the SP20E, or the SF3301 - but unless they're almost paid off already, forget getting back the money you'd pay to buy one right now (and don't forget cost of power supply adds to that). I'm not sure but I think the Avalon 4.1 MIGHT be able to mine profitably at 15 cent electric, but that would be VERY marginal.


 New hardware is still a major question mark.

 The SF3301 COULD be profitable and hit ROI if they dropped the price down to something reasonable, but at the current $1199 PLUS SHIPPING it's not likely to ROI unless you have VERY CHEAP electric - and looking very iffy even THEN, IF you can actually get one direct sometime this month as opposed to paying the crazy pricing from folks like Zoomhash.

 No clue about performance or cost on the announced S7 yet - but that should be soon, I'm certain Bitmain is MAKING them but replacing S5s in their own farm before they start selling S7s. I would guess late this month or sometime in September we'll finally get some hard information.

 No firm knowlage about anything based on Innosilicon's announced A3 (ditto the A4 for Litecoin fans) yet though it appears LTek (sp?) is planning a next gen miner around that chip and I'm sure Innosilicon will produce a "reference" design and sell it like they did on the A2 Terminators.

 It appears that BitFury is ONLY selling it's current gen gear to BIG farms - or might only be selling the chips and letting the farm do the board design and/or board build work.

 KnC isn't selling to anyone else any more, not that I've ever been impressed with the reliability of their equipment. They also have bad enough legal problems I won't be shocked if they end up bankrupt sometime in 2017 (legal processes tend to take a while when the defendent can afford good lawyers).

 No clue yet what Avalon is doing on next generation if anything.

 No idea if the Alchemist folks are even thinking about Bitcoin or a next-gen Litecoin miner design.

 The folks that announced an X11 miner design haven't said anything since they canceled out "due to lack of preorders, going to look for venture capitol investment". Not sure if that one was vaporware or not, but it seems they actually refunded preorders which tends to make me think they were legitimate - just badly underfunded.

 I try to ignore vaporware announcements, can't think of any legitimate folks still in the mineing hardware business I haven't mentioned above.

[Moria843]

I decided to try my hand at Undervolting the S3, I would like to play with the S5 but am hoping the second hand prices will come down a bit first.. Although there are posts around that say you can change the core voltage using the Advanced setting field, like some others have found on my S3 & S3+ it seems to make no difference to the voltage.

I wanted to be able to easily adjust the voltage so I soldered in 2 x 4 channel 5K digital pots across the VFB resistors. These are setup with an Arduino, which also measures the voltage set..



In practice I have just rediscovered what other have found, but it's good to see the numbers for yourself.  

The Standard S3 with 218.75MHz clock had a core voltage of 0.8V hashed at about 440GH & took 321W at the wall giving J/GH of 0.73

After trying a lot of frequencies and voltages I decided it was possible to continue at 218.75MHz with the voltage reduced to 0.73V. This gives a small number of hardware errors .001% but improves the J/GH to 0.65. I soldered 4K7 resistors into the S3 an am letting it run, while continuing to play with the S3+ with the digital pots.

At my electricity cost this moves me from Break Even to about £1 Week profit. I am happy with this for the moment as it's buying BTC and my Wife is happy as it's drying the washing.

As would be expected as you drop the frequency and Core voltage the efficiency increases and the J/GH drops.

The best I have seen was at 125Mhz, 0.64V Core Voltage, giving a hash of about 254GH which is J/GH of 0.48. This was with 270 Ohms across the VFB resistor and at this point I run out of adjustment on the core voltage as we are very close to the TPS533355 0.6V reference voltage. However I am actually surprised that the chip was still hashing at this voltage.

I could probably squeeze a slightly better result by doing away with half the DC-DC converters and moving to 4 chips per, as the currents are now much reduced. I may try this later?

Rich

0.48 J/GH is a great result! I soldered a 2.2k resistor across each of the 8 VFB resistors per board for 4 of my S3+ and tried various frequency settings to get the lowest J/GH. Looking at the OOXX results, measuring power, and GH/s, the results varied for each ranging from 250 - 390 GH/s with the effeciencies being all around 0.61 J/GH. It sounds like I need to lower the resistance more. A couple questions.

Were you adding 270 ohms across VFB or was that the total resistance across VFB after you applied your additional parallel resistance? If the latter, what was the additional resistance?

Some of the newer S3+ boards don't use the TPS533355 chips. Have you ever tried to undervolt them?

There is an S3 undervolt thread at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=771979.0
I'm sure they would be interested in your results.
Thanks for the info.

[RichBC]

Yes I was pleased.   I actually ended up with 0.49J/GH as with more testing it started dropping the odd chip so I had to push the voltage up slightly. Yes the 270 Ohms was the additional resistor in parallel the VFB feed resistor, and ended up being  a 330 Ohms.

I only have the one S3+ & one S3 they both have the TPS533355 so that's all I have played with. Have seen pictures of what looks like a different chip, do you know the part number?

I will post up all my measurements on the S3 Undervolt thread if you think that would be of use?


Rich

[Moria843]

Thanks for the quick response.

I'll get some PNs and will post some pics. I tried looking for the hashing chip driver and an associated voltage divider circuit without luck. I was looking for 8 similar circuits like we're seeing on the boards we modded, but there are not 8. I did find 4 similar circuits on each board so it's possible that these 4 are doing what the 8 TPS53355 synchronous buck converter is doing on the older boards. But when I tried googling the PNs nothing showed up.

May be good to post to undervolt thread and continue there???

[RichBC]

If there were no obvious Buck Converters it's possible you were looking at the S3+ which was a trial for the S5 with string power and no DC-DC converters? However I have seen pictures of an S3 with a different chip and associated circuitry but still 8 Converters?

I will post up my stuff in the Undervolt thread when I get a moment. Am also exploring S5 undervolt.

Rich

[sloopy]

A bit outside what you've specified, and the price is too much at the moment.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=985400.0
I'm betting you will start seeing some good efficiency from Sfards chips.

How can you honestly suggest something that will never get close to ROI ? - the sfards chips are new, and premium priced (and sold out god knows why with that pricepoint) ... unless they do a 50% discount to bulk buyers that miner is as doomed as the Monarc was as soon as BFL put them up for sales

I believe I stated the price is too much at the moment.
From reading the posts and work done to the S3 and S3+ I believe he has as much chance as anyone to make the Sfards chip sing. \
The simple fact us none of us know because there haven't been any / many if any seen in the wild. Jabber has done work with them on his dev chips, but very few people have done anything.

My only recommendation or suggestion was that he check out the chip, the technology for the lower efficiency. If you notice, that is exactly what RichBC seems to be skilled at doing.

How can you honestly suggest something cannot ROI when you haven't seen the person's skills?

There are many talented people in the bitcoin scene and I try to listen to all of them. I suggest you try your hand at more listening to some of those folks and understanding the context of other's posts.

RichBC thanks for what you've shown. Regardless of any repeat in the end result, it is refreshing to see a different application with the rheostats which I can get on the cheap. That is a fantastic way to dial in what an individual miner may do the best at.
Please don't stop sharing!
 

[Moria843]

Yes I was pleased.   I actually ended up with 0.49J/GH as with more testing it started dropping the odd chip so I had to push the voltage up slightly. Yes the 270 Ohms was the additional resistor in parallel the VFB feed resistor, and ended up being  a 330 Ohms.

I only have the one S3+ & one S3 they both have the TPS533355 so that's all I have played with. Have seen pictures of what looks like a different chip, do you know the part number?

I will post up all my measurements on the S3 Undervolt thread if you think that would be of use?


Rich

Hey, Rich
Here are pics of front and back of board. Let me know if you have any suggestions on how to undervolt. Thanks.

[RichBC]

Well that is definitely a version of S3 I have never seen before. Have you tried the firmware version that allows voltage adjustment from cgminer to see if it responds to that. It still had Buck converters but there are trio's of chips on each one. Can you take a picture just of the top of the board where the components are such that the component markings can be read?

I see the ident says V1.0 so am assuming it is an early S3?

Rich

[Moria843]

I installed Kano's latest [CGMiner] => 4.9.2  [API] => 3.6, details of which are at https://github.com/kanoi/cgminer-binaries/tree/master/AntS3.

It has the voltage adjustment, which I tried setting to .65 V and restarting as instructed and nothing changed. Still hashing at 450 Gh/s and 350 W for the same 0.79 J/GH I was getting before. As you know, if voltage would have actually changed I would have expected X's in the ASIC status and having to reduce from the current 225 MHz to stabilize. Would have been great if it was that simple.

It is an early S3, but the newest one of the 5 that I bought. Below are front/back pics from one of my other 4 boards showing the resistor mods on the backside. They seem to be the same version that you're modding. I'll try to get a pic of of the top of the mystery board that shows the markings.




Thanks for your help.