Avalon ASIC users thread

[server]

Would it be advisable to bring the PSU outside the box instead? It would seem to lower the temps.

Avalon previously recommended against this.  The PSU needs to be cooled as well.

I think it's better for the psu to suck in cool fresh air outside the box then warm/hot (40+) air inside.
My psu performs better and the hashing-modules are 2-3 degrees cooler. Temp3 dropped from 46 to 42-43.

But ambient temp overhere is ~20.

[Bowjob]

This is kinda strange. When I got my ASIC, it was hashing at 66 GH/s.. then.. I was able to constantly clock it... from 66 - 80 GH/s I'm afraid of 85 GH/s >_>

[Bogart]

How long do I have to wait till "avalon-auto" finds the optimal frequency? Or after what time I can say thats the optimal freq now to set locked?

It will usually continue to fluctuate indefinitely but you'll find it hovering +/-2 MHz, and that value's about the optimal. It will of course go lower if it starts getting too hot. Most seem to fall into two camps, close to 350 or close to 365. I run mine slightly lower than 350 since it seems to end up rebooting the router eventually at the highest setting (not cgminer but the whole hardware which is a little disconcerting). This is why I was experimenting with a less aggressive firmware yesterday, but in this world maximum hashrate seems to be the only thing that matters for most people...

does --avalon auto require that default be left at 282?

reason being, hashrate the other day wasn't going up as fast as i expected so i gave it a boost by changing default to 325 which obviously immediately jacked up the MH/s.  everything seems ok since but should i not have done that and is it affecting the auto function?

Nope. Whatever you want as starting speed.

I sure wish the Ztex boards had that option.  They seem to be hardcoded to start at 200Mhz.

To stay on topic, is there any possibility for changing the clockspeeds of the Avalon hashing modules (or to 10-chip submodules) individually?  Looking at the photos, I can see a separate crystal on each 10-chip submodule.

[BenTuras]

Firmware 20130702-1

Strange effect on a silver Avalon. I noticed that fan3 is running at 1200 rpm, while the others are well over 3000.
Frequency:299 Fan1:3360 fan2:3600 fan3:1200 temp1:30 temp2:-1 temp3:49

I guess fan3 is weaker than the other two.
So I did a little experiment and partly covered the intake of fan3.
Result ? Better cooling and higher Mhz!

Frequency:299 Fan1:3360 Fan2:3600 Fan3:2280 temp1:29 temp2:-1 temp3:47
and later:
Frequency:317 Fan1:3360 Fan2:3600 Fan3:2280 Temp1:29 Temp2:-1 Temp3:48

Ambient also went down 1 degree. Seems odd that partly blocking intake of Fan3 lowers the ambient temp.
Probably due to location of sensor.

Food for thought: Monitor fan speeds and maybe lower speed of fan1 & 2 when fan3 starts slowing down ?

[invader]

i'm sure people will eventually need it when a fan or two goes out

My first goal was to install more powerful 252CFN fans as ambient temperatures now over +30c.
Also overclocked it to 360Mhz, hw errors near 1.6% 1.7%. Temperatures now like 32 / 48 with new fans even not running at full! To be exact, the model is TFC1212DE-SP07 and it's used in HP DL580 servers.

So I did a little experiment and partly covered the intake of fan3.
Result ? Better cooling and higher Mhz!

I also just covered fan hole and unplugged it to prevent air go back.

[cypherdoc]

con,

i've pointed my avalons with your firmware at my server to solo mine.  will there be any performance issues that occur in that situation versus pool mining?

[-ck]

con,

i've pointed my avalons with your firmware at my server to solo mine.  will there be any performance issues that occur in that situation versus pool mining?

Provided you've set up pool software for your solo mining it's fine, however avalon+cgminer mining directly to bitcoind is a disaster.

[cypherdoc]

con,

i've pointed my avalons with your firmware at my server to solo mine.  will there be any performance issues that occur in that situation versus pool mining?

Provided you've set up pool software for your solo mining it's fine, however avalon+cgminer mining directly to bitcoind is a disaster.

i have successfully setup slush's stratum pool mining software on my linux server.

however, initially it was streaming thru pages of hashes w/o problem but now has slowed to a crawl.  some memory buffer or something must be filling up.  

i doubt, however, it has anything to do with cgminer/avalon.

[cypherdoc]

con,

i've pointed my avalons with your firmware at my server to solo mine.  will there be any performance issues that occur in that situation versus pool mining?

Provided you've set up pool software for your solo mining it's fine, however avalon+cgminer mining directly to bitcoind is a disaster.

any idea what's causing this?

[candoo]

con,

i've pointed my avalons with your firmware at my server to solo mine.  will there be any performance issues that occur in that situation versus pool mining?

Provided you've set up pool software for your solo mining it's fine, however avalon+cgminer mining directly to bitcoind is a disaster.

any idea what's causing this?

your controller board is probably dead. Overheated or overvolted. The Chips may have also receveid damage

I ll buy your avalon for 30 BTC and try to fix this.

-> PM me

[-ck]

any idea what's causing this?

What am I looking at? Looks okay to me.

[cypherdoc]

any idea what's causing this?

What am I looking at? Looks okay to me.

high hardware error rate while solo mining via slush's stratum pool software.

also, the hashing rate in stratum has slowed to a crawl.

[-ck]

any idea what's causing this?

What am I looking at? Looks okay to me.

high hardware error rate while solo mining via slush's stratum pool software.

also, the hashing rate in stratum has slowed to a crawl.

Looks fine to me? Your hardware error count is under 1.5% and your hashrate is 77GH.

[demkd]

ckolivas
I tried your 06/27 & 07/02 firmware for avalon with my new batch 2 black unit. (received yesterday)
In both cases after I twice change cgminer settings (Chip Frequency) and press Save & Apply button, cgminer permanently lost ability to solve shares. Immediately after reflashing from 06/07 firmware cgminer works fine, this problem occur only after 2 changes cgminer's settings.
Cgminer running, slowly getting work but won't solve shares, so 0 hashrate displayed and 0 accepted.
I power off unit and tried set different frequencies many times without any results.
Rollback to 06/07 firmware and Save & Apply cure problem instantly.

[cypherdoc]

ckolivas
I tried your 06/27 & 07/02 firmware for avalon with my new batch 2 black unit. (received yesterday)
In both cases after I twice change cgminer settings (Chip Frequency) and press Save & Apply button, cgminer permanently lost ability to solve shares. Immediately after reflashing from 06/07 firmware cgminer works fine, this problem occur only after 2 changes cgminer's settings.
Cgminer running, slowly getting work but won't solve shares, so 0 hashrate displayed and 0 accepted.
I power off unit and tried set different frequencies many times without any results.
Rollback to 06/07 firmware and Save & Apply cure problem instantly.

i installed 7/1 this morning and it's been running great all day.

2 things to try before going to hard reboot.  first go to System tab, then Startup, then scroll down to cgminer and Restart.  usually that will do it.  if not, then go to soft Reboot, which is in the System tab, i think.  if those 2 fail, then hard reboot via power switch.

the fact that i have a newly installed 240V power line may be helping too.  don't know.

[-ck]

ckolivas
I tried your 06/27 & 07/02 firmware for avalon with my new batch 2 black unit. (received yesterday)
In both cases after I twice change cgminer settings (Chip Frequency) and press Save & Apply button, cgminer permanently lost ability to solve shares. Immediately after reflashing from 06/07 firmware cgminer works fine, this problem occur only after 2 changes cgminer's settings.
Cgminer running, slowly getting work but won't solve shares, so 0 hashrate displayed and 0 accepted.
I power off unit and tried set different frequencies many times without any results.
Rollback to 06/07 firmware and Save & Apply cure problem instantly.

i installed 7/1 this morning and it's been running great all day.

2 things to try before going to hard reboot.  first go to System tab, then Startup, then scroll down to cgminer and Restart.  usually that will do it.  if not, then go to soft Reboot, which is in the System tab, i think.  if those 2 fail, then hard reboot via power switch.

the fact that i have a newly installed 240V power line may be helping too.  don't know.

I'm not really sure why this happens, but it appears to happen when code outside of cgminer kills it, so I suspect it's because it's not allowing it time to shut down properly and perhaps the API port is still bound to the old zombie process and you're not seeing the new one mining, or the new cgminer process is fighting the old one for access to the device.

[cypherdoc]

Looks fine to me? Your hardware error count is under 1.5% and your hashrate is 77GH.

i thought the error count was HW/Accepted shares?

here's my problem while solo mining with bitcoind + slush's stratum pool miner:



when i first pointed cgminer/avalon at my server this afternoon, i got these hashing lines scrolling up the page at a rate of hundreds per second.  i couldn't even read the detail they were moving so fast.  but over a period of 20 min or so they started slowly down to a crawl of about one hash per 5 second as you can see in the above image.  that doesn't seem right.  it feels like some sort of memory buffer is filling up or something?  this phenomenon is not consistent with this however from cgminer:



as you can see, cgminer's hashing rate looks perfectly normal and now you're telling me the hardware error count is normal also.  am i misinterpreting something here?

since i'm the only one i know of who's trying to solo mine with asics/avalons/cgminer with slush+bitcoind this isn't easy.  tiktoc has been superb in getting me this far.

i'd appreciate your help as you probably understand slush's stratum software better than most.

btw, here's thanking you in advance for your help:  87b0962c3b8aafd51b0ee109306dd04626e9713bf0037812ff9fa4293b0b614c

[jddebug]

Is it stratum vardiif ramping up so you are submitting far less shares but same hashrate?

[-ck]

Accepted depends on difficulty so it's relative. HW error count is an absolute. You must compare it to diff1 shares and remember that doesn't include the hw errors themselves.

Hardware error percentage is:
100 * HW / (diff1shares + HW)

I'm not sure which of slush's stratum code you're using, as stratum is the protocol, not the software, and cgminer implements its own stratum support. If it's slush's stratum proxy, then that doesn't do anything more than mining directly to bitcoind, and bitcoind can't keep up with an avalon mining with cgminer (it bombs beyond about 5GH). If you are using some kind of pool software from slush, then I'm not really familiar with it, but it could just be increasing your share target difficulty, which is what you want it to do.

[cypherdoc]

I'm not sure which of slush's stratum code you're using, as stratum is the protocol, not the software, and cgminer implements its own stratum support. If it's slush's stratum proxy, then that doesn't do anything more than mining directly to bitcoind, and bitcoind can't keep up with an avalon mining with cgminer (it bombs beyond about 5GH). If you are using some kind of pool software from slush, then I'm not really familiar with it, but it could just be increasing your share target difficulty, which is what you want it to do.

it's coming from here:  https://github.com/generalfault/stratum-mining/blob/master/INSTALL