Avalon ASIC users thread

[creativex]

mine is a 3 module...all batch 2's are. I would imagine its a enermax GX 850 - if such thing.. Im guessing cuz the fan inside PSU has enermax on it and the wiki for avalon shows 2 enermax PSU's w/ same naming convention.

Yeah I will upgrade to latest firmware after I confirm it works n everything =)...
Im excited, still need to thoroughly go over inside n make sure all is hooked up well.

Grats GenTarkin!

[1714028209]

1714028209

[cypherdoc]

i'm in the process of exchanging out psu's.

hopefully someone will stop me before i do something stupid.  my Seasonic psu doesn't have all the exact same cord connectors that correspond with the Chinese Enermax.  i've mixed and matched all the possible cords and i'm about to end up plugging 2 pci-e connectors into the pcb of the avalon without the ground.  in other words, it's an 8 hole connector and i'm having to leave off 2 of the holes (b/c of the mismatching shapes) which i'm pretty sure is the ground.

please someone tell me if this is a big mistake as i'm about to reassemble everything and power it up.

[ebereon]

i'm in the process of exchanging out psu's.

hopefully someone will stop me before i do something stupid.  my Seasonic psu doesn't have all the exact same cord connectors that correspond with the Chinese Enermax.  i've mixed and matched all the possible cords and i'm about to end up plugging 2 pci-e connectors into the pcb of the avalon without the ground.  in other words, it's an 8 hole connector and i'm having to leave off 2 of the holes (b/c of the mismatching shapes) which i'm pretty sure is the ground.

please someone tell me if this is a big mistake as i'm about to reassemble everything and power it up.

Do not connect pci-e connectors if they don't fit completly, you will vaporize your avalon and/or PCB/PSU!

Why not connect all modular cables in that new PSU and then connect the "mainboard cables" (3) and then the pci-e (2) to the PCB. pci-e is a norm and they must fit completly all over the world to any pci-e connector.

You need 8pin pci-e because of the needed power and the "Ground" is also needed for it to avoid "cable-fire".

sry for my bad english  

[johnyj]

New Avalon firmware:

http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/avalon/20130703/

Fixed one longstanding bug where it would occasionally fail to start yay. \o/

Should also prevent one mode of failure while it's running.

After upgraded to this firmware, all my fans running at 720 RPM and the temperature just keep going up until it reaches 50 degree then all the fans will blow at full speed, is there any way to adjust this behavior to be more gradual? I tried --avalon-auto and --avalon-fan 20-100, seems not working

[goxed]

i'm in the process of exchanging out psu's.

hopefully someone will stop me before i do something stupid.  my Seasonic psu doesn't have all the exact same cord connectors that correspond with the Chinese Enermax.  i've mixed and matched all the possible cords and i'm about to end up plugging 2 pci-e connectors into the pcb of the avalon without the ground.  in other words, it's an 8 hole connector and i'm having to leave off 2 of the holes (b/c of the mismatching shapes) which i'm pretty sure is the ground.

please someone tell me if this is a big mistake as i'm about to reassemble everything and power it up.

Atleast put some pictures man!

[cypherdoc]

guys, i need some help.

i removed the Enermax psu from the avalon but couldn't find any connectors in the cords included with my Seasonic that would fit the 2 white EPS ports shown in this picture.  

is my only option to go out and buy special pci-e cords that have this type of plug on this end?  i'm very surprised that my Seasonic didn't come supplied with these.  am i missing something?

[ebereon]

guys, i need some help.

i removed the Enermax psu from the avalon but couldn't find any connectors in the cords included with my Seasonic that would fit the 2 white EPS ports shown in this picture.  

is my only option to go out and buy special pci-e cords that have this type of plug on this end?  i'm very surprised that my Seasonic didn't come supplied with these.  am i missing something?

Please go to that website: http://www.seasonicusa.com/Platinum_Series.htm
Select your PSU and scroll to the bottom of the page. Here you will see the last picture and it shows the 2. and 3. cable (EPS12V), that is what you need to plug in to the white connectors.

In hope...
ebereon 

[mdbssm]

--avalon-auto seams working now, maybe I just was too impatient. I just don't get the results I wanted with my water cooling, frequency is on 354 now with the auto option. I am thinking of applying thermal paste to the back and an aluminum plate to the front which really presses the chips down onto the heatsink.

Heat's not the rate limiting thing for frequency it seems. In cold weather mine isn't getting hot but I can't get it up much past 355. The chips probably need a voltage mod to run at higher frequencies than that, but at least you've sorted out the heat side.

Con,

A huge thank you for your dev work on cgminer and the customizations for the avalon. The July 3 firmware is rock solid, running for 4+ hrs on my units without restarts. The auto-overclocking is just way cool too.

1 BTC donation sent your way.

Keep up the great work!

[allinvain]

guys, i need some help.

i removed the Enermax psu from the avalon but couldn't find any connectors in the cords included with my Seasonic that would fit the 2 white EPS ports shown in this picture.  

is my only option to go out and buy special pci-e cords that have this type of plug on this end?  i'm very surprised that my Seasonic didn't come supplied with these.  am i missing something?

Those are the connectors you normally connect to a PC's motherboard to power the CPU - ie 8pin CPU connector. Your power supply should come with at least one! It is possible that your PSU is old enough that it was produced before manufacturers adopted the 12VEPS standard (which by the way is a server environment standard).

Oh also, a lot of motherboards come with a 4+4 connectors. You just join the two and they become 8 pin.

Edit: oops..did not notice ebereon's post. Just follow the link he posted and it will clear things up for sure.

[psjw4450]

Whats an acceptable HW error %?  Im getting roughly 1.5%. 

[E]

Real world efficiency report:

Batch 2 Avalon, Delivered ~22 Jun 2013
Stock Enermax "Chiyan Gold Magic 750W" (Iffy translation)
http://www.enermax.cn/Products_Pages.asp?ID=198&SortID=1

• All Japanese 105C Capacitors
• 62A +12V (Single Rail)
• 87Plus Ready - Efficiency "Up to 93%"

Unless I'm mistaken, this is the same platform as the Corsair TX750M but with derated +3.3V and +5V (20A vs. 30A)

I've been running ckolivas-releases firmware, mainly at a clock of 325MHz but moving up to ~350 recently; my AC supply is ~119volts at the wall under load.

Anyway, net/net for that time period is:

227KWh for 29.43BTC, or ~28MJ/BTC. My electric cost for this will be $13.3, so this is profitable for BTC > $0.45, or at $70/BTC it is profitable to a difficulty of ~3Billion.

E

edit: I paid ~ 76BTC for this Avalon, so it is almost halfway to recovering its cost.

[-ck]

con,

is a vardiff of 236 getting too high?

Strictly speaking, there's no such thing as "too high". The higher the diff, the less communication you will have with the pool. The disadvantage is progressively greater variance in how much you get paid till the ultimate variance when your difficulty is as high as solo mining. OOC did the analysis and for variance to not look more than 1% and still reap the benefit of lower communications, you need to have a diff where you submit about 20-24 shares per minute. That works out to about a diff of 56 for one avalon.

[cypherdoc]

finally got it.  man, my eyesight must be getting bad.  made the mistake of trying to match up hole shapes.

but now finally in optimum configuration.  temps are much lower after externalizing the psu's.  allowed me to go into full --avalon -auto.

[cypherdoc]

Whats an acceptable HW error %?  Im getting roughly 1.5%. 

anything under 2%

[-ck]

A huge thank you for your dev work on cgminer and the customizations for the avalon. The July 3 firmware is rock solid, running for 4+ hrs on my units without restarts. The auto-overclocking is just way cool too.

1 BTC donation sent your way.

Keep up the great work!

Thanks  

Can I just take a step back now and point out to people there is absolutely no way I could have developed the avalon code to this level of maturity and features if I didn't have one myself. Avalon themselves offered me only one module to develop on, or to deliver me one quickly if I purchased one at a slight discount, and this was only at Xiangfu's insistence, who was their developer and understands how important developer access to hardware is. I'm certainly not happy that I actually had to pay for it since I never intended to be one of their customers effectively doing the software for their hardware for free, so I was torn about whether I should or not, but ultimately knowing it would pay itself off anyway I gave in.

[mdbssm]

A huge thank you for your dev work on cgminer and the customizations for the avalon. The July 3 firmware is rock solid, running for 4+ hrs on my units without restarts. The auto-overclocking is just way cool too.

1 BTC donation sent your way.

Keep up the great work!

Thanks  

Can I just take a step back now and point out to people there is absolutely no way I could have developed the avalon code to this level of maturity and features if I didn't have one myself. Avalon themselves offered me only one module to develop on, or to deliver me one quickly if I purchased one at a slight discount, and this was only at Xiangfu's insistence, who was their developer and understands how important developer access to hardware is. I'm certainly not happy that I actually had to pay for it since I never intended to be one of their customers effectively doing the software for their hardware for free, so I was torn about whether I should or not, but ultimately knowing it would pay itself off anyway I gave in.

I agree entirely with your position. A company interested in optimizing the product to drive future sales would do exactly what you suggested and more.

One quick feature request. Is it possible to display the calculated HW error rate in the status page, say 5min avg and running avg?

[Syke]

Can I just take a step back now and point out to people there is absolutely no way I could have developed the avalon code to this level of maturity and features if I didn't have one myself. Avalon themselves offered me only one module to develop on, or to deliver me one quickly if I purchased one at a slight discount, and this was only at Xiangfu's insistence, who was their developer and understands how important developer access to hardware is. I'm certainly not happy that I actually had to pay for it since I never intended to be one of their customers effectively doing the software for their hardware for free, so I was torn about whether I should or not, but ultimately knowing it would pay itself off anyway I gave in.

Great firmware. Keep up the good work. Here's my 1 btc donation.

[bitdude]

So, suddenly, in the middle of the night, my Avalon stopped working (latest ckolivas' firmware, default clock, default settings). In the morning I found out I can not connect to its IP, it was not hashing on the pool, and I had to turn it off and on again to restart it. Is there anything I can do to get information what actually happened?

Are there any logs that are kept over the reboot? Or can this be set so?

[el_rlee]

I just don't get the --avalon-auto function working



I don't know what I am doing wrong. According to my calculations this should be ~1.2% HW errors, so why the frequency doesn't go up? Does the controller wait for a certain temperature to be reached?
This is a water cooled unit.

Settings:



I also tried "--avalon -auto", which doesn't work at all

[GenTarkin]

give it a little more time, I notice it climbs up slowly...