Bitmain's Released Antminer S9, World's First 16nm Miner Ready to Order

[CryptoTeng]

Thanks very much for your answer,

Looks like I can prepare two repair tickets already for the time the boards fail, as I assume that the hot boards will not survive long. =(

It would interesting to know whether this is a hardware issue, or a software issue. If software, then Bitmain should try to come up with new firmware pretty soon, as the current will only destroy the miners.

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[d57heinz]

Bottom line bitmain Cheaped out on the heat sinks. These machines were not built with longevity in mind. Which also brings into question just how "secure" is the network.  Again it's only as secure as its weakest link.  Bitmain is the weak link in the block"chain".  I'd say we gettin close to calling them attackers instead of supporters!

It's known as a confidence trick.  Make the first machines which they knew would be obsolete with damn nice efficienct heat sinks. Hell many machines still run today.  Fast forward to today. Now they build machine with most efficient chip but with least reliable components. One must question why they would do that!

BR
d57heinz

[mettalmag]

I have 7x s9, they were working perfectly, avg temps are 80-87, about a week ago one of them just stopped hashing and after unplugging from power and plugging in again it started mining again with no issues, today three of them did the same.
Is there any chance to see the logs why they turned off ?

anyone ?

[aarons6]

I have 7x s9, they were working perfectly, avg temps are 80-87, about a week ago one of them just stopped hashing and after unplugging from power and plugging in again it started mining again with no issues, today three of them did the same.
Is there any chance to see the logs why they turned off ?

anyone ?

if the s9 is like the s7 and s5 there are no logs saved.. once its powered down they are cleared..

[mettalmag]

I have 7x s9, they were working perfectly, avg temps are 80-87, about a week ago one of them just stopped hashing and after unplugging from power and plugging in again it started mining again with no issues, today three of them did the same.
Is there any chance to see the logs why they turned off ?

anyone ?

if the s9 is like the s7 and s5 there are no logs saved.. once its powered down they are cleared..

So I suppose there is no other way to know why they keep shutting down. I'm sure that it isn't temp issue. What if internet drops and comes back after one hour ? Is there a chance that some miners can reconnect and others not ? I'm getting internet from quite far distance via 5GHz and there is a chance of network drop downs, is it possible ?

[Biffa]

I have 7x s9, they were working perfectly, avg temps are 80-87, about a week ago one of them just stopped hashing and after unplugging from power and plugging in again it started mining again with no issues, today three of them did the same.
Is there any chance to see the logs why they turned off ?

anyone ?

Instead of powercycling them did you try just restarting them from the GUI?

As aarons6 said the logs are probably toast after a reboot, so best bet is to investigate while the machine is on.

So I suppose there is no other way to know why they keep shutting down. I'm sure that it isn't temp issue. What if internet drops and comes back after one hour ? Is there a chance that some miners can reconnect and others not ? I'm getting internet from quite far distance via 5GHz and there is a chance of network drop downs, is it possible ?

Also they can take quite a while to come back online, like 5-10mins some of them even longer, I wonder how long did you wait before power-cycling them?

[mettalmag]

I have 7x s9, they were working perfectly, avg temps are 80-87, about a week ago one of them just stopped hashing and after unplugging from power and plugging in again it started mining again with no issues, today three of them did the same.
Is there any chance to see the logs why they turned off ?

anyone ?

Instead of powercycling them did you try just restarting them from the GUI?

As aarons6 said the logs are probably toast after a reboot, so best bet is to investigate while the machine is on.

I haven't tried that because someone rebooted them before informing me about the issue, that's an interesting idea to check them while they are not hashing.

[takagari]

I can understand the Frequency thing, for over clocking.. but should allow underclocking...

But the fans? WTF Bitmain, how many complaints has this brought up?
Fix it!

[takagari]

I had actually planned to underclock mine down to pull 1250 or so at the wall so to use my PSU I already have,
Instead I had to power down the centre board, guess it's time to source a second PSU>

[CryptoTeng]

I can understand the Frequency thing, for over clocking.. but should allow underclocking...

But the fans? WTF Bitmain, how many complaints has this brought up?
Fix it!

The fan thing and the freq are related as the fan rpm is adjusted to the highest temp of the 3 boards.

As it looks I can open the first warranty case, as one of the boards of 1 of the 2 problematic miners doesn't start anymore.

Thanks very much for your answer,

Looks like I can prepare two repair tickets already for the time the boards fail, as I assume that the hot boards will not survive long. =(

It would interesting to know whether this is a hardware issue, or a software issue. If software, then Bitmain should try to come up with new firmware pretty soon, as the current will only destroy the miners.

3 new S9 B22 (11TH/s) arrived yesterday.
First miner plugged in, and working fine. Could be better when looking at stats, but okay =D

However, the other two new miners show strange behavior, even after installing latest firmware while closely following instructions.

It is similar to what other people wrote before, constant up and down of fan speed. (which is rather annoying, but in data-center setup, one doesn't hear it, but more worrying is, it doesn't seem to be enhancing the lifetime of miner and ventilators. especially when looking at the stats)

Looking at the miner stats the following was noted for one miner (the other problematic is similar).

1 card seems to do fine freq. 533MHz and temp of 91C. (slightly high)
1 card seems pretty low in freq. 420MHz and temp of 72C. (pretty low)
1 card seems to be quite high freq. 578MHz and a high temp of 102. (very high)
(I can upload screenshots if needed)

In average the hashrate achieves the ideal hashrate of 11 TH/S. However the frequencies and temperature of the low and high card are pretty worrying. Furthermore, actually one expect that the frequencies of the boards would be similar, something like all in range of a freq. 510MHz.

Honestly, being able to set the frequency manually would help. However, other people already stated that this is not possible with the latest firmware. Or is there already a new firmware again, which sets the right frequencies, or gives manual control?

Or is something seriously wrong with the 2 hothead miners?
Best regards

Great, and all this to faulty firmware of the manufacturer? Cause it is not able to adjust the frequency correctly. And seeing the warranty of Bitmain this is more than frustrating, since the board didn't even run for whole day. Let's see what their reply will be. =(

[CryptoTeng]

As it looks I can open the first warranty case, as one of the boards of 1 of the 2 problematic miners doesn't start anymore.

Great, and all this to faulty firmware of the manufacturer? Cause it is not able to adjust the frequency correctly. And seeing the warranty of Bitmain this is more than frustrating, since the board didn't even run for whole day. Let's see what their reply will be. =(

So, the unit needs to be send back to China at own expenses. Great. Sending from China to us on Bitmains costs, at least something, but seeing that is is more than obviously caused by their own faulty firmware this is outrageous. (And last but not least not having the unit mine for the time.)

[takagari]

I can understand the Frequency thing, for over clocking.. but should allow underclocking...

But the fans? WTF Bitmain, how many complaints has this brought up?
Fix it!

The fan thing and the freq are related as the fan rpm is adjusted to the highest temp of the 3 boards.

I understand that, But they dial right down, nearly off. than crank back up to make turbine speed.
This is why the damn thing is so noisy, if it idled at 80% or so, it wouldn't need to crank up nearly as often, keeping noise down and temp spikes down. The fluctuating temp/speed is annoying.

[CryptoTeng]

The fan thing and the freq are related as the fan rpm is adjusted to the highest temp of the 3 boards.

I understand that, But they dial right down, nearly off. than crank back up to make turbine speed.
This is why the damn thing is so noisy, if it idled at 80% or so, it wouldn't need to crank up nearly as often, keeping noise down and temp spikes down. The fluctuating temp/speed is annoying.

Check whether your miner is actually restarting, when it cranks down. Or maybe part of the mining process. Am looking at this atm myself. This would explain it a bit.

In theory, when the miner would be constantly running, and one of the cards has a very high temperature, the fan should be running constantly high. Remark here, cranking the fan down manually (if it would be possible) to 80% would probably cause the high temp card to overheat & break for sure. Better would be to have all cards in same frequency range, so all cards have roughly same temperature range, then the automatic adjustment of the fan would work nicely (and probably at lot less noisy).

[Sierra8561]

Has anyone tried the firmware from 11-19? I'm giving it a shot on one machine right now. Curious how it is working for others?

[CryptoTeng]

Yes did try it, same problem, and the one time frequency settings only work for miners before the auto-adjustment miner generation of S9s. Mentioned somewhere on this post before too

[takagari]

The fan thing and the freq are related as the fan rpm is adjusted to the highest temp of the 3 boards.

I understand that, But they dial right down, nearly off. than crank back up to make turbine speed.
This is why the damn thing is so noisy, if it idled at 80% or so, it wouldn't need to crank up nearly as often, keeping noise down and temp spikes down. The fluctuating temp/speed is annoying.

Check whether your miner is actually restarting, when it cranks down. Or maybe part of the mining process. Am looking at this atm myself. This would explain it a bit.

In theory, when the miner would be constantly running, and one of the cards has a very high temperature, the fan should be running constantly high. Remark here, cranking the fan down manually (if it would be possible) to 80% would probably cause the high temp card to overheat & break for sure. Better would be to have all cards in same frequency range, so all cards have roughly same temperature range, then the automatic adjustment of the fan would work nicely (and probably at lot less noisy).

No not setting a Max, a Min.
I can hear it, and it doesn't turn off, it spins up, then dies right down, then spins back up a little later.
Miner keeps hasing away constantly.
I'd like to see the minimum speed stay higher, maybe it wouldn't kick into turbine mode so often.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Has anyone tried the firmware from 11-19? I'm giving it a shot on one machine right now. Curious how it is working for others?

Batch 16 is when the autotune was introduced so any after that are autotune only.

As I've said earlier on here IMHO Bitmain forced autotune boost the # of chips they can actually use instead of scrapping under performers. I have a batch 18 with wildly different speeds per-board but in total the miner runs at advertised 11 TH/s. Barely. My guess is they stuff the boards then test to get speed ranges for binning. After that they pick combinations of fast/slow boards to make the miner reach target speed.

ref that b18 miner to the b23 I just got -- on this newest one all boards are running 649.7 to 649.9 MHz to produce 14.129 THs. Obviously the b23 boards were cherry-picked for them.

[CryptoTeng]

I got the same problems here, and just a look at the frequencies and temperatures of the boards tells me, that the large differences of frequencies over the boards is the cause of the problem of the fan, so being able to manually adjust fan would be the place wrong place to change something right now. (imo) And keep in mind that the card with the highest temp defines the fan rpm. (Maybe large difference in temps causes a problem for the control loop of the fan speed)

Just look at freqs and temps in previous post

...
Looking at the miner stats the following was noted for one miner (the other problematic is similar).

1 card seems to do fine freq. 533MHz and temp of 91C. (slightly high)
1 card seems pretty low in freq. 420MHz and temp of 72C. (pretty low)
1 card seems to be quite high freq. 578MHz and a high temp of 102. (very high)
(I can upload screenshots if needed)
...

IMO. An even distribution of frequencies and thereby hashing power over the cards would help much more. It would decrease the chance of failure of cards with high frequency ==> high temps, and would most probably decrease the strong modulation of fan speeds. Be it cause by cycling of the mining process, or wrong interpretation of temperature by the fan speed control loop.

[takagari]

Honestly the fans on this thing are stupid, I can whisper to someone beside it one minute, and the next minute you gotta yell.
Why not find a bloody balance instead of on off?

[OgNasty]

Honestly the fans on this thing are stupid, I can whisper to someone beside it one minute, and the next minute you gotta yell.
Why not find a bloody balance instead of on off?

The answer from Bitmain is that it must have this behavior due to engineering issues, "at the chip level."  Basically, Bitmain has the temperatures rise high and fall on purpose, and they believe this will reduce the number of failed units.  I imagine it also has the side effect of boosting their R4 sales as home miners won't be able to run S9s with this firmware. 

Bitmain...  How about some sort of coupon or hand out for the people who bought an S9 not knowing you switched the firmware to be unusable for home miners?