Bitmain Announces the Antminer R4 and APW5 Power Supply, Designed for Silence

[qctechno_isback]

I changed twice my connectors on both R4 of mine. Still they overheat and need to be change again.
Look like only few pins take all the load, I suspect poor PCB layout. Don't purchase if you can't tinker with soldering.

What are you using for a power supply? If it is overloaded then voltage will sag below 12v and current draw will go up. Amps equals heat.

Also buy only nickel plugs, not the brass crap ones. Nickel is much better.

I use a overkill EVGA 1300W Gold P/S.
R4 burned couple of cable sets already.
Next repair I solder my cable directly 

Down clocked by haft , still feel they are fire hazard.
Don't buy.

[1714953057]

1714953057

[lightfoot]

Might still be sagging, esp if there are multiple +12 rails and they are not distributed evenly. Try checking the voltage at the miner's plug (from the back) and see if it's 12 or 11 or whatnot.

They shouldn't burn up that badly. Hm.

[VRobb]

Yeah, there's definitely something not right if you're burning up cables on an R4.  I personally use the "RAID" configuration when it comes to PSU's powering miners, in that I buy multiple lower wattage PSU's to power up the boards and controller.  For example, my home droid Artoo (an Antminer R4 Batch 2) is powered by two Thermaltake 750W ATX PSU's.  They're cheap, give me more than enough power, and for those of you who might say I'm over-spec'ing the PSU's take note of the the efficiency curves and how the sweet spot is around 60% of max output...
As a side note, I (finally) updated the firmware on Artoo due to a hashboard dropping out often enough and so far it runs with better board temp differentials. We'll see if R4 becomes R2 again, or if indeed it's better.
Now if only the mines on ice planet Hoth would open up again I'll be a happy miner.
Mine ON!  

Edit - Well that didn't take long, a board dropped out already and R4 became R2 again!    Time to downclock.  

[VRobb]

Ok, this is both weird and serendipitous! I did the old [your miner's IP address here]/cgi-bin/minerAdvanced.cgi trick to bring up the clock speed setting window and set it to start searching a bit below original, 537M.  It gave the "this will take 3 hours" warning and I went ahead and did it.  Only took the usual 10-20 minutes to boot up instead of a 3 hour tour as warned  , and afterwards is now running a whole 1.6% faster instead of slower at 557M...  You might think, as did I, that a faster clock would give even more problems. Turns out R4 has been running great the last week without dropping a board, and I must say I'm quite pleased to get my R4 back to normal!  
Mine On!

[aswithin]

Did Bitmain ever release a 2nd (or Nth) batch of the R4?  It seems there was just that initial batch and... no mas.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

AFAIK they released a total of 6 batches. I have 2 of the batch 6's.

[Breeze]

Hi!

Does anybody know where i can get hold of capacitors for the R4 hashboard?
Or can i take from a broken S7 hasboard?

[HagssFIN]

Hi!

Does anybody know where i can get hold of capacitors for the R4 hashboard?
Or can i take from a broken S7 hasboard?

Hi,
I would have one faulty Antminer R4, for spare parts, in case you are interested.

PM me for more.

[Breeze]

Hi!

Does anybody know where i can get hold of capacitors for the R4 hashboard?
Or can i take from a broken S7 hasboard?

Hi,
I would have one faulty Antminer R4, for spare parts, in case you are interested.

PM me for more.

Looks like the capacitor is ok, but the soldering looks bad. Maybe been too hot.
Gonna try to replace the soldering.
Good to know that you have spares.
Kiitos.

[HagssFIN]

Hi!

Does anybody know where i can get hold of capacitors for the R4 hashboard?
Or can i take from a broken S7 hasboard?

Hi,
I would have one faulty Antminer R4, for spare parts, in case you are interested.

PM me for more.

Looks like the capacitor is ok, but the soldering looks bad. Maybe been too hot.
Gonna try to replace the soldering.
Good to know that you have spares.
Kiitos.

No problem.

Eipä kestä.

[Pyrojason]

What is the deal with the soldering on bitmain's hardware? The R4's and S9's both have those sometimes poorly-soldered inductors - the big orange/red things with two solder spots 'underneath'. 
On two of my R4 boards one set has the inductor leads smooth and almost flush with the board and on another one the leads are poking out several mm away from the surface of the solder joint. What on earth!?
Consistently inconsistent.

Someone's message was deleted as it was probably spam so my response was deleted as well.
Hopefully it won't be flagged this time!

I will be amazed if Bitmain ever comes out with another batch of the R4's.
I will also be pretty happy to pay them for such a batch if they can ensure better reliability. R4's are awesome in terms of sound level and efficiency.
I am slowly prototyping some scroll fan style cooling across solid aluminum and copper blocks on things like Avalon and S9 designs. I'm not sure if there's just too much heat on the newer boards or if the design of the long r4 boards was the reason it would work with a scroll/ac style fan.

I've been able to repair several of these with limited knowledge and have good success repairing the 6 pin pci-e connectors.

One board I haven't repaired yet is strange - the power light on the board is flickering intermittently, not with a pattern or anything. Does this sound more like a reflow kind of thing or could an inductor or cap be crapping out causing that?

[DaveF]

What is the deal with the soldering on bitmain's hardware? The R4's and S9's both have those sometimes poorly-soldered inductors - the big orange/red things with two solder spots 'underneath'. 
On two of my R4 boards one set has the inductor leads smooth and almost flush with the board and on another one the leads are poking out several mm away from the surface of the solder joint. What on earth!?
Consistently inconsistent.

Someone's message was deleted as it was probably spam so my response was deleted as well.
Hopefully it won't be flagged this time!

I will be amazed if Bitmain ever comes out with another batch of the R4's.
I will also be pretty happy to pay them for such a batch if they can ensure better reliability. R4's are awesome in terms of sound level and efficiency.
I am slowly prototyping some scroll fan style cooling across solid aluminum and copper blocks on things like Avalon and S9 designs. I'm not sure if there's just too much heat on the newer boards or if the design of the long r4 boards was the reason it would work with a scroll/ac style fan.

I've been able to repair several of these with limited knowledge and have good success repairing the 6 pin pci-e connectors.

One board I haven't repaired yet is strange - the power light on the board is flickering intermittently, not with a pattern or anything. Does this sound more like a reflow kind of thing or could an inductor or cap be crapping out causing that?

Very poor quality.
I have had several top boards die due to them being hotter (heat rises, who knew). Some people have repaired them with new caps, some had the voltage regulator go poof.
I would try caps and then reflow 1st, then start tracing the voltage back. It's way above what I can do, but those are the reports from the people who worked on them.

-Dave

[sarcheer]

I've found with my two R4's that running them upright as opposed to horizontal really helps the boards run at equal temps

[Pyrojason]

Very poor quality.
I have had several top boards die due to them being hotter (heat rises, who knew). Some people have repaired them with new caps, some had the voltage regulator go poof.
I would try caps and then reflow 1st, then start tracing the voltage back. It's way above what I can do, but those are the reports from the people who worked on them.

-Dave

Heat rises!?     

It really is a shame though - I bet the design could be tweaked just a little and it would be better, other than the component failure due to machine/mfg quality.

I've always run mine upright to "get the fire out faster" and it seems to help. I'm imagining a design for a new "R" with dual scrolls and copper sincs and tubing. Would be sweet!

[Artemis3]

Yes the R4 has to be run upright and the fan at 100% (by disconnecting the 4th wire). No other orientation works because the fan is too weak.
The design is great for single units sitting at home, but awful when you have many units next to each other.

I think someone should design a mod case conversion mimicking the R4, but using a couple of regular S9 boards, which are a bit smaller. Who knows, perhaps something similar could be done to the Whatsminer M10 or the Innosillicon T2 (which use larger heatsinks).

[sarcheer]

Bitmain released the AB firmware for the R4 btw, download it at the support site. Has no LPM button and runs as an autofreq fw. You must first upgrade to the previous fw (if you aren't running it already) as you need to running a FW with the "UBI" filesystem, otherwise you get an error when you try to upgrade to the AB FW.

[HagssFIN]

@sarcheer
I'm curious, how's the hash rate after the update?

[sarcheer]

Hash rate has reverted to the prior autofreq hashrate for the individual boards, so for my two, 8.1 and 8.5 TH. However, the 8.5 unit (8.7 before) is using ~765W (910W before) and running much cooler even with the fans running at 1800. Haven’t had any problems with the Hash decreasing over time.

[tomcat2]

Running 12 days on mine and HW errors have dropped to 0% and running cooler
Hash rate has remained the same as prior to update.

[VRobb]

After updating to the newest FW my R4B2 went from 8 to 8.5TH/s and is running cooler.  So more hash for less operational cost, not too shabby...