PinIdea.io x11 asics

[not.you]

I may be jumping the gun on this but I am making this post for two reasons: one, I have seen enough of these situations to recognize that it looks like I was ripped off, and two, because I wish I had found a post like this before I ordered a miner from this place.  I sincerely hope I will have to come edit this to say that they came through and I was premature to worry about it and I got my miner and it rocks and all is well.  Sadly I fear that in reality I will eventually have to edit out the word "possible" from the thread title instead.

These guys manufactured and delivered x11 asics in the recent past but as with so many companies in the cryptospace it appears they may have gone into full scam mode.  They have a website operating and taking payments through coinpayments.net but they are not responding to my emails.  My order has been marked as "on hold" on their website since I made it.  Coinpayments.net basically just says you are on your own with the merchant so they won't help.  I emailed both pinidea.io's listed support address and a gmail address I found for a Tomasen Shen who is listed on the website as a founder of the company.  None of my emails have been answered.

It doesn't look encouraging that the pinidea.io website lists only 3 people associated with the company but Tomasen Shen's linked-in page (which lists his name as Shen Sheng) doesn't list pinidea.io at all.  Instead it lists "PinIdea Co., Ltd." with the same logo but a website of pinidea.com, a website which does not exist.  It also says "PinIdea Co., Ltd." is a computer game company which employees between 50 and 200 people.  I am inclined to think that is made up since the website doesn't even exist but linked-in says there are 35 employees with linked-in accounts, but it won't show me any of their profiles because they are apparently "out of my network".  And why he has this computer game company listed and not pinidea.io I am not sure but not good signs.

The pinidea.io website also lists another person's linked-in page, a Xinjiang Shao who was also active on dash.org in the past year in threads discussing pinidea.io miner sales.  Xinjiang Shao's linked-in does list his association with pinidea.io but it looks like he has a different full time job so I am not sure what association he has with pinidea.io now.  if I continue to have no response from the other email addresses I may contact him on linked-in next.

I paid just under 50 dash for the miner which came to about $660 at the time of purchase.  I will update this thread with new information.

[QuintLeo]

Are you sure you ordered through the actual site of the actual company that made the miner?

 There are a LOT of scams around involving sites with names SIMILAR to a legitimate site that aren't the real manufacturer site (though that seems to be most common for folks to try to scam pretending to be Bitmain).

[not.you]

Two things happened in the past 24 hours, my order changed from "on hold" on their website to "processing".  I got a corresponding automated email about it but I am not sure if this entire process was automated or if a human being was behind it.  However the second thing is more encouraging, I received an email response to my email to their support address.  It was only a 3 word response and only sort of answered my questions about setup but certainly better than nothing.

I am going to remove the thread title portion about "possible scam warning" for the moment and see what happens.

[eckmar]

to be honest their site looks like other scammy sites so I don't understand why would you order your miner there at first place (look at some more recent transactions from them, not past)... But anyway for how long was your order on hold ? 

[not.you]

Well I was hesitant and I did indeed have my doubts which is why I ended up posting this thread.  To be fair I only gave them a few days to respond to me before I posted this thread so it hasn't been very long but total silence + they have my money is a bad combination.

I bought from them for a couple of reasons, for one they did deliver a product, or rather several products so they were certainly legit at some point (and possibly/hopefully they still are).  I saw evidence of that in threads on dash.org and I can still find hardware resellers that have pinidea hardware for sell.  The main reason I bought from them instead of the hardware resellers is that they list a newer model with more desirable specs than the models for sale from the resellers.  Also these miners look like a better deal than the baikal miners.

I could not find recent conversations (like this thread I started) about them so I wasn't sure if they were reliable or not and I deliberated for some time on whether to take the plunge and buy it.  At least at this point there will be this thread for people to find some recent conversation about them and I will post in here as to whether or not I receive a miner and how well it works.

[eckmar]

Well I was hesitant and I did indeed have my doubts which is why I ended up posting this thread.  To be fair I only gave them a few days to respond to me before I posted this thread so it hasn't been very long but total silence + they have my money is a bad combination.

I bought from them for a couple of reasons, for one they did deliver a product, or rather several products so they were certainly legit at some point (and possibly/hopefully they still are).  I saw evidence of that in threads on dash.org and I can still find hardware resellers that have pinidea hardware for sell.  The main reason I bought from them instead of the hardware resellers is that they list a newer model with more desirable specs than the models for sale from the resellers.  Also these miners look like a better deal than the baikal miners.

I could not find recent conversations (like this thread I started) about them so I wasn't sure if they were reliable or not and I deliberated for some time on whether to take the plunge and buy it.  At least at this point there will be this thread for people to find some recent conversation about them and I will post in here as to whether or not I receive a miner and how well it works.

Almost all hardware manufactures will hold your order for a few days. It's not so easy if you are them to find and ship your item (if they are legit of course). Good thing is your order is now processing so maybe you should just be a bit more patient

[wlefever]

I sent them an email on 1/6/2017 when I was interested in their DR3 and when I didn't get a response I assumed they had gone awall and just weren't shipping miners anymore....

[allnewbie]

I also sent two email to them, no response. I was going to send them money but just persuaded myself don't do that case I can not even get in touch with them though they seems were active at forum of dash.org.

Monday, I found Baikal are holding a group-buy, offering 10% discount. So, I gave myself a try on their mini miner(even, relatively, the price is still higher than Dr3 at this discount)... .. I sent them an email yesterday and after several emails, I paid. they told me within 48 hours will send the miner, but just 2 hours ago I have got my waybill..Good(I hope it won't came with a empty box... haha).

Still looking at Dr3, keep updating this thread! thank you very much.

[not.you]

Things are looking up.  I got notification that my order is complete and was sent a tracking number for DHL.  The DHL tracking web page so far just says the information was received so no package drop-off or pickup yet, but it shows it is shipping from Hong Kong to my location so looks like I will be getting something.

[wlefever]

Things are looking up.  I got notification that my order is complete and was sent a tracking number for DHL.  The DHL tracking web page so far just says the information was received so no package drop-off or pickup yet, but it shows it is shipping from Hong Kong to my location so looks like I will be getting something.

Pics when it arrives! That's a surprise.

[not.you]

Well so far DHL still only shows that a label was printed so it hasn't even entered their system yet.  But so far every single step of the process has taken several days, so if shipping takes a few days (and I am speaking of just the PinIdea portion of the shipping process) then it will fit the pattern.  I am inclined to believe at this point that something will eventually arrive though.  If the plan was to string me along they pretty much hit the end of the string along already, but really why bother?  They had my DASH coins from day one, they could have ignored me outright if they actually didn't plan on fulfilling the order.

EDIT: Tuesday is the past in Hong Kong and DHL still does not have the package.  They printed the DHL label on Saturday (in Hong Kong).  So including Sat we have 4 days since the label was printed with the package still not sent.  

EDIT2: Doh!  I just realized I had written the edit above on Monday.  Apparently I had gone into some sort of time warp.  As of this edit it is Wed morning in Hong Kong.  So Tuesday has now passed (for real) and Wed is passing.  DHL still does not have the actual package.

EDIT3: I just received notification from DHL that the package was picked up!  Which is odd since it is 5:16AM on Thursday there.  DHL estimates delivery on Friday!  I was starting to get a little antsy again.  I will update on how it works but probably not until I run it for a couple days which means the 30th at the earliest.

So if I get it Friday it will have been 2 weeks from order to arrival.  Not terrible I suppose.

[rpmenterprise]

how long between purchase and shipping notification?  I ordered one 20th of January and nothing yet. All I have is a confirmation and order number.

[djgorilla]

how long between purchase and shipping notification?  I ordered one 20th of January and nothing yet. All I have is a confirmation and order number.

Maybe you got unlucky due the chinese new-year, they stop almost everything in this time.

[not.you]

how long between purchase and shipping notification?  I ordered one 20th of January and nothing yet. All I have is a confirmation and order number.

I think it was 8 days between the day I ordered and the day they printed the label and sent the shipping notification. 

[alucard20724]

how long between purchase and shipping notification?  I ordered one 20th of January and nothing yet. All I have is a confirmation and order number.

I think it was 8 days between the day I ordered and the day they printed the label and sent the shipping notification.  

if you go into the dash forums, it seems the guy hasn't posted since may.

https://www.dash.org/forum/topic/hardware-discussions-asic-gpu-cpu.101/

[not.you]

I got the miner.  It has some miner issues and quirks but it is hashing.  I am not sure if miningpoolhub vardiff is causing a problem or not but the hashrate seems to fluctuate a lot.  It hits the 600 MH/s it was sold as but it also drops to like 100 or 200.  It has averaged about 450 for the last half hour.  I ran it on NH for a bit too and it seemed more stable but I kind of wanted to mine DASH.  I'll play with it for a couple days and then give some more impressions in the thread.

[not.you]

I know wlefever asked for pictures but I think it is unnecessary since the pictures on the website already show it: https://shop.pinidea.io/index.php/product/asic-x11-miner-dr3/

One thing to note is that the ethernet port is pretty close to the casing so a shielded cable doesn't really fit.  I might have been able to force it but I have more cables so I just used one with the cheaper end.  There is a DR2 setup tutorial here: https://www.eastshore.xyz/tutorial-x11-asic-miner-pinidea-dr2-450mh-335w-dash-miner/

The DR3 is almost exactly the same.  One difference though is that the power connectors are on the top (which you can see in pics from the pinidea.io website) which looks like a good change.  

It's pretty heavy for the size.  It is shorter than an antminer S9 but I think it might be slightly heavier.  The fans are loud but the air exhaust is not really that hot, especially compared to other asic miners I have.  I haven't turned the fans down at all though since I don't care.  I have an environment where I can run them loud but there is a fan setting in the web interface.  It is just a drop down with settings labelled LV1, LV2, and LV3.  It arrived set to LV3 so I have left it that way.

I am using a 750W PSU but I will probably try and use a smaller wattage unit tomorrow if I can find one that is around 500W.  I am not sure if I have one or not, I know I have a bunch lower than that but I would like to see if it runs the same on a smaller PSU.  I do not have a wattage meter so I can't check what it is using.

The end with the ethernet connector is actually what I would call the back since that is the air exhaust end.  That seems backwards compared to most miners I have owned before but not a big deal at all.

The web interface for the DR3 looks identical to the screen shots of the DR2 in the setup tutorial linked above.  I will make a post with some more details about that.

[not.you]

The web interface has some quirks (and one bug) that kind of tripped me up on the setup.

When you type the user name and password on the login page, the enter key on your keyboard won't log you in, you have to click the button on the page.  The pages will auto-refresh every minute indefinitely but if you click between pages you will be logged out after about 2 minutes.  So basically, after 2 minutes no matter what you click on, you will be logged out, but if you just leave any of the pages open it will auto-update that page every minute forever.



I circled a of couple things in green above.  

First, the Internet Status never changes from "Disconnect".  This seems to be a bug although I am not sure what it is trying to do to determine that. I tried both static and dynamic IP for the miner and tried different DNS servers.  It may be a DNS resolution issue where it just can't resolve something it is looking for but if that is the case google DNS can't resolve it either.  This in combination with some other early configurations I made had me thinking the thing was broken initially.

Second, the 30 second hashrate (and possibly the 5 minute hashrate) seems to be a calculated value.  It may also be that the hashrate graph is based on calculated values.  Initially I had just given the miner a more or less random difficulty through use of the password on the pool I was using.  I set the difficulty to 1000 which is apparently astronomically high for x11 so my 30 second hashrate was always zero.  I didn't wait a full 5 minutes to see if that one changed but basically the high difficulty combined with the Internet Status made me think the miner wasn't working at all because it never reported any hashrate.  You can see in my screen shot I am on miningpoolhub and the vardiff sometimes gives me a difficulty high enough that I don't send a share within 30 seconds and when that happens the 30 second hashrate as reported in the web interface will show 0.0.  Watching this for a bit is what had me conclude it is a calculated value because sometimes it will show something like 2000 also.  I am used to asic miners that show the actual number of hashes being done by the hashing engine rather than calculating a value based on submitted shares so this is a bit weird.  

As I say, it seems possible that the 5 minute hashrate and the graphs are similarly based on calculated values too.  The graph has a lot of variance, sometimes going as high as 1000.  I have circled the line for 600 which is what the miner is advertised at but you can see that some of the graph lines are under 400 as well.  It seems to average about 540ish on MPH.  It averaged 550ish on nicehash.  Not terrible but not exactly 600.  There is a slider for chip freq and it says the default is 420 but was set to 470 when the miner arrived.  So it was already OC'd to the max setting before they shipped it.  I haven't tried lowering this at all.  The temps are not high at all in comparison with other electronics (GPU's, CPU's, other ASIC's) and the temp of the air at the exhaust end is just mildly warm and not hot either.  I am curious however if the OC is reducing hashrate at all since sometimes I have seen that on antminers where you get a benefit from OC up to a point and then it starts going down as you go higher still so I will probably lower this and see what it does.



It appears I have one bad chip.  The vast majority of invalids come from that one chip.  If the difficulty is lower, as it is on nicehash, then there are even more HW failures and that chip will actually show in red.  With the higher diff on MPH it seems to behave better.  As you can see though it still gives more good shares than bad.

[wlefever]

Great, thanks for reporting!

[rpmenterprise]

mine arrived yesterday for those still skeptical. not horrible considering the chinese new year. on a side note couldnt get it set up for a while becasue the deafult ip is set at 192.168.1.200 and my router was in setup in a different range.  All is well now though with no bad asics