[Guide] Dogie's Comprehensive ASICMiner Blade Setup

[dogie]

While you are here friedcat, are you able to enlighten us on the new revision of ethernet and power delivery boards we will eventually receive.

1) Why have you designed a revision, what is likely to improve?
2) Will you be rolling it out on all your blades already hashing away or just new installs?
3) Can we have another hashing board with them, seems a shame to have perfectly good ethernet and power delivery boards without a friend

1) Mainly for longevity and stability.
2) Just for new installs.
3) Yes. But you need to pay for the hashing board according to the price at that moment.

And what proportion of the going rate would a hashing board alone cost us? I'm not sure how much selling power you'll have @ 50 when B2 and 3 land properly, and the homebrew avalon projects near <3 months.

[bitjoint]

24 Hour Earnings 2.656 *faps*

Hey dogie... still getting 2.656 daily? Which pool are you using?

[puexam]

Is it possible to set three stratum proxy IPs?

[dogie]

24 Hour Earnings 2.656 *faps*

Hey dogie... still getting 2.656 daily? Which pool are you using?

I was/would be if BTCGuild didn't just have a FAIL luck in the last 48 hours. Normalised earnings should be 2.4 a day.

[piit79]

24 Hour Earnings 2.656 *faps*

Hey dogie... still getting 2.656 daily? Which pool are you using?

Wow, how did you achieve that, lucky day? I assume that was with 4 blades?

I'm on 50BTC and on a good day I get 1.1 BTC with 2 blades.

[eastpk]

What pools have you guys been using? I've been on slush but was thinking about testing BTC Guild to see if its any better of there.

[dogie]

24 Hour Earnings 2.656 *faps*

Hey dogie... still getting 2.656 daily? Which pool are you using?

Wow, how did you achieve that, lucky day? I assume that was with 4 blades?

I'm on 50BTC and on a good day I get 1.1 BTC with 2 blades.

It was lucky on BTCGuild. Theoretical is about 2.4 with 4 blades.

[WinTame2012]

What pools have you guys been using? I've been on slush but was thinking about testing BTC Guild to see if its any better of there.

I'm trying 50btc and Bitparking right now, both via local Stratum-proxy.

[mjmvisser]

Hi, just chiming in with my experience with power distribution to my BE after seeing all the melted wire posts.

Instead of using a molex splitter, I used one of these:

https://i.imgur.com/5AP7r9p.jpg

Cut the 6-pin connector off the end and remove the third (not yellow, not black) wire from the molex plugs. Don't cut it -- just reach in with a pair of tweezers or needle-nose pliers and gently squeeze the pin at the base and you should be able to slide it right out.

You'll now have two molex connectors that you can wire to the power plug: two yellow to the + side, two black to the -. Double-check with a multi-meter before you plug it in -- always double-check! You can get a multi-meter for less than $10.

Use two molex connectors on the same feed from your PSU. I've been running like this for 2 days now at "high" clock and the cables are barely warm. Don't skimp on fans, either. I have 4, two against the heat sink and another two on the other side of the board. I'm going to add two more on the back of the power board, too, it's quite warm.

[sveetsnelda]

Has anyone had an issue with their blade(s) where they'll mine for a while (minutes or hours) and reboot on a regular basis?  Both of mine will run for an hour or so, stop hashing for a couple minutes, and reboot (triggers the failsafe).  It's great that they reset automatically, but I'm losing a few minutes of hashing each hour.  I'm running them through slush's stratum proxy and they maintain ethernet communication the entire time (the web page stays accessible and they're connected to the proxy).

I tried moving one to another pool (under another instance of the proxy using a different port) and it still does the same thing, although they now reset at different times.  It seems like a stratum proxy or pool issue, but I'd expect it to pick back up after a disconnect (if that's what's happening).  When the blades go down for a couple minutes, my GPUs keep hashing (although they aren't using the proxy).

I'm going to start digging into it, but I wanted to check to see if someone else ran into the same thing.

[WinTame2012]

Has anyone had an issue with their blade(s) where they'll mine for a while (minutes or hours) and reboot on a regular basis?  Both of mine will run for an hour or so, stop hashing for a couple minutes, and reboot (triggers the failsafe).  It's great that they reset automatically, but I'm losing a few minutes of hashing each hour.  I'm running them through slush's stratum proxy and they maintain ethernet communication the entire time (the web page stays accessible and they're connected to the proxy).

I tried moving one to another pool (under another instance of the proxy using a different port) and it still does the same thing, although they now reset at different times.  It seems like a stratum proxy or pool issue, but I'd expect it to pick back up after a disconnect (if that's what's happening).  When the blades go down for a couple minutes, my GPUs keep hashing (although they aren't using the proxy).

I'm going to start digging into it, but I wanted to check to see if someone else ran into the same thing.

I've run into this yesterday when I've tried to mine on old-fashion getwork pool (w/o any proxy). It have reset after several minutes. And I've ceased my counter-science experiments

[drlatino999]

Has anyone had an issue with their blade(s) where they'll mine for a while (minutes or hours) and reboot on a regular basis?  Both of mine will run for an hour or so, stop hashing for a couple minutes, and reboot (triggers the failsafe).  It's great that they reset automatically, but I'm losing a few minutes of hashing each hour.  I'm running them through slush's stratum proxy and they maintain ethernet communication the entire time (the web page stays accessible and they're connected to the proxy).

I tried moving one to another pool (under another instance of the proxy using a different port) and it still does the same thing, although they now reset at different times.  It seems like a stratum proxy or pool issue, but I'd expect it to pick back up after a disconnect (if that's what's happening).  When the blades go down for a couple minutes, my GPUs keep hashing (although they aren't using the proxy).

I'm going to start digging into it, but I wanted to check to see if someone else ran into the same thing.

I'm having issues with my proxies, every 2 minutes or so they lock up in turn and the blade switches to the next. Rinse and repeat indefinitely.

[piit79]

Just in case anybody's interested in my installation

Two 120mm fans on the heatsink in push/pull config, 140mm fan at the back blowing at the chips. All three fans are powered from one HDD molex connector

I'm using an old-ish ATX PSU with just one PCI-e power connector so I'm powering the other blade from a 4-pin CPU power connector. I purchased 40cm extension cables (male-female) for both (PCI-e power & 4-pin CPU), removed the female connectors on the other end and attached the blade power connectors. This way the blades plug into the high-amp PSU connectors nicely. At 20 AWG 5 amp per cable is not a problem at all provided that there is good contact on the blade connector end.

[slastar]

Hi, just chiming in with my experience with power distribution to my BE after seeing all the melted wire posts.

Instead of using a molex splitter, I used one of these:



Cut the 6-pin connector off the end and remove the third (not yellow, not black) wire from the molex plugs. Don't cut it -- just reach in with a pair of tweezers or needle-nose pliers and gently squeeze the pin at the base and you should be able to slide it right out.

You'll now have two molex connectors that you can wire to the power plug: two yellow to the + side, two black to the -. Double-check with a multi-meter before you plug it in -- always double-check! You can get a multi-meter for less than $10.

Use two molex connectors on the same feed from your PSU. I've been running like this for 2 days now at "high" clock and the cables are barely warm. Don't skimp on fans, either. I have 4, two against the heat sink and another two on the other side of the board. I'm going to add two more on the back of the power board, too, it's quite warm.

carefully with these adapters, they have copper cables with smaller φ so they heat up more then aluminium molex-sata adapter or molex splitter

[WinTame2012]

Hi, just chiming in with my experience with power distribution to my BE after seeing all the melted wire posts.

Instead of using a molex splitter, I used one of these:



Cut the 6-pin connector off the end and remove the third (not yellow, not black) wire from the molex plugs. Don't cut it -- just reach in with a pair of tweezers or needle-nose pliers and gently squeeze the pin at the base and you should be able to slide it right out.

You'll now have two molex connectors that you can wire to the power plug: two yellow to the + side, two black to the -. Double-check with a multi-meter before you plug it in -- always double-check! You can get a multi-meter for less than $10.

Use two molex connectors on the same feed from your PSU. I've been running like this for 2 days now at "high" clock and the cables are barely warm. Don't skimp on fans, either. I have 4, two against the heat sink and another two on the other side of the board. I'm going to add two more on the back of the power board, too, it's quite warm.

carefully with these adapters, they have copper cables with smaller φ so they heat up more then aluminium molex-sata adapter or molex splitter

Always believed that copper is better conductor than aluminium...

[piit79]

carefully with these adapters, they have copper cables with smaller φ so they heat up more then aluminium molex-sata adapter or molex splitter

Always believed that copper is better conductor than aluminium...

That is true in general. However, it also depends on the cross-section (gauge) of the cable/conductor.

What slastar meant probably was that these adapters have fairly low gauge wires. I also personally think that the molex HDD connector doesn't make a very good contact so the connector will heat up as well.

[WinTame2012]

carefully with these adapters, they have copper cables with smaller φ so they heat up more then aluminium molex-sata adapter or molex splitter

Always believed that copper is better conductor than aluminium...

That is true in general. However, it also depends on the cross-section (gauge) of the cable/conductor.

What slastar meant probably was that these adapters have fairly low gauge wires. I also personally think that the molex HDD connector doesn't make a very good contact so the connector will heat up as well.

It's just your assumption. I'v read his post and didn't found he refer AWG. Given equal cross-section copper is much better so I'd write posts to avoid any misleading.

[dogie]

Hi, just chiming in with my experience with power distribution to my BE after seeing all the melted wire posts.

Instead of using a molex splitter, I used one of these:



Cut the 6-pin connector off the end and remove the third (not yellow, not black) wire from the molex plugs. Don't cut it -- just reach in with a pair of tweezers or needle-nose pliers and gently squeeze the pin at the base and you should be able to slide it right out.

You'll now have two molex connectors that you can wire to the power plug: two yellow to the + side, two black to the -. Double-check with a multi-meter before you plug it in -- always double-check! You can get a multi-meter for less than $10.

Use two molex connectors on the same feed from your PSU. I've been running like this for 2 days now at "high" clock and the cables are barely warm. Don't skimp on fans, either. I have 4, two against the heat sink and another two on the other side of the board. I'm going to add two more on the back of the power board, too, it's quite warm.

Absolutely no different to the recommended setup, its still 2 lives and 2 neutrals [actually compared with my 2 lives and 4 neutrals]. The problem with burnt cables is some brands are selling knockoff cabling which isn't sufficient.

Has anyone had an issue with their blade(s) where they'll mine for a while (minutes or hours) and reboot on a regular basis?  Both of mine will run for an hour or so, stop hashing for a couple minutes, and reboot (triggers the failsafe).  It's great that they reset automatically, but I'm losing a few minutes of hashing each hour.  I'm running them through slush's stratum proxy and they maintain ethernet communication the entire time (the web page stays accessible and they're connected to the proxy).

I tried moving one to another pool (under another instance of the proxy using a different port) and it still does the same thing, although they now reset at different times.  It seems like a stratum proxy or pool issue, but I'd expect it to pick back up after a disconnect (if that's what's happening).  When the blades go down for a couple minutes, my GPUs keep hashing (although they aren't using the proxy).

I'm going to start digging into it, but I wanted to check to see if someone else ran into the same thing.

This is heat based.

[dogie]

Just in case anybody's interested in my installation

Two 120mm fans on the heatsink in push/pull config, 140mm fan at the back blowing at the chips. All three fans are powered from one HDD molex connector

I'm using an old-ish ATX PSU with just one PCI-e power connector so I'm powering the other blade from a 4-pin CPU power connector. I purchased 40cm extension cables (male-female) for both (PCI-e power & 4-pin CPU), removed the female connectors on the other end and attached the blade power connectors. This way the blades plug into the high-amp PSU connectors nicely. At 20 AWG 5 amp per cable is not a problem at all provided that there is good contact on the blade connector end.

Be careful, 20awg is smaller than 18

[piit79]

Be careful, 20awg is smaller than 18

I know. I'm not sure, it might actually be 18 AWG. These are good quality Akasa extensions.