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[allinvain]

One thing that does suck about these rigs is that they do not run very stable when fully populated (ie all 16 cards installed).

This is very dependent upon power supplies.  You need a beefy PSU with stable 12V rails in order to keep the amperage even to all 16 cards.

Hmm, do you have any recommendations. Believe it or not I'm running one full rig with a seasonic 550 watt 80 plus gold psu but I'm thinking of buying something more beefy. I have in mind the AX860 series.

Just pay close attention to the 12V rails.  I am using a couple older PC P&C 750W PSUs, but these are not built anymore.  I also have a 1KW Coolermaster Gold Series that I use to power two full rigs.

Hmm, I too use a 1K psu for a full rig but it is still flaky, so I'm not sure if the power supply is to blame though. I bought another PSU - Corsair HX850 that will replace that Seasonic GS550 that is currently powering (so far so good) a full rig.

I should mention that the 1K PSU is not 80 plus gold rated (more like 80 silver) but that should not matter as it only affects efficiency at the wall.

[allinvain]

Believe it or not I'm running one full rig with a seasonic 550 watt 80 plus gold psu

 I suspect this is the cause of all your problems right here That's BARELY enough to power a full rig.

 I <3 anything Corsair in the 850W range for these guys.

I don't think that's true though. According to my power meter a full rig with v2.3 h-cards (the pci ones) is consuming 450 watts at 520 gh. 450 watts is at the wall of course.

But I still think that it would likely be better to give the power supply more room to breathe. Voltage ripple on the 12V rail is likely to occur more frequently at higher loads and the h-cards may not like this.

I think another solution would be to trim down the full rig by 4 h-cards. I was told by punin (from Bitfury Strikes Back -bfsb) that 12 h-cards is a more stable config.

Keep in mind that you are asking these PSUs to push all that power over the 12V PCI-Express power leads.  They were NOT designed to do this.  They were instead designed to push about 50% of their power over the main ATX connector to a motherboard.  That is why you need PSUs that are spec'd far above what the actual power draw is on a full rig -- the 12V rails for the PCI-Express power leads were never designed with that in mind.

Several PSUs- like the EVGA 1300g2, can run almost their entire Amperage over PCIe. I think the evga can do almost 110A @ 12v, or 99.7% of its rated 1300w

It would suck mighty hard if I had to buy a uber expensive evga 1300g2 PSU to power a 460 to 480 watt full rig. I think we are better off just splitting the rigs.

[allinvain]

Once again I've proven that they shouldn't let this Software guy play with hardware. I plugged in an H board backwards and got smoke.  One of these days I'll learn. 

Oh noooes!   That sucks bro. You may be able to get away with it - it may still work. From what I heard though doing that is a sure way to fry all the chips as what you did is essentially reverse the polarity and the magic smoke came'a'calling.

[allinvain]

Received my new 1/2 kit yesterday and got it working today.  My first one is a v1 with 16 boards at 460 Gh/s.  It has one bad port and some of the boards are EOL's that don't hash much.
But this new kit out of the box is going 240 Gh/s.  No tuning or anything.  So once I set up decent cooling I should be able to get 300 Gh/s out of it.

Has anyone heard from Spotwood???  I sent him an email and posted on his thread that I wanted a new case.  But it's been days with no reply.

He's still alive and making cases. I just got word that he finally shipped an order of mine placed like a month or two ago. He is pretty busy and backlogged I guess.

[Keefe]

There's no need to get a PSU with way more capacity than needed, as long as you choose a single-rail design from a high-quality manufacturer such as Seasonic. I'm running a full 16-card overclocked v3 rig on a gold 750W Seasonic, and it's perfectly stable at 580GH. I could probably get it up to 620GH if I turned up the voltage a bit more and tweaked the speeds again.

I definitely wouldn't run this on just two PCIe power connectors though; they'd probably melt. I made my own cables to connect four PCIe connectors to the screw terminals.

[xstr8guy]

Believe it or not I'm running one full rig with a seasonic 550 watt 80 plus gold psu

 I suspect this is the cause of all your problems right here That's BARELY enough to power a full rig.

 I <3 anything Corsair in the 850W range for these guys.

I don't think that's true though. According to my power meter a full rig with v2.3 h-cards (the pci ones) is consuming 450 watts at 520 gh. 450 watts is at the wall of course.

But I still think that it would likely be better to give the power supply more room to breathe. Voltage ripple on the 12V rail is likely to occur more frequently at higher loads and the h-cards may not like this.

I think another solution would be to trim down the full rig by 4 h-cards. I was told by punin (from Bitfury Strikes Back -bfsb) that 12 h-cards is a more stable config.

Keep in mind that you are asking these PSUs to push all that power over the 12V PCI-Express power leads.  They were NOT designed to do this.  They were instead designed to push about 50% of their power over the main ATX connector to a motherboard.  That is why you need PSUs that are spec'd far above what the actual power draw is on a full rig -- the 12V rails for the PCI-Express power leads were never designed with that in mind.

Well you may be right or not, but personally I'm not so sure if PSU are designed to push 50% of their power to the mobo. That would be a LOT of power to serve the needs of the motherboard and cpu. From my understanding with a single rail design it should not matter which connectors are being used as they are all drawing from the same rail. Also these days GPUs are the biggest power hogs so the PCIE express connectors usually draw the most power by a long shot.

What a horrible flaky design these bitfury rigs are. Why could they not have included more PCIE connectors to spread the load more evenly or even make use of the mobo CPU connector - anything to ensure that the m-boards and thus the cards get reliable power.

Right now one v3 m-board rig is being powered by an AX860 PSU and another v2.3 m-board rig is being powered by a 1000W OCZ EliteXtreme PSU. I wish I know if these were adequate.

However even with a 1000w supply (single rail) the rig is not stable. I think the main cause of instability is running all 16 cards at once. I am going to look into splitting up my rigs as I'm tired of constantly having to mess with these miners. I may as well just give up and buy a KNCMiner Jupiter.

lol, anyone want to swap hardware ?

Luckily I have some extra M boards.  I can't get more than 12 in my V.1 rig and 14 in my V.2.  Strangely, my V.2 rig became more stable when I added more cards... up to 14, that is.

[allinvain]

There's no need to get a PSU with way more capacity than needed, as long as you choose a single-rail design from a high-quality manufacturer such as Seasonic. I'm running a full 16-card overclocked v3 rig on a gold 750W Seasonic, and it's perfectly stable at 580GH. I could probably get it up to 620GH if I turned up the voltage a bit more and tweaked the speeds again.

I definitely wouldn't run this on just two PCIe power connectors though; they'd probably melt. I made my own cables to connect four PCIe connectors to the screw terminals.

Well it seems the golden ticket there is a v3 rig.

I currently have two PCIe 6 pin feeding the rig and it's running at 512 gh. I would however like to ensure the load is even more spread out so I'm wondering if you know where I can find some pci-e 6 pin to screw terminal connector adapter. Or maybe you can make me some for a fee?

[allinvain]

Believe it or not I'm running one full rig with a seasonic 550 watt 80 plus gold psu

 I suspect this is the cause of all your problems right here That's BARELY enough to power a full rig.

 I <3 anything Corsair in the 850W range for these guys.

I don't think that's true though. According to my power meter a full rig with v2.3 h-cards (the pci ones) is consuming 450 watts at 520 gh. 450 watts is at the wall of course.

But I still think that it would likely be better to give the power supply more room to breathe. Voltage ripple on the 12V rail is likely to occur more frequently at higher loads and the h-cards may not like this.

I think another solution would be to trim down the full rig by 4 h-cards. I was told by punin (from Bitfury Strikes Back -bfsb) that 12 h-cards is a more stable config.

Keep in mind that you are asking these PSUs to push all that power over the 12V PCI-Express power leads.  They were NOT designed to do this.  They were instead designed to push about 50% of their power over the main ATX connector to a motherboard.  That is why you need PSUs that are spec'd far above what the actual power draw is on a full rig -- the 12V rails for the PCI-Express power leads were never designed with that in mind.

Well you may be right or not, but personally I'm not so sure if PSU are designed to push 50% of their power to the mobo. That would be a LOT of power to serve the needs of the motherboard and cpu. From my understanding with a single rail design it should not matter which connectors are being used as they are all drawing from the same rail. Also these days GPUs are the biggest power hogs so the PCIE express connectors usually draw the most power by a long shot.

What a horrible flaky design these bitfury rigs are. Why could they not have included more PCIE connectors to spread the load more evenly or even make use of the mobo CPU connector - anything to ensure that the m-boards and thus the cards get reliable power.

Right now one v3 m-board rig is being powered by an AX860 PSU and another v2.3 m-board rig is being powered by a 1000W OCZ EliteXtreme PSU. I wish I know if these were adequate.

However even with a 1000w supply (single rail) the rig is not stable. I think the main cause of instability is running all 16 cards at once. I am going to look into splitting up my rigs as I'm tired of constantly having to mess with these miners. I may as well just give up and buy a KNCMiner Jupiter.

lol, anyone want to swap hardware ?

Luckily I have some extra M boards.  I can't get more than 12 in my V.1 rig and 14 in my V.2.  Strangely, my V.2 rig became more stable when I added more cards... up to 14, that is.

Yep, well thanks for confirming it. This pretty much tells me what I need to do soon - get extra m-board and take out 4 cards from each full rig, that way I'll have two 12 card rigs and one 8 card rig.

These rigs run on smoke and magic apparently.

It would be nice if Dave sold m-boards by themselves as well.

[Keefe]

There's no need to get a PSU with way more capacity than needed, as long as you choose a single-rail design from a high-quality manufacturer such as Seasonic. I'm running a full 16-card overclocked v3 rig on a gold 750W Seasonic, and it's perfectly stable at 580GH. I could probably get it up to 620GH if I turned up the voltage a bit more and tweaked the speeds again.

I definitely wouldn't run this on just two PCIe power connectors though; they'd probably melt. I made my own cables to connect four PCIe connectors to the screw terminals.

Well it seems the golden ticket there is a v3 rig.

I currently have two PCIe 6 pin feeding the rig and it's running at 512 gh. I would however like to ensure the load is even more spread out so I'm wondering if you know where I can find some pci-e 6 pin to screw terminal connector adapter. Or maybe you can make me some for a fee?

If you have, or can get, a basic crimp/strip tool, you can make cables with parts from eBay and Lowes:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=251966.4420

I also have a 13-card v2 rig that I've OV/OC/optimized even more, that's stable at 510GH (over 39GH/card). It's running on the same model PSU.

[klondike_bar]

modified server psus are great too: $5 for the psu and $10 at home depot, and Ive converted a 835W Power Supply that has 4*12V and 4*GND lines - 14AWG each for an Antminer and a 7-card bitfury

[goxed]

modified server psus are great too: $5 for the psu and $10 at home depot, and Ive converted a 835W Power Supply that has 4*12V and 4*GND lines - 14AWG each for an Antminer and a 7-card bitfury

Hey what are the efficiency ratings of these PSUs? Thanks

[goxed]

Just a  heads up.
I have had tremendous luck with UHS-1 SD cards. No amount of power outages, or random shutdown have lead to Filesystem failure yet (2 months and counting).
I am specifically using 16GB Toshiba UHS1. http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/261215529897?lpid=82



Thanks

[Soros Shorts]

There's no need to get a PSU with way more capacity than needed, as long as you choose a single-rail design from a high-quality manufacturer such as Seasonic. I'm running a full 16-card overclocked v3 rig on a gold 750W Seasonic, and it's perfectly stable at 580GH. I could probably get it up to 620GH if I turned up the voltage a bit more and tweaked the speeds again.

I definitely wouldn't run this on just two PCIe power connectors though; they'd probably melt. I made my own cables to connect four PCIe connectors to the screw terminals.

Well it seems the golden ticket there is a v3 rig.

I currently have two PCIe 6 pin feeding the rig and it's running at 512 gh. I would however like to ensure the load is even more spread out so I'm wondering if you know where I can find some pci-e 6 pin to screw terminal connector adapter. Or maybe you can make me some for a fee?

If you have, or can get, a basic crimp/strip tool, you can make cables with parts from eBay and Lowes:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=251966.4420

I also have a 13-card v2 rig that I've OV/OC/optimized even more, that's stable at 510GH (over 39GH/card). It's running on the same model PSU.

You don't need to sacrifice power supply connectors to make the cables (as suggested in the link). You can buy PCI-e 6-pin splitters from eBay and cut off the ends. Then crimp or solder the yellow and black wires to a pair of ring terminals.

I bought a large bag of PCI-e 6-pin splitters a while back, and they have been very useful in helping me power up everything from ASICMINER blades to BitFury rigs. In a pinch, without ring terminals you can twist the ends of the wires and screw them down on to the v3 terminals with just a pair of washers to hold them down (be VERY careful of stray strands of wire that may touch adjacent H-cards, though).

[allinvain]

Just a  heads up.
I have had tremendous luck with UHS-1 SD cards. No amount of power outages, or random shutdown have lead to Filesystem failure yet (2 months and counting).
I am specifically using 16GB Toshiba UHS1. http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/261215529897?lpid=82



Thanks

I'm guessing those red boards at the back are temp probes, no?

[goxed]

Just a  heads up.
I have had tremendous luck with UHS-1 SD cards. No amount of power outages, or random shutdown have lead to Filesystem failure yet (2 months and counting).
I am specifically using 16GB Toshiba UHS1. http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/261215529897?lpid=82



Thanks

I'm guessing those red boards at the back are temp probes, no?

Those are voltage regulators. I ordered the PCBs and hand soldered the bitfury chips and slapped on the regulator boards.
I was soldering and then testing the boards 4 chips at a time, to root out any dead boards before it created a problem, and did not have the patience to undergo the shutdown routine and instead turned off the PSU switch. The SD-card survived all the attempts.

[klondike_bar]

modified server psus are great too: $5 for the psu and $10 at home depot, and Ive converted a 835W Power Supply that has 4*12V and 4*GND lines - 14AWG each for an Antminer and a 7-card bitfury

Hey what are the efficiency ratings of these PSUs? Thanks

Not a clue! Over on the modified server PSU thread though it sounds like basically all server PSUs are designed for >85 or 90% efficiencies since all they do is produce huge amounts of reliable 12V power

[Cablez]

modified server psus are great too: $5 for the psu and $10 at home depot, and Ive converted a 835W Power Supply that has 4*12V and 4*GND lines - 14AWG each for an Antminer and a 7-card bitfury

Hey what are the efficiency ratings of these PSUs? Thanks

Not a clue! Over on the modified server PSU thread though it sounds like basically all server PSUs are designed for >85 or 90% efficiencies since all they do is produce huge amounts of reliable 12V power

Yes,  the bigger ones typically run at 90-92% at 50% load.

[BTClobsta]

I'd buy 'bad' boards too :-)

i have a bad v2. board are you interested?

[Keefe]

I'd buy 'bad' boards too :-)

i have a bad v2. board are you interested?

Depending on the kind of "bad", I may be interested in buying bad H-cards and trying to repair.

[bobcaticus]

Hey everyone -

We had some issues with the store overnight & this morning, so was is disabled for the time being.  

I apologize and appreciate your understanding!

Jason


EDIT: Looks like it's working again.