BFL Product Failures / Underperformance.

[joeventura]

I've had one of my Little Single PSUs die, and just recently a SC Single PSU die. BFL RMAd the first one, and is in the process of RMAing the second. Not a huge issue.

Don't really trust the PSUs a whole lot, so I plan on switching them to ATX PSUs relatively soon. And moving to 80Plus Gold will also help with efficiency no doubt.

more or less the same here: my jally PSU died 6 months after delivery. however I had flashed the firmware to 8.1 Ghs so no warranty for me. I knew that before flashing it though.

also this full disclosure: my SC 25 I ordered arrived @ 31 Ghz from the factory. 6 months after I ordered it. and I never used the included PSU (it didnt exactly instill  confidence with its looks and feel), I use the antec basiq 500 watt that powers the computer. its been running a few weeks now.

but take this away if nothing else: bfl power supplies are absolute junk. there is no UL mark or number on them for a reason.

My miners from BFL all work fine, the power supplies however NOT SO MUCH.

I reported two dead power supplies to the RMA email address within 3 days of each other, got one replacement.
Still waiting, been 20 days

[Bicknellski]

I've had one of my Little Single PSUs die, and just recently a SC Single PSU die. BFL RMAd the first one, and is in the process of RMAing the second. Not a huge issue.

Don't really trust the PSUs a whole lot, so I plan on switching them to ATX PSUs relatively soon. And moving to 80Plus Gold will also help with efficiency no doubt.

more or less the same here: my jally PSU died 6 months after delivery. however I had flashed the firmware to 8.1 Ghs so no warranty for me. I knew that before flashing it though.

also this full disclosure: my SC 25 I ordered arrived @ 31 Ghz from the factory. 6 months after I ordered it. and I never used the included PSU (it didnt exactly instill  confidence with its looks and feel), I use the antec basiq 500 watt that powers the computer. its been running a few weeks now.

but take this away if nothing else: bfl power supplies are absolute junk. there is no UL mark or number on them for a reason.

My miners from BFL all work fine, the power supplies however NOT SO MUCH.

I reported two dead power supplies to the RMA email address within 3 days of each other, got one replacement.
Still waiting, been 20 days

Not going to go with the ATX route given the failures reported and safety concerns of the owners that have already posted and complained about the PSU's?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=344105.msg3691914#msg3691914 <-- You tore apart some of the BFL units you own why exactly?

[Bicknellski]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=386546.msg4163306#msg4163306

Cooling?

[Bicknellski]

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/post-sales-customer-service/5887-word-about-customer-service-shipping.html

Quote Originally Posted by BFL_Josh  View Post

We are nearly at the end of the tunnel and the future looks very bright indeed.

As everyday passes with a piece of hardware that arrived broken I disagree. Bad enough I know you're going to ask me to pay more and wait longer (again) just to get what I wanted in the first place....

3 days, no response.

Shipping broken product out the door doesn't count as done.

Bit of a sweeping statement, how many out of the 1000 units ship per day are defective? Nobody will post "mine arrived and it works" all you get are people with issues who post, sometime multiple times

I have ordered (and received) 2 miners. A Single which arrived last month, and a Jalapeno that arrived Tuesday. Neither worked when it arrived. I had to RMA the Single. The new one worked perfectly!

The Jalapeno actually does work, but the power supply that arrived with it does not. I hooked it up to another 12V DC power supply I have and it works (somewhat). It does not provide enough current, so it only hashes for a short time before having problems. So now I'm waiting to hear what I need to do to get a replacement power supply.

Although I wish I could say differently, I am disappointed with my BFL experience.

I'd like to send my 60gh/s back to them now ( it's broken too after 2 weeks of mining .. at least I got that out of it!  ) ... could you give me the address I should send the machine to for the RMA? Any other tips would be appreciated. thanks

Quote Originally Posted by BFL_Josh  View Post

We have a less than 1% failure rate on our miners.

That you're aware of... Failure rate also doesn't take into account those miners running under spec that won't be sent back. I really hope the Monarch runs go off without a hitch, if they do, I might buy another piece of BFL hardware when you get to third gen. The whole Jalapeno thing really left a bad taste in my mouth.

Saying sorry doesn't put the $1500+ money BFL lost me by accidentally skipping over my order due to a undocumented "error" in the system. There was no expedited shipping, there was nothing but a "we're sorry." I had to contact BFL for them to even realize the error. Saying sorry doesn't fix the issue with my broken power brick which would be costing me additional money if I didn't already have a pc psu to use. Saying sorry doesn't replace the under-performing 60 GH/s unit I have which equates to lost profits. I know for a fact I have been ignored because my original account was banned and all my posts were deleted. I sent emails from my gmail account and have never had a reply for WEEKS going on MONTHS. I left messages at the 800 number and no one ever replied. All I want right now is for BFL to fix the items which are under a warranty they are legally obligated to honor. I'd like this to occur in a TIMELY manner so I can concluded my business with them. At the rate things are going, I'll not have an RMA till after December and the resale value of the Singles will be horrible.

I'd like to put my 2 cents in this post.

Josh, I totally understand where your coming from on your end that your backed up and finding smart people is hard. Until I've seen this post, I didn't see any responses or anything (forums or email). You also know that for every day that we are not mining due to a failed miner is a loss on our end after waiting over 6 months for it. My Miner has been dead since the 7th (I had it for less then 4 weeks), that's 10 days that I've lost in mining time and so far that's a loss of 1.247 BTC, which at the current rate is over $750 and I'm expected to have to wait an additional 2 weeks (maybe a month due to the delay of JUST the RMA #) for a miner when its becoming harder and harder to mine?

I'm not too happy with the fact that all I see are posts in the forums about failed miners (w/ no responses from official staff), It makes us think twice about future purchases. I also don't buy the 1% failure rate, I know a decent amount of people that had bought miners from you guys. Every single person has had ether the unit itself or the power supply fail, even a failed power supply is still a fail and should be counted. I also have to bring up the fact that even prior to shipping units, your customer service team has had less then satisfying results. It took me 10 days just to get a standard template response back in June, Really does not sound like you guys focused much energy on customer service since shipping and from my point of view it has just gotten worse.

I don't buy the 1% figure either. If they only had to deal with 10 failed units a day, their customer service wouldn't be so completely overwhelmed. The true figure is surely a multiple of that. Plus BFL is lucky that so many customers can take apart and fix their own shoddily assembled units, or they'd have even more to do.

Plus they're still six months behind on shipping everything but the minirigs, so there's obviously a lot of e-mail traffic complaining about that.

A first baby step would be to channel the inquiries, with separate, dedicated e-mail addresses for RMA requests, skipped orders, and other problems, instead of a single unmanageable queue, so priority cases can be dealt with effectively. Another would be implementing an actual ticket tracking system. Whatever system or methods they're using now are obviously painfully inadequate.

How about this, Josh? It's been nearly 4 weeks since your mea culpa, but I don't see much progress. Are you taking steps to improve your customer service response? Judging from the many angry forum posts and my own experiences, I'd say you still have a way to go yet.

In my specific case, I sold a 7 GH unit on eBay recently. It worked perfectly up until the time I packed it up, but the buyer says the power supply shorted out the first time they plugged it in. They sent an e-mail to rma@butterflylabs.com (which you set up on my suggestion - you're welcome), but apparently that e-mailbox is now just as clogged as the office account, because they've been waiting over 3 days without a response. Because the buyer isn't getting a response from you, they opened a Paypal dispute with me and Paypal has frozen my funds until things are resolved.

In other words, your completely deficient customer service is having a negative impact even on people who aren't dealing with you directly. Please shape things up.

Out of the 60 units we bought, I had 3x that were only 30GH (1/2 speed) and 1x DOA. So my small sample size is 8% failure rate. I assume this is the real number BFL will start to see months after the units have shipped.

The reason BFL is only seeing 1% might be because they have a really bad RMA department and people are having issues opening RMA requests. Also the failures we saw were a couple months after the units arrived.

I bought 6 Singles and 2 blew up. My failure rate is 33%.

I'm waiting a month since requesting my first RMA and a week on the second RMA.

I'd gladly take a credit on a Monarch or mining contract.

[RAVENCROW]

Thanks for the requesting a rma bit on the bfl page that helped me move forward my miner is running slow too 38ghs and dropping lol.. Was 50 something at first

[bcp19]

Dang Bick, you missed this:

Really busy with the holidays, but Merry Christmas or happy what ever you celebrate. So I got my 2 new jalapeños yesterday thank god. So I watch them for the first day mining one at 7Ghs with 4% hw errors and an 8 with 2% hw errors. So I'm like wtf and start looking at the boards. One has 3 chips on it!!!!!!! I started geeking out wondering why it wouldn't be initiating when it's obviously recognized. Figure it's prolly clocked down and I'll be reflashing after the holidays. Just wanted to let you guys know, only one of them has 3 chips. Dissect that.

Ok, so interesting findings. I took the 3 chip jallie and flashed it with 1.2.9 after editing for "little_single" it boots up and registers 1 chip.... Like wtf?? Hashing at 2-3Ghs I've went through and flashed it about 4 times checking through std_def.h. I'm kinda at a loss with this again, Why would flashing cause only one chip to show???  Pics to follow prolly tomorrow.

P.S. the FW version written on back is 292..... hmm board rev. C same as others. This has to be a FW issue somehow....

No both bricks work for the 3 chip version. The 2 chip has 29 shares accepted and 57 HW errors. I can grab the BFL driver I guess but BFGminer is telling me a pretty close speed of each chip as well.   So far I'm extremely disappointed in BFL blackfriday product seems like their unloading the shit inventory. I'll have to check the 2 chip board rev. but there is no tag saying inspected or shit....... RMA if I can ever get a hold of them rofl, eBay has a better RMA policy for selling defective products... Thinking I pretty much lost my money on this deal.

Customer buys 2 5GH Jalapenos, they arrive running at 7 and 8GH.  Customer then flashes a new firmware trying to speed one up and basically bricks the unit and decides to RMA.  I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the RMA's are people just like this... "I got my unit and it stopped working after 4 days!!!"  (translates to "Damn, I bricked my unit after trying to speed it up... I'd better make up some BS story and get it RMA'd... they're a shit company so everyone will believe it")

But back to the topic... You're failing at your trolling duties Bick when you miss stuff like this!

[Bicknellski]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=387715.msg4174302#msg4174302

   
BFL Black Friday order arrived, thoughts and boosts....

Well, my BFL order came. Minus the $20 PCI-E cable, I guess it's on back order and I'm glad that they didn't wait for it. But it does mean I have to use the BFL cables for the moment....

Anyway, some thoughts: The miners do work, and seem to be working pretty well. There were three, well packed, clean, and new. Fans all blow down, they only have two drilled holes in the bottom of the back plate to see the LEDs, and they all use the newer style fan mounting which is much better than those stupid spacers of yore.

Put them all online and tried to read them with the BFL Commport tool. Well well well, they all do not respond, the tool thinks they are mining. Whatever the software load it looks to be different than normal. That's odd, I'll have to reflash them but I thought I would take a look at the statistics first.

Speeds are not bad. One is at 8, one at 7.7, one at 7.0. The two with green dots on the back are the fast ones, the red dot is a slower one. I can see how BFL is doing things.

Taking them apart they use the normal new style heat sink, which blocks the front vents somewhat. Yuck, I don't recall if my older ones do that, will have to check. Pulling a heat sink showed a thick pad of heat sink compound (ie: krud), I took that off and put on dabs of Radio Shack heat sink compound. Much better.

These things run hotter than my older jallies, not sure why. Temps were almost 50c, blowing down on the FTDI chip is probably a good way to fry it. Switched one of the fans, temp is at 45c. Bit better but still hot, odd.

Took one of the units and put it on the torture table for another chip from lentbt. Two chips came today, 4 more ordered today, guy is selling very good stuff. I recommend. Chip went on fine with the preheat to 350f for 5 mins, then 450c for 90 seconds this time after using a thin coating of flux and aligning the chip. Don't go by the markings, use a magnifying glass to look at the balls. They must be aligned perfectly, otherwise you're wasting a chip.

Put fan on pointing down and left sides off. Unit is at 48c, hashing 12gh, three lights on back. Nice. Will take another one to 12gh tonight, then when I get the extra chips will probably boost both to 16gh then do something else with my remaining chips.

Overall, good product, but running hotter. I'd recommend flipping the fan if you're running it with the sides on, otherwise take the sides off and look into replacing that crap on the bottom of the unit.

[Bicknellski]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150803.msg4238611#msg4238611

Another BFL power supply blows overnight.

That makes it 100% failure rate.

Last RMA submitted 4 days ago, still not acknowledged/approved.

[Bicknellski]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=392152.msg4238205#msg4238205

I have spent A LOT with BFL, up until several weeks ago i was happy with BFL, DESPITE delays. I like the form factor, how they are plug and play ready to use devices etc.

That all changed when one of the 65nm 60Gh units i received have 5% HW errors, no reply from BFL - ok it was hashing just fine tho, then my last order of 4x7Gh was received, 2 of which didn't perform even at 6Gh, 1 of which had 7-8% HW errors, and worst of all: NOT EVERYTHING in my order was received! No reply from BFL, no refund etc.

and now this "Happy new year, F! YOU PREORDER PEOPLE" shit.
They need to compensate that. All those who preordered got properly shafted. The same people who made sure they got the development funds. They are shafting the people who brings in the dough for them.

I know i wont be making a new order with BFL - no matter what. I'm damn sure i'm not alone.

Most likely most of the people who make big return orders, ie. big miners, like myself will not be making more orders with BFL unless they offer A BIG discount compared to the competition to compensate for the lack of customer care, delays in shipping and BS stunts like this.

What BFL just did was 60% devaluation of your preorder - i don't believe for a moment there is a significant lead time for the 4700$ price tag items before the 2100$ ones ship.
They shafted their most important customer base - those who "invest" into BFL, believe in them. The least they could do is even attempt to compensate for this.

[Bicknellski]

I would not buy from BFL. I have seen many blown up BFL products. Even if they deliver, then will deliver late. And even when you have this product 'Monarch', you do not want to put that in your precious computer.

[bcp19]

I would not buy from BFL. I have seen many blown up BFL products. Even if they deliver, then will deliver late. And even when you have this product 'Monarch', you do not want to put that in your precious computer.

Amazing!  This person must have the BFL customer list and travels from place to place in order to have seen all of these units 'blow up"!  Must be a wonderful job, to travel just to watch things go boom!

Seriously though, Bick, you are sad.  Your December rollout of your 'use any chip' board hasn't happened and you're a poor role-model for others wanting to become sellers in this market.  When's YOUR tapeout?!?!?  Oh, that's right, YOU DON'T HAVE ONE!  You're piggybacking onto others because you can't design your own product. 

[Inaba]

Hey... Bick has another 12 hours at least before he has to produce his product that he promised would be delivered in December!  Give him the benefit of the doubt, I mean he's delivered befo... oh wait... no he hasn't.  His last two projects were failures as well.  Oops!

Poor guy has fail written all over him.  I would hate to be him... never having accomplished a single thing in his entire life, running from one failure to another, day after day, ugh.  I bet he wonders why everything he does turns to crap and doesn't realize the only common denominator between all of his failures is himself.

[Syke]

Hey... Bick has another 12 hours at least before he has to produce his product that he promised would be delivered in December!  Give him the benefit of the doubt, I mean he's delivered befo... oh wait... no he hasn't.  His last two projects were failures as well.  Oops!

Are you referring to BFL's Monarch?

http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/

November / December    Initial Shipping

[vayvanne]

RMAed 2 underperforming and DOA LSes already. One more of total 5 LSes slowing down to 15-20GH/s and dead after 4 days of work PSU is under RMA request ATM. And I keep losses on return and delays. Ban on support forums by SLok...
And that happy new year letter informing about 60% pricedrop after about 1 month after receiving the order... Just joke on customers.
No reply on warranty certificate request as it was demanded by Fedex for UK customs.
Josh there is a lot of work to do with BFL customer relations and service. Why you are spending the time on humble Bicknelski who is in fact supporing BFL in being reputable company?

[Bicknellski]

RMAed 2 underperforming and DOA LSes already. One more of total 5 LSes slowing down to 15-20GH/s and dead after 4 days of work PSU is under RMA request ATM. And I keep losses on return and delays. Ban on support forums by SLok...

And that happy new year letter informing about 60% pricedrop after about 1 month after receiving the order... Just joke on customers.
No reply on warranty certificate request as it was demanded by Fedex for UK customs.

Josh there is a lot of work to do with BFL customer relations and service. Why you are spending the time on humble Bicknelski who is in fact supporing BFL in being reputable company?

I would love to see BFL become reputable. Unfortunately they have done very little given the mountains of evidence in their own forums and on here regarding the under performance and failures. Their attack and ban practices is clearly a sign they are not interested in the truth or in fixing the quality issues with their products. This is more in coming with 'scams' than any of the other reputable ASIC manufacturing companies who are shipping products and respond immediately to RMA issues.

The competition has beaten BFL and there is little if anything BFL has that anyone should want to own at this point. They are way over priced, poorly built, given the numbers of complaints in this thread alone as evidence, they have not even provided evidence for the tape out of the Monarch yet and people are still holding out hope they will deliver?

At this point the best solution is not to purchase BFL products and move to more reputable companies. I am sorry for your experiences with BFL Vayvanne, I suppose at some point the shame will finally hit BFL and it could turn things around or they will go under.

[Bicknellski]

Hey... Bick has another 12 hours at least before he has to produce his product that he promised would be delivered in December!  Give him the benefit of the doubt, I mean he's delivered befo... oh wait... no he hasn't.  His last two projects were failures as well.  Oops!

Are you referring to BFL's Monarch?

http://www.butterflylabs.com/monarch/

November / December    Initial Shipping

+1 It is laughable if it weren't for the fact people are being screwed over in the millions of dollars.

Unlike BFL anything I have been involved with has not taken a dime from the community. And when we do have our WASPs Open Source Hardware designs out well before the Monarch is shipped in any quantity we can then measure the size of our "Dick's". Given the EE's working on the WASP's I have little fear that in the end Monarch will not be able to compete against our Open Source Hardware design given you would have a variety of chip options. There is failure here in this thread and that is BFL products. Thankfully I have never been sued by anyone as a result of my efforts in the community and would hope that the 50+ members of our collective uphold our mission to bring an open source mining hardware solution to the community without ever having to take a single Satoshi let alone millions of dollars from others and then screw them over royally. We will bring to market something that you can build you can control the timeline and take out the weakest link companies like BFL.

----------

Back to the topic at hand it looks like someone has sued BFL and won. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1u4v0o/i_sued_bfl_in_kansas_jurisdiction_and_won/ <--- Looks like the people are taking the fight to BFL and I am hopeful this will continue. People shouldn't have to take BFL bullshit any longer this looks like a nice way to put a dent in the BFL wall of ignorance.

BFL has now failed to respond to their loss of the suit and we are looking for ways to collect via lien, direct bank account deduction, etc. In addition we will be shortly expanding a second lawsuit based upon the proof of fraud whereby our bitcoins will be returned to us via a court procedure known as 'recession' [where the court orders that you are returned to the same position today that existed before the fraud occurred] and will seek to secure our bitcoins by way of a replevin order...

...If anyone is interested in filing suit against BFL remotely, I have an EXCELLENT attorney-- and since he has already won the first suit, it is a foregone conclusion he can win yours.

Now the caveat: BFL is very skilled at moving its money and its accounts around the various banks in Leawood Kansas. Our investigator has determined that they had accounts in certain banks which are now closed, but we suspect that they are no longer using the registered corp-name BF Labs Inc as the corporate name on the account they use to pay their local employees-- and they DO have to pay their employees somehow.

... Slok? BCP19... Inaba care to comment on BFL being sued and losing? Thought not.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

Tacit warning to the buyers that the sellers are not bound to volunteer negative information about the items they are selling. It is assumed that (unless the seller gives express warranty) the buyer takes all risk of any loss due to defects in the goods or property being bought. Latin for, let the buyer beware. And in the case of BFL you would have to SUE to get your money back in most if not all cases.

[Lassi]

Oh more here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=136392.msg4013080#msg4013080

Code:

This 6.02GH/s is reached in 10% of the time. The other 90% of the time it wants to hash at 5.7GH/s. 
The +/-10% of the advertised 7GH/s requires that the device hash at least 6.3GH/s.

TL;DR Josh STFU

and if you are a Monarch customer here is good news: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=136392.msg4078766#msg4078766

Code:

They've pre-sold more then 60,000 monarchs which have missed their power targets by about 70% 
and the bullet run is expected to now be late march.

Quote
"some units might hit 350W, but most will be 500W or more, expect high end to be 600W"
"which means we may revise the estimate to 350W for the 300GH version, 600GH version being 600W"

Apparently they're also now having thermal expansion detach bumps (like Nvidia in 2008).

In the meantime, their RMA queue is huge (with the RMA email address refusing emails) with the amount 
of people who's devices have engines which have just died. And that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, 
the PSU blew which has then fried the device.

I know there are people from November who are still waiting for a reply to their RMA requests. 
It could be potentially earlier...

[Unacceptable]

Oh more here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=136392.msg4013080#msg4013080

Code:

This 6.02GH/s is reached in 10% of the time. The other 90% of the time it wants to hash at 5.7GH/s. 
The +/-10% of the advertised 7GH/s requires that the device hash at least 6.3GH/s.

TL;DR Josh STFU

and if you are a Monarch customer here is good news: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=136392.msg4078766#msg4078766

Code:

They've pre-sold more then 60,000 monarchs which have missed their power targets by about 70% 
and the bullet run is expected to now be late march.

Quote
"some units might hit 350W, but most will be 500W or more, expect high end to be 600W"
"which means we may revise the estimate to 350W for the 300GH version, 600GH version being 600W"

Apparently they're also now having thermal expansion detach bumps (like Nvidia in 2008).

In the meantime, their RMA queue is huge (with the RMA email address refusing emails) with the amount 
of people who's devices have engines which have just died. And that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, 
the PSU blew which has then fried the device.

I know there are people from November who are still waiting for a reply to their RMA requests. 
It could be potentially earlier...

Dosen't look like BFL will ever be able to claim "1 watt per gigahash",even with 28nm LMAO 

[Lassi]

More: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1u19ca/do_not_buy_miners_from_bfl/

Code:

Purchased a 5GH/s miner in August, received it in November. Miner hashed at 1.5GH/s. 
Requested an RMA to replace the miner. RMA was accepted. I shipped it back, received a 
package 1 week later. No miner, just a power supply. So now I have a power supply for a
 $300 miner, still can't mine.

Some bullshit man.

edit: Yes, I was aware of the many terrible experiences people have had with them, and even 
the theory that they mine with the machines themselves before sending them out, at the time 
of my purchase. I made the purchase with money to blow, even in the event that by the time
 I had expected to receive the miner (april 2014) it would be unprofitable, I wouldn't feel that 
bad. I'm just complaining here because of how absurd this service is. Blows my mind.

[wEEcoIn]

30Gh/s little single, mines around 25-28