Server Power Supply Interface Board - for standalone miners and GPU rigs

[wpgdeez]

Are the fans of the PSU really that loud? I have three on the way to power 5 ANTS. I wonder what will be louder the ANTS or the PSU's ...

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[bobsag3]

Are the fans of the PSU really that loud? I have three on the way to power 5 ANTS. I wonder what will be louder the ANTS or the PSU's ...

They are pretty loud... but max speed deltas > PSU fan

[mystix]

Are the fans of the PSU really that loud? I have three on the way to power 5 ANTS. I wonder what will be louder the ANTS or the PSU's ...

Short answer is yes.

If your living around these server power supply fans, they become the ambient noise level. They are essentially about as loud as a hair dryer on low. Sitting out in the living room, in the middle of theday, with general noise around I started one up. I thought it wasn't too bad, definitely noticeable, but not too bad. Get them running for a while, and its not really that great as an example, to sleep near.

I set mine up in the basement with a bunch of vibration absorbing rubber material. With that, I cant hear them.

[sidehack]

I just took one off my desk that's been running in my room since probably November. It does definitely seem quieter in here, but not enough that I really care. Maybe that's what happens when you work around loud fans every day for three years though. When the fans are turned down they're not too bad. By my standards. I'd rather have stuff that works really well than is comfortable.

[jlsminingcorp]

External fan, the actual pot resistance doesn't matter a whole lot. I'd probably use a 10K. What really matters is a wiper voltage range that includes 0-1.8 or so.

Yes, GekkoScience is my business. Hence why all the links are to stuff on gekkoscience.com

Also 3 AntMiners at stock clock would require, if the measurements I did a while ago were accurate, about 960W. If you have a 1000W supply that you trust (like perhaps a DPS-800GBA on 220V power) or greater, it's probably possible. Two of these D750 boards load-balanced would supply 4 Ants at stock or 3 Ants overclocked without any issue. Might do 4 Ants overclocked, I don't recommend it but it has been done.

Thanks Sidehack, that's perfect!

[jlsminingcorp]

Are the fans of the PSU really that loud? I have three on the way to power 5 ANTS. I wonder what will be louder the ANTS or the PSU's ...

Short answer is yes.

If your living around these server power supply fans, they become the ambient noise level. They are essentially about as loud as a hair dryer on low. Sitting out in the living room, in the middle of theday, with general noise around I started one up. I thought it wasn't too bad, definitely noticeable, but not too bad. Get them running for a while, and its not really that great as an example, to sleep near.

I set mine up in the basement with a bunch of vibration absorbing rubber material. With that, I cant hear them.

At full fan speed they are loud, but the airflow seems way over the top for the amount of cooling required if they are ~85-90% efficient. I'm not sure if Dell designs these units so that the fans are an integral part of the airflow through the server chassis, as well as just taking out the heat from the PSU. Anyway, using sidehack's breakout board to turn the fan down is important if you want to live near these things.

[sidehack]

I know when the servers fire up they run at full fan everything ever for a few seconds, until stuff is initialized and it throttles them all down to manageable levels. Two PSUs and a couple other 2U fans and those servers are effing LOUD.

Also, a consideration I'd like opinions on. The DPS-2000BB does not have internal fans, so external fans need to be provided. I'm going to put a speed controller with fan headers on the board, probably for a 4-wire fan. Does anyone have a compelling reason why I should design for a 2/3-wire fan instead?

[Abraxas601]

I'm looking forward to your DPS-2000BB board because I just got one running and it's a real monster.

I'm showing a 6.3A draw at the breaker with four overclocked Ants (2@375, 2@400).  It's max draw is 13.5A so I'm guessing I could easily put 2 maybe 3 more Ants on the power supply.

Each Ant has a dedicated 14 gauge wire back to the supply.  The wires are a little warm so 12 gauge is probably the better choice.  Once the power gets to the Ant I break it out with these cheap adapters from monoprice,

http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=102&cp_id=10245&cs_id=1024503&p_id=2883&seq=1&format=2

I just cut off the molex ends and use twist nuts to tie all the wires together.  Even though it's 18 gauge wire they are room temperature.

Best part of all this.  The supply only cost me $30 on Ebay 


http://i58.tinypic.com/2vb90l0.jpg

[iGOSHi]

Preemptive disclaimer that I don't work with GPUs a lot.

But I would imagine the 300W and 280W from your cards, part of that is coming from the risers. If you don't plug the risers into a heavy external supply but run them off your ATX, I'd allot at least 6A of 12V per riser. If the 300W/280W is straight external, they should all run off the DPS-1520 without issue. If that includes the socket power (from risers in this case), you could power the risers off the DPS-1520 and still only be at 80% capacity.

If, then, you ran your 6950 and motherboard off the ATX supply, I'd recommend probably at least a 500W unit. Maybe more depending on what processor/motherboard you're running, and what overhead you want to allow for.

What you could do, and an idea I've toyed around with but haven't tested yet, is actually get two server supplies in parallel load-balanced (I don't know enough about that particular model to know if they current-share or not, but I think most do) and get a picoPSU running off the 12V bus for your motherboard. Those things aren't terribly expensive, and run around 96% efficient. If you isolate your riser power from the motherboard power (either by using the recommended USB-style risers or cutting the 12V lines to the ribbon) you shouldn't overload anything on the picoPSU by trying to pull GPU current through it, and anything else requiring 12V (like GPU, or processor VRMs) would pull straight from your ~3KW 12V source.

You mean like this; This is 3 systems all connected to the same DPS-2000BB power supply. Each system has 6 x PowerColor 6950's (some unlocked) for a total of 18 GPU's. This was an undervolted setup with the memory downclocked to 150mhz through a bios mod. So overall power consumption per system was about 750 watts. The IBM PSU if properly cooled will do 200 amps before OCP trips. So you can actually get upwards of 2300+ watts reliably.

http://imagize[Suspicious link removed]ageshack.us/v2/1024x768q90/99/imag0094q.jpg

A previous client and I had these picopsu like boards made in china in bulk. They are a special design, unlike a normal picopsu that regulates the 12V line and limits it's current. This design passes the 12 volt straight through without regulation and provides a full 10 amps on 5v and another 10 amps on 3.3v. The connector and wire gauges are sized so that the current from the 3.3v and 5v do no impact the overall current available on the 2 x 12 volt atx pins. Also the CPU connector is straight pass thru. The connector was spec'd so that I could be put on powered from a standard ATX PSU from the 8 pin CPU header (only 4 pin CPU pass thru). Since most PSU's have two 8 pins (one dual 4 pin) you could power two individual systems and then yet one more from the ATX PSU's monster 24 pin cable. However it's very difficult to have enough power to power 3 systems on a ATX PSU as most are limited to 1200-1300 watts.

http://imagize[Suspicious link removed]ageshack.us/v2/1024x768q90/441/imag0091zf.jpg

This is a break out board. So the PSU powers each system with a single pair of #6 copper wire. Then this break out board gives you all the pig tails in addition to the 8 pin CPU style connector to power the motherboard.

http://imagize[Suspicious link removed]ageshack.us/v2/1024x768q90/33/imag0089t.jpg

A closer look at the PSU adapter break out I made.

http://imagize[Suspicious link removed]ageshack.us/v2/1024x768q90/829/imag0088cn.jpg

Where did you buy the power cables and Y-splitters for the GPUs??

[claudesdad]

I got my interface boards for the Dell 750W power supplies yesterday - thanks for the fast shipping!

I finally had a chance to plug one of them into a supply and power them on - the power switch on the interface board works as advertised , but I have a question about the fan speed control .......  it doesn't seem to work on the two boards and two supplies I have tried so far.

I tried with the supply loaded by hooking it up to my cube and unloaded - same behavior in both cases.

Turning the fan speed knob doesn't seem to have any effect. 

Is there something I'm missing here?

[sidehack]

First thing to try - make sure it's set for internal instead of external fan speed control. If it is set for external, set it to internal and try again. If it still doesn't work, set it to external and ground the FAN pin. If it still doesn't work, I have no idea.

If it doesn't work on internal but works on grounded external, short around the 393 resistor on the backside of the board and try the knob again (on internal). If that works, either permanently short around that resistor or tie a wire from the rightmost pin on the knob to ground.

The other option if it works on external, is rig up an external pot between the 3.3V and GND pins on the header, tap on FAN,and adjust from there.



For the record, this is not a problem with the board. It's a change in internal design spec on a different variant of the power supply than I had to test with. The half-dozen supplies I used all worked, but there exist other variants that, for some reason, use a different voltage standard for fan control. It's not a problem if you have a closed-loop active controller, but that's not what we have.

And since this is the third time I've answered this question today, and at least the eighth time I've answered this question in the last week, I'm gonna start directing people here if they ever mention the word "fan speed" to me in any communications.

[claudesdad]

First thing to try - make sure it's set for internal instead of external fan speed control. If it is set for external, set it to internal and try again. If it still doesn't work, set it to external and ground the FAN pin. If it still doesn't work, I have no idea.

If it doesn't work on internal but works on grounded external, short around the 393 resistor on the backside of the board and try the knob again (on internal). If that works, either permanently short around that resistor or tie a wire from the rightmost pin on the knob to ground.

The other option if it works on external, is rig up an external pot between the 3.3V and GND pins on the header, tap on FAN,and adjust from there.



For the record, this is not a problem with the board. It's a change in internal design spec on a different variant of the power supply than I had to test with. The half-dozen supplies I used all worked, but there exist other variants that, for some reason, use a different voltage standard for fan control. It's not a problem if you have a closed-loop active controller, but that's not what we have.

And since this is the third time I've answered this question today, and at least the eighth time I've answered this question in the last week, I'm gonna start directing people here if they ever mention the word "fan speed" to me in any communications.

Sorry for making your answer the question again - I looked thru the multiple threads where the boards are discussed but didn't come across the previous responses.   I've got six of these supplies - but have only tried two of them so far - I'll try some of the others and see if they perform any differently.  I can check the version numbers on the labels and see what I have.

If that doesn't work - I can try some of the other suggestions.

[claudesdad]

So I tried grounding the FAN pin to one of the GROUND pins - and the fan definitely slows down.  It stays at a low speed. The fan speed knob on the board still has no effect - and I tried all the dip switch combinations and those have no effect either.

Out of curiosity - what's the rev number on the supply you're using?

The ones I have are Rev - 04 and Rev - 06.  

I'll do some more experimenting tomorrow, I didn't run the supply under load for any appreciable amount of time to see what happens to the fan speed when the supply heats up.


Actually - let me correct that,  one place on the PSU label it says 

 Rev (chinese): 06  and in another place it says REV A05.

the other supply says:

Rev (chinese):04  and in the other place it says REV A03

I actually work for Dell - and I can tell you that internally the "A03" and "A05" numbers are the Dell rev numbers.  The other Rev numbers may be those from whomever
the original manufacturer of the supply was for Dell.  Dell typically sources components like power supplies from at least 2 different manufacturers for every product so they don't have single source points of failure.

I'd still be curious to find out what the versioning is on the supplies that you developed and tested with.

[sidehack]

I wasn't sure if I had explicitly explained it here or not, so if I haven't then you have no need to apologize.

[claudesdad]

I wasn't sure if I had explicitly explained it here or not, so if I haven't then you have no need to apologize.

No problem. I'm just trying to get these to work - and (unfortunately) the loud fan thing is sort of an issue for me. I'd like to keep the noise down.

If you can please post the Rev number(s) from the supplies you've used that have worked - I may just order some with the same Rev number instead of going too crazy modding the boards.  The supplies are all over the place on Ebay - cheap.  That's probably the easiest way out (for me at least)

[1l1l11ll1l]

Here's a nice picture of Sunbreak's PSU adapters.


You can run 6 antminers off each of these PSUs, the setup with the 6awg wire lets you run 3 groups of 2 antminers. 1 6awg per pair of ants is just right. Delta fans keep it nice and cool. It doesnt get any better than this.

[sidehack]

Snazzy. Hopefully we'll be stress-testing the first DPS-2000BB PCB prototypes in a little over a week. It'll have a built-in controller for two 4-wire fans with full internal and external speed control, as well as the standard 5V/3.3V, current share and external-on lines.

Building the test rig is gonna be fun. 12V 200A is a lot of heat to dissipate.

It doesnt get any better than this.

Well... I'm sorta banking on that it does... but for the basics, that's a pretty slick setup.

[JLebowskiTheDude]

If you can please post the Rev number(s) from the supplies you've used that have worked - I may just order some with the same Rev number instead of going too crazy modding the boards.  The supplies are all over the place on Ebay - cheap.  That's probably the easiest way out (for me at least)

Just a follow-up from this and the other thread.

The two supplies we have that are running two of sidehack's boards are both A02 revisions.

With that revision the knob knobulates as expected.  

[Spotswood]

If you can please post the Rev number(s) from the supplies you've used that have worked - I may just order some with the same Rev number instead of going too crazy modding the boards.  The supplies are all over the place on Ebay - cheap.  That's probably the easiest way out (for me at least)

Just a follow-up from this and the other thread.

The two supplies we have that are running two of sidehack's boards are both A02 revisions.

With that revision the knob knobulates as expected.  

My Rev A00 also works. 

[nexus99]

Hows this different than what gekko science is offering? Also what would be the best option to power 3 antminers off 1 psu and run them at stock clock.

Does the dell PSU + gekkosciene board combo run 2 antminers OC'd to 200 GH/S ok? Or do they only have enough juice for 2 at stock clock speed?