ANTMINER S2 Discussion and Support Thread

[kendog77]

I suspect Bitmain is bumping up against economic realities associated with requiring 640 chips to reach 1TH/sec at 1W/GH. I bet it is cheaper to use 32 A1 chips to reach 1TH/sec than it is to use 640 Bitmain chips to reach 1TH/sec.

Unfortunately, unless BTC spikes in price, or Bitmain starts using next gen chips, I'm not sure how much the price of a S2 will go down in BTC terms from here.

[samsonn25]

I am VERY disappointed BITMAIN.
I have a dozen S1s, and at this price I see no reason to buy S2s. I can buy 6 more S1s (1.1TH@375mhz), 3 gold PSs, and have $200 left to pay 2 months of additional electricity usage.

What exactly is the benefit here? They take up less space?
Or just to say I have one?

Needs to be priced at $1300 

[Syke]

ROI is possible if BTC reach USD 850 and above.

So just buy BTC. Then when BTC reaches 850, you'll be at +75% ROI, rather than simply break even.

[pedrosoft]

ROI is possible if BTC reach USD 850 and above.

So just buy BTC. Then when BTC reaches 850, you'll be at +75% ROI, rather than simply break even.

+ 1, but if you have only BTC and you want to have more BTC ?

[bcollan]

ROI is possible if BTC reach USD 850 and above.

So just buy BTC. Then when BTC reaches 850, you'll be at +75% ROI, rather than simply break even.

Miner ROI should be calculated only in BTC in order to discount BTC exchange rates.

So, fiat priced miners are "cheap" when BTC is high and "expensive" when BTC is low.
Therefore it is best to buy BTC when BTC is low and buy miners when BTC is high.
All IMO, of course.

[Syke]

+ 1, but if you have only BTC and you want to have more BTC ?

Then send your BTC to me. Every day I'll send you a few satoshis. In a few months, you may or may not receive more BTC than you originally had.

[pvnamk19]

ROI is possible if BTC reach USD 850 and above.

So just buy BTC. Then when BTC reaches 850, you'll be at +75% ROI, rather than simply break even.

+ 1, but if you have only BTC and you want to have more BTC ?

I am in this situation and I found no ROI miners this time.

[nikolaz]

+ 1, but if you have only BTC and you want to have more BTC ?

Then send your BTC to me. Every day I'll send you a few satoshis. In a few months, you may or may not receive more BTC than you originally had.

Love it... take my money.....

[Threader]

I would gladly pay a 10-15% price premium just to continue doing business with Bitmain over the unknown  of may getting screwed over by other vendors BUT $3200 (+ Customs)  for only 1 TH with the network on the verge of going into the stratosphere is just asking too much.

truth is my many S1's have finally this month paid for themselves and though not a fortune the current BTC profit they now generate is enough. greedy pigs get slaughtered first.

As like many don't want the risk of break even point to be more than 6-8 weeks at this time.

[Collider]

My guess is, their production volume remains low (putting 600 chips on pcbs per miner etc. does take more time than 64), or they are going to stack more on their own shelves, now that all the antminers are gone and they have a built datacenter.

Therefore they dont need to sell as many, or the know some greater fool will take it off their hands even at high price.

Why sell double the hashpower if you can sell half at double the profit (per unit), keeping the (possible) rest for yourself?

Also, leadtime on some parts might still be a problem, as this typically takes 1-2 months.

Finally, while they still own S1s, the price difference is definately deliberate, to sell the less efficient hardware first.

[WHAM!]

Has there been any discussion on overclocking the S2?  Potentially adding additional power and increasing frequency?  If there is a different discussion board please point me in the right direction!

[whonesta]

Has there been any discussion on overclocking the S2?  Potentially adding additional power and increasing frequency?  If there is a different discussion board please point me in the right direction!

I replaced PSU with a 1300 watt PSU, OC'd it to 225 clock and watched the HW errors climb and pool speed fall. I turned down clocks to 200 and while HW errors are still SUPER high, it is hashing @ 1050+ on the pools. So as of yet OC'ing the S2 is LAME!

$3099 (return coupon) is NOT a good price, cloudhash price is dumping (> $4/GHS) @ $3.09 per GHS, plus power and heat I can do better letting a MEGA-DataCenter run the equipment for me.

Sorry BitMainTech the product does NOT warrant the price.

[klondike_bar]

Has there been any discussion on overclocking the S2?  Potentially adding additional power and increasing frequency?  If there is a different discussion board please point me in the right direction!

the discussion has been pretty minimal thus far. IIRC it was mentioned waaay back in this thread that you can get up to about 225MHz for 1250W/1175GH, but when changing specs you need to start/stop cgminer rather than simply rebooting the unit like the S1 did.

to get further, the resistors likely would need pencil modding to go from 0.75V to 0.85V. at 0.85V you could almost certainly achieve 1500W/1300GH.  Cooling may be an issue at this speed though.


DOES ANYONE HAVE A SPARE BACKPLANE? I would really like to be able to try overclocking just one or two of the blades seperately as a sort of test bench.  With sufficient cooling, the actual hardware could probably handle 150% speeds at about a 200% power consumption

[klondike_bar]

Has there been any discussion on overclocking the S2?  Potentially adding additional power and increasing frequency?  If there is a different discussion board please point me in the right direction!

I replaced PSU with a 1300 watt PSU, OC'd it to 225 clock and watched the HW errors climb and pool speed fall. I turned down clocks to 200 and while HW errors are still SUPER high, it is hashing @ 1050+ on the pools. So as of yet OC'ing the S2 is LAME!

$3099 (return coupon) is NOT a good price, cloudhash price is dumping (> $4/GHS) @ $3.09 per GHS, plus power and heat I can do better letting a MEGA-DataCenter run the equipment for me.

Sorry BitMainTech the product does NOT warrant the price.

could you please post a code for overclocking? I havent seen the method laid out clearly and simply yet.

Code:

code window

I think the voltage of the regulators is the issue, rather than power or temperature.  I have a pencil and a 2000W PSU ready, and am hoping to spend some time with my device tomorrow to see how easily the regulators can all be pencil-modded. 40 resistors total that will need to be modified if you want to get the frequency any better than 225

[googlemaster1]

IMO the price should be betwwen 2200$ and 2400$. Others like bit-tech or the dragon miners are selling for far less than 3199$.

I am "lucky" that my miners are working fine, problem with just one having my fans running at 100% all the time. Still didnt find any solution on how to control those god damn fans. So fans are still running, 3 of them are monitored in the antminer webinterface and with the first one it is showing 0 rpm ( but still running at 100% ).  It is so loud, and bitmain replied to me that it is not possible to adjust fan control manually. So disapointing.

I hope someone can find a way to acces the miners configuration file, I really need to reset / control the fan settings with SSH or something like that. I tried everything I could in order to have my fan control working good.

I agree, Bitmain seems to REALLY be milking the S2 … That or they are trying not to piss off batch 1 or batch 2 customers...

Batch 1 and 2 owners already made back $31-32 a day on the machines mining.

Wow! Seriously, I am interest to see how you arrive at that. If it's true, I get 1 too.

What im saying is 1Th will make about $31 a day hashing now.  If you bought a machine last week for $3600 it is almost same price as if you order a batch 3 machine today for $3199 and receive it next week.

Too bad the S2 won't ROI in it's lifetimes for Batch 1, 2, or 3 buyers.

I actually don't agree with this, I have been mining with Batch 2 and have already made around 1 BTC since I got it (Slush has been on an absolute RAMPAGE the past week, I must admit, including our 4 blocks in a row last night FFS) , and I paid 5.5 BTC for it.  So basically what you are saying is, if you purchased 1TH/S TODAY at 4.5 BTC you wouldn't ROI?  Keep in mind I also live in WA (cheap power USA) state.  Even the most conservative calculator in the world says I'll get damn close within 90 days:

7-16 – 7-27 (96 days)   25006 M   0.2029   0.1988   -1.338

So I'm sorry, I forsee an ROI for Batch 1 and batch 2.  And quite honestly, potentially even batch 3.  However, the batch 3 comes with no discount to existing customers so I'm out on that purchase.  However, glad they are listening to their customers.  You guys wanted it, they offered it for $500 USD less only a few weeks later.  Thats really not bad.  But I'd need BTC to be around $600 rather than $500 to make this purchase worth it imho

[jelin1984]

does anyone put
memory heatsink
at vrm?

[whonesta]

could you please post a code for overclocking? I havent seen the method laid out clearly and simply yet.

Code:

code window

I think the voltage of the regulators is the issue, rather than power or temperature.  I have a pencil and a 2000W PSU ready, and am hoping to spend some time with my device tomorrow to see how easily the regulators can all be pencil-modded. 40 resistors total that will need to be modified if you want to get the frequency any better than 225

I have not done any pencil mod on the resistors only adjusting the asic-freq

Code:

ssh root@(your miner) - pass = admin
vi /config/asic-freq.config

#option 'freq_value'    '0881'  #225M
#option 'chip_freq'     '225'
#option 'timeout'       '45'  <--- I have changed this from 50 - 40 

option 'freq_value'    '0781'  #200M
option 'chip_freq'     '200'
option 'timeout'       '40'

[ElGabo]

could you please post a code for overclocking? I havent seen the method laid out clearly and simply yet.

Code:

code window

I think the voltage of the regulators is the issue, rather than power or temperature.  I have a pencil and a 2000W PSU ready, and am hoping to spend some time with my device tomorrow to see how easily the regulators can all be pencil-modded. 40 resistors total that will need to be modified if you want to get the frequency any better than 225

I have not done any pencil mod on the resistors only adjusting the asic-freq

Code:

ssh root@(your miner) - pass = admin
vi /config/asic-freq.config

#option 'freq_value'    '0881'  #225M
#option 'chip_freq'     '225'
#option 'timeout'       '45'  <--- I have changed this from 50 - 40 

option 'freq_value'    '0781'  #200M
option 'chip_freq'     '200'
option 'timeout'       '40'

How many HW errors do you get?

I think you have 4%+ ain't you?

I always get 4%+.... I've tried a lot of settings.

[whonesta]

How many HW errors do you get?

I think you have 4%+ ain't you?

I always get 4%+.... I've tried a lot of settings.

Wow that is high, is that @ 225 clocks?

I am running @ 200 clocks, my 5 day #'s

Accepts = 109823488,  HW = 109888   so my HW error % is roughly .1%

[ElGabo]

How many HW errors do you get?

I think you have 4%+ ain't you?

I always get 4%+.... I've tried a lot of settings.

Wow that is high, is that @ 225 clocks?

I am running @ 200 clocks, my 5 day #'s

Accepts = 109823488,  HW = 109888   so my HW error % is roughly .1%

Yep at 225M

for 200 you use '0781' value and '40' timeout?