T17/S17 malfunction: cases, solutions, remedies, RMA history

[o_solo_miner]

I will take a look at your S9 topic, if chips fall off during transport, that means that the reflow was to low in temp or the belt speed was to fast (if the temp profile in the oven was ok). POOR QA!

The best way to repair the faulty board (and produce the board) would be to use a vapor phase instead of the reflow. But that is to pricy for them and to slow. The heatsink is glued,  the S1 was a proper way to do a heatsink, but again, to pricy for BM.

[philipma1957]

Yeah. the box is well packed. the foam is good quality.  but the force generated with a 6 foot drop is quite a bit.

and if you drop the box flat on the bottom there will be no apparent damage to the box or the miner inside.

But every heat sink will be subject to a g-force from the drop then stop.

to make it more wrong is that if the gear is in a really cold spot ie during wintertime the  gear is allowed to travel in 0c or 32f or lower transport bays.

So now the glue/heatsink past is hard stiff and brittle so now drop it 6 feet and the box has no damage the  unit looks fine .  I could guarantee that multiple glue/paste/epoxy heatsink joints now have micro damage .  Same as solder joints.

Would love to demo that test.  As you know it happens.


edit To be clear 0c or 32f makes the heatsink to chip joint a bit more brittle and easier to crack then it would be at 20c or 68f

And of course  at -20c or -4f it would be a bit stiffer and even more brittle.

So if the fedex/dhl/ups truck drops off a unit on your porch in the winter time it is very likely the chip to heatsink seal if cracked was cracked right at your door step.

Here in NJ I have received hundreds of pieces of gear from China and sometimes the guys drop the gear off when I am not home.

Even if the guy drops it 3-4 feet to the step in the dead of winter it is not good for the heatsinks.

[mikeywith]

And of course  at -20c or -4f it would be a bit stiffer and even more brittle.

So if the fedex/dhl/ups truck drops off a unit on your porch in the winter time it is very likely the chip to heatsink seal if cracked was cracked right at your door step.

Even if the guy drops it 3-4 feet to the step in the dead of winter it is not good for the heatsinks.

I believe it has little to do with the outside temp when the miner is not running, also bad handling of packages doesn't seem to be the reason why those chips on my S9ks fell, I had a lot of them shipped, some for me and a lot for clients, they all arrived at the same time with the same environmental conditions, a few had heatsinks fall right out of the box, some did mine for a few days, some for a few weeks, some are still good to this point but overall terrible, so my guess is that alongside with the terrible quality of their solder paste, those S9ks don't go through a quality process, so depending heavily on your luck, you might receive a bricked gear as I did.

[favebook]

Well... Considering their price, QC is probably not worth it for Bitmain to do on S9ks. It has been noticable over years that their QC is becoming worse (or even worse, it could be that it hasn't changed at all even though technology changed a lot and that can be a big problem too).

[mikeywith]

Well... Considering their price, QC is probably not worth it for Bitmain to do on S9ks. It has been noticable over years that their QC is becoming worse (or even worse, it could be that it hasn't changed at all even though technology changed a lot and that can be a big problem too).

Just for the record, I paid $263.00 for those crappy S9ks, they weren't at $60 like now, so really nearly $300 for that gear doesn't give bitmain the excuse to send them with fallen chips and heatsinks, in fact, the QS measure should be same on all gears, cheap gears cost less to manufacture, which is why they can afford to sell them for so cheap, but QS is a different story, around the same period of time I bought S9js for $276, and they are a trillion times better, those S9js were probably stored from previous years batches, and given that all the new gears S9 or not have the same issue of chips/heatsinks falling, it shows that something went wrong in their QS department, something which all the S19s buyers should keep in mind, although Jihan Wu promised that the S19s will be robust after he admitted the 17 series were crappy, he, of course, puts the blame on Micree Zhan.

Ironically I tend to believe Jihan this time, not because I think he is honest by any means, but the S19s are their last chance, so it's very likely that everything about S19 is going to be a lot better in terms of quality, I am just not willing to take the risk until it's confirmed.

[The_binary_Observer]

Well after pushing and pushing at every known e-mail address at Bitmain I finally got in contact with somebody on a high rank at service dept. He confirmed what I have been suspecting about the quality of soldering is very likely the root of the problems on all S17 series, even on prior from S series as S9K and all the way thru S17. I got in touch with him via whatsapp here is the conversation: https://ibb.co/LdPzMyc

So, being that said, all my dear friends is useless and futile send you S17 to Bitmain even under warranty because is very likely that as soon as you receive them back other chips will come off, so learn how to solder using soldering paste and flux with hot air solder. Other than that, find yourself a local electronic tech near you to avoid and expose the miner to shipping "kick handling" even if shipped to Bitmain's Service Center in the USA.

Hope this clears out all theories about this equipment since the root cause of failure have been revealed.

[mikeywith]

This guy knows a lot more than those bots who usually reply to most of us, but the logic behind his explanation is plain stupid, saying "The advantage is that easy is easy to disassemble" is like saying "We made this car with a strong engine but we hang it using a zip-tie so you can remove it whenever you need", so if that guy is not lying, he is simply stupid, simply because how often do you need to disassemble those chips?  almost NEVER, how often do you need them to stick and not drop? ALWAYS!

The only advantage I can think of is that low-temperature solder paste cost way less than high-temperature solder paste, making thousands of gears, it means soldering millions of chips, 100,000 miners with 30 chips each, using a cheaper paste saves you hypnotically 1.1 cents per chip or 1$ per miner, that's a $100,000, you make 200,000 miners, you save twice as much, this assumes $1 cost reduction per miner which of course is just a random number that could potentially be a lot higher.

If there is really any advantage (related to the subject) aside from cost reduction for low-temp paste vs high-temp paste, I would like to know about it.

[The_binary_Observer]

Mikeywith, what really disturbed me is the part the guy says, "Because new miners rarely have such problems in China, it is likely that they have been injured during transportation"

So how do they transport the miners within Mainland China? By teletransportation as in Star Trek? Scotty beam up the miners to Shinchong farm? Nahhh they ship them the same way the do to other parts of the world.

So thinking about the way that people operates, cheating and lying all the time, I have come into a conclusion that Bitmain have two assembly lines, one for their own farms and customers within China, the other for the rest of the world which is low quality and compensates the extra costs invested into the "domestic production assembly line".

Moreover, they don't want more competition so they take your hard earned money, send you a crappy machine and in 3 months max you are out of the business either because you ran out of money or you are not willing to spend more in some other brand of equipment and in the top of that you have no working miners either.

[favebook]

Mikeywith, what really disturbed me is the part the guy says, "Because new miners rarely have such problems in China, it is likely that they have been injured during transportation"

So how do they transport the miners within Mainland China? By teletransportation as in Star Trek? Scotty beam up the miners to Shinchong farm? Nahhh they ship them the same way the do to other parts of the world.

So thinking about the way that people operates, cheating and lying all the time, I have come into a conclusion that Bitmain have two assembly lines, one for their own farms and customers within China, the other for the rest of the world which is low quality and compensates the extra costs invested into the "domestic production assembly line".

Moreover, they don't want more competition so they take your hard earned money, send you a crappy machine and in 3 months max you are out of the business either because you ran out of money or you are not willing to spend more in some other brand of equipment and in the top of that you have no working miners either.

Come to think of it. That could be true (Bolded Italic). I am a small sample but all the gear I ordered via friend in China is working even OC-ed after year and more. And only units I had problem with were shipped from Bitmain directly to Europe.

[mikeywith]

Mikeywith, what really disturbed me is the part the guy says, "Because new miners rarely have such problems in China, it is likely that they have been injured during transportation"

That is another lie, a while ago i linked an article which was likely translated from a Chinese one, that talked about Chinese miners complain about the exact same problem we all have 'heatsinks/chips falling apart', apparently the mining whales in China have some private WeChat groups, and that's where Jihan Wu hangs around, Jihan Wu begged the Chinese miners to give bitmain another chance with the S19 after admitting the 17 series had some major quality issues, those reports came from CHINA from CHINESE miners, so saying "new miners rarely have such problems in china is a straight out lie" unless he thinks that 30% or higher failure rate is considered "rare".

This, of course, does not negate the fact that the Chinese miners get a special pass, Jihan Wu never apologized or begged us, he probably never bothers about the forum, or other non-Chinese groups on telegram and Facebook, but when the Chinese miners complain he listens, heck he even offered to send them staff on site to have the faulty 17 series fixed at NO cost.

[akagi82]

I also have a complete coorespondence with Bitmain tech support, Jessica L. I can post it if you guys are interested. All they have done is given me a generic trouble shooting list and not answered any of my specific questions...

This is pretty normal... such a waste of time.

[danieleither]

Recently purchased 2 x S17+ 70TH, April batch but delivered in May due to delays at Customs. Both machines worked fine initially, then dropped a hashboard. One machine after just 1 hour and the 2nd unit after approx. 2.5 hours, very disappointing Spent several days back and forth with Bitmain support doing everything they asked but to no avail and now both units have been shipped back for repair.

Since I posted this a short while back, I feel it is only fair to post an update since the response from Bitmain has been reasonably impressive.

After a few days of initial troubleshooting (back and forth communication with Bitmain where they asked me to try various things to fix the problem), they asked me to send the units to their repair centre in Europe. I know from following the tracking number that the faulty units arrived at the repair centre on Wednesday 3rd June. On Thursday 4th June I received a notification from Fedex of 2 brand new replacement units being shipped from China, which duly arrived here on Tuesday 9th June. They would have been here Monday 8th if it wasn't for a delay in customs.

The replacement units are working perfectly. Whilst it's not good that I received two faulty units initially, in their credit they have replaced them very quickly and with no complications.

[philipma1957]

That was pretty good service on their part.  Thank you for the follow up info.

[mikeywith]

That was pretty good service on their part. 

How was that a pretty good service?  , did they refund the shipping fees he paid to send those faulty hash boards to Europe? did they compensate him for the days of mining he lost? ya "pretty good" is a bit of a broad word, but for Bitmain to do it, I guess it's outstanding because we are not used to that kind of "okay service".

With that being said, and despite that not being the best thing one would expect after paying a fortune for mining gear, I consider danieleither to be a lucky client who got VIP treatment, your chances of receiving the same thing are not so high.

danieleither, glad you got your gears to run with all three boards, wish you luck with them.

[favebook]

How was that a pretty good service?  , did they refund the shipping fees he paid to send those faulty hash boards to Europe? did they compensate him for the days of mining he lost? ya "pretty good" is a bit of a broad word, but for Bitmain to do it, I guess it's outstanding because we are not used to that kind of "okay service".

With that being said, and despite that not being the best thing one would expect after paying a fortune for mining gear, I consider danieleither to be a lucky client who got VIP treatment, your chances of receiving the same thing are not so high.

danieleither, glad you got your gears to run with all three boards, wish you luck with them.

I fully agree with you (bolded part). But I do not think that danieleither got a VIP treatment as I had the same treatment (twice for same unit) from Bitmain.

But do not get me wrong, I do not think that is the best they could've done, but it was AWESOME comparing to what they have been doing over last few years.

[mikeywith]

Well, let's call it a terrible choice of words on my behalf . As far as I know, they hardly allow you to send the hashboard separately, and they will ask you to ship the whole machine, a few weeks ago someone complained about the same thing somewhere in this board, so it doesn't seem like they will always give you the option of sending the bad board while keeping the other working boards to reduce the loss, is it now okay to disassemble the miner without voiding the warranty? or is it a VIP thing?

I don't claim to be an expert in this warranty process, I probably know the least about it among you guys, given the circumstances and the shipping cost to the nearest repair center, to me it has almost always been best to try to

1- Claim a coupon from them.
2- Fix the board by myself.
3- Throw them away.

[favebook]

[...]

Either I am reading it wrong or you know something I do not, but I think he sent a both machines that were faulty.

Since I posted this a short while back, I feel it is only fair to post an update since the response from Bitmain has been reasonably impressive.

After a few days of initial troubleshooting (back and forth communication with Bitmain where they asked me to try various things to fix the problem), they asked me to send the units to their repair centre in Europe. I know from following the tracking number that the faulty units arrived at the repair centre on Wednesday 3rd June. On Thursday 4th June I received a notification from Fedex of 2 brand new replacement units being shipped from China, which duly arrived here on Tuesday 9th June. They would have been here Monday 8th if it wasn't for a delay in customs.

The replacement units are working perfectly. Whilst it's not good that I received two faulty units initially, in their credit they have replaced them very quickly and with no complications.

[Guinsanity]

I wtb a couple of psu fans for my t17, two of then are not working

w40s12bmd5 from nidec

12vdc 0.64a

https://www.nidec.com/en/product/search/category/B101/M111/S100/NCJ-W40S12BMD5-5/

Anyone knows where to buy?

[mikeywith]

[...]

Ok my bad I thought he only sent the bad boards, this means he didn't get any special treatment, in fact I got a better deal on the faulty control board of my S17+

Despite them sending me this



I insisted on sending only the control board and not the whole unit because I already had another control board to replace the bad one and I didn't want the gear to stop mining, and after a ton of "polite" arguments with them, I managed to get them to accept my request.

They asked me to create a repair ticket to HongKong but send it to the Netherlands since it was the cheapest to send to from where the miner was located, once it was delivered I guess in 2-3 days they sent me an email with the tracking number for a control board from China at their expense, and then they refused to pay me for the shipping to the Netherlands but after being consistent - I managed to get a coupon from them.  

With that being said, I still think they treat us terribly by sending us dead machines in the first place.

[...]

You can get it on aliexpress for $12 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32825983768.html or if you are in the U.S you can check with scott if he doesn't have them he would probably be able to tell you where you can find them, make sure you get another spare those fans are not the best quality one can get and they eventually you will lose another fan.

[Scorpyy]

Wait, you can actually get a coupon because you had to cover shipping expenses to their service location?  I haven't read that info anywhere.