Antminer S2 Support and Overclocking Thread

[Rabinovitch]

Guys, please make this clear - have you achieved more hashing power (stable long-term h.p. both at miner's and pool's side with normal reject/discarded/stale/HW rate) after S2 overclocking or not?..   Also - what firmware do you use, what clocks have you set?

I will today replace 2 big fans with Noctua NF-A14 PWM (to see whether it will work more quiet having the same temperature), replace PSU with Chieftec 1250 W and try to OC it. 

[1713558199]

1713558199

[Hyacin75]

Guys, please make this clear - have you achieved more hashing power (stable long-term h.p. both at miner's and pool's side with normal reject/discarded/stale/HW rate) after S2 overclocking or not?..   Also - what firmware do you use, what clocks have you set?

~1.08 TH average over several hours on nicehash, 218 clocks, latest stock firmware
1.12 TH average over several hours on multipool.us, 218 clocks, latest stock firmware
1.21 TH average over one hour on multipool.us, 218 clocks, Kano's firmware
CAN NOT use nicehash with Kano's firmware (invalid ntime errors)

All with a Corsair 1200W.

[mroth7684]

Guys, please make this clear - have you achieved more hashing power (stable long-term h.p. both at miner's and pool's side with normal reject/discarded/stale/HW rate) after S2 overclocking or not?..   Also - what firmware do you use, what clocks have you set?

I will today replace 2 big fans with Noctua NF-A14 PWM (to see whether it will work more quiet having the same temperature), replace PSU with Chieftec 1250 W and try to OC it. 

Mine runs silent. I swapped my fans for 8x Prolimatech PRO-BV14 which are only 18dba. Akasa makes a higher CFM fan at 24dba which might be better but I'm not sure how loud that would be. I pointed all 4 side case fans inward and removed the case and put the other 4 directly on top of the boards to blow the hot air upwards. My max temp is 53c

[Rabinovitch]

Well, after my modding attempt I can conclude that Noctua NF-A14 PWM is not a proper choise (I replaced 2 on the front). Temperatures of all boards rised to 2-3 degrees. But these fans are quiet, definetely. 

Unfortunately new PSU Chieftec GPM-1250C refused to start (both connected to miner's MB and and standalone), so I will try to exchange it tomorrow or perform moneyback.... And I was not smart enough to check it before replacing... 

[Rabinovitch]

My S2 is working on 212 MHz for last 4+ hours on stock PSU. Temperature of several boards have rised for 1 degree. There are much less discarded, stale shares and HW errors, but this may depend on router's firmware replace.  

At pool side I see about 5-7% of hash speed increase. Need more time to observe.

Update: after some strange hangup yesterday I did a power reset, and all my settings has reverted back to default factory settings, in spite that I did everything as described in first post of this thread... Files in both /config and /etc folders are in their pristine state...  How?..

[Rabinovitch]

Have just replaced stock PSU with Corsair AX1200i and overclocked a miner to 218 MHz. Seems to be OK, without any significant HW/rejects.

Does anyone know how to avoid resetting of configuration files during reboot?.. Copying it to /etc folder doesn't help at all, anytime I shutdown or reboot my S2 I forced to configure it again from it's factory settings...  

[Hyacin75]

Have just replaced stock PSU with Corsair AX1200i and overclocked a miner to 218 MHz. Seems to be OK, without any significant HW/rejects.

Does anyone know how to avoid resetting of configuration files during reboot?.. Copying it to /etc folder doesn't help at all, anytime I shutdown or reboot my S2 I forced to configure it again from it's factory settings...  

Kano's?

It's built on an earlier factory image that had that same bug ... no fix until either he releases an updated version with the latest stock fixes incorporated, or we get a new version through the official channel with his fixes incorporated  

Rock and a hard place ...

On the bright side, for me, Nicehash has made some changes on their end and Kano's firmware now plays nicely with them ... I think I'm going to do some scripting on my GPU miner to monitor the S2 w/ Kano's firmware and when it resets to stock, put my config back on it and restart cgminer ...

[Hyacin75]

I think I'm going to do some scripting on my GPU miner to monitor the S2 w/ Kano's firmware and when it resets to stock, put my config back on it and restart cgminer ...

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my $s2pooldata = `echo "pools|" | nc 192.168.1.99 4028`;
chomp($s2pooldata);

if ( $s2pooldata =~ /btcguild/ ) {
        system("sshpass -p 'admin' scp -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no s2-cgminer.conf root\@192.168.1.99:/config/cgminer.conf 2>/dev/null");
        system("sshpass -p 'admin' ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no root\@192.168.1.99 /etc/init.d/cgminer.sh stop 2>/dev/null");
        sleep 5;
        system("sshpass -p 'admin' ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no root\@192.168.1.99 /etc/init.d/cgminer.sh start 2>/dev/null");
}

Requires perl, obviously, sshpass which on ubuntu can be installed with "sudo apt-get install sshpass", and nc which on ubuntu can be installed with "sudo apt-get install netcat-openbsd" ...

Save it as whateveryoudlike.pl and add it to your crontab to run every minute or five minutes or whatever you'd like (chmod 755 after creating the file, obviously)

If you use btcguild in your config file, other things you can look for to see if it's flipped back to (Kano) stock are -

nezumikun.kant
167.160.36.2
juros_kant
stratum.ozco.in

And as you can see you have to have the desired s2 config file in the same directory as the script, and named s2-cgminer.conf ... it'd probably be wise to update that to use a full path ...

This is for stock clocks, just duplicate the scp line and update the file name to asic-freq.config if you want to copy over a custom clock file as well.  You can add another ssh line as well if desired to copy it from /config to /etc.

[Rabinovitch]

Oh... Too complicated.   It looks easier to install latest Bitmain's firmware... And all my PCs either at home and at work are under Win7.  

I see the strange thing after an OC. At triplemining.com I see S2's speed 982 GH/s, while web-GUI shows me 1482 GH/s. I believe I should trust to the pool, right?.. Looks like my S2 was working better at 212 Mhz...   Now let's try 215. (Upd: 1090-1100 GH/s at triplemining' side, accepted almost equals to HW errors in web GUI, but this is not a problem AFAIK).

Voltage(V)	Core Frequency(MHz)	Hash Rate(GH/s)	Current(A)	Power Consumption(W)	Power Efficiency(J/GH)
0.75	200	1.60	1.423	1.07	0.681
0.85	250	2.00	1.993	1.69	0.847
1.00	312.5	2.50	2.821	2.82	1.128
1.10	350	2.80	3.359	3.70	1.32
1.25	400	3.20	4.205	5.26	1.643

But if these chips are able to run at frequency up to 400 Mhz, then why in AntMiner S2 they are running at 196 Mhz by default and can't run higher than 218 without issues?.. I hurriedly tried to uncomment a 250 Mhz settings, but S2 won't work with it. After shutting down miner I even saw a "-------" line and I thought that I burned up one board, but it fortunately became normal after a while... Sigh...

Maybe someone who is familiar with PCBs design could find a way (replacing some resistors, for example) to make S2's chips run at higher frequencies.... But maybe they can't go above 218 (or 225? Has anyone tried it?..) just because of hardware design of S2's boards, it's DC circuits or something...

[d2dtk]

Maybe the chips need more then 1200w to get them pass 225mhz

[Rabinovitch]

I have both Corsair AX1200i installed and the stosk Enermax PSU. 1200+1000 W. Is this enough? I can try to connect both these PSUs. But I'm afraid to brick my S2. )

p.s. I'll ask Bitmain via e-mail about it. 

[d2dtk]

I have both Corsair AX1200i installed and the stosk Enermax PSU. 1200+1000 W. Is this enough? I can try to connect both these PSUs. But I'm afraid to brick my S2. )

p.s. I'll ask Bitmain via e-mail about it. 

I've wondered the same thing. If it is possible to connect two PSU units I would imagine more power for the chips. Might be possible that you could do half the boards on one new PSU then others on the Original.

[Rabinovitch]

~1.08 TH average over several hours on nicehash, 218 clocks, latest stock firmware
1.12 TH average over several hours on multipool.us, 218 clocks, latest stock firmware
1.21 TH average over one hour on multipool.us, 218 clocks, Kano's firmware
CAN NOT use nicehash with Kano's firmware (invalid ntime errors)

As I understood we can run Kano's compiled cgminer under latest stock Bitmain's firmware. We just need some linux geek who has a little free time to try it.  

Yeah, 225/6386 thus far (30 minutes in) is giving me about the same hashrate (0.85% increase), and more than double the hardware errors (7.43% vs. 2.33%) ...

What was your value for 'timeout' and where did you get it from?

p.s. by the way I have asked kano about his (or maybe her?   ) plans about new firmware for S2 (or maybe even for S3) and I hope I will not be the one who is ready to donate him for this job...

[Hyacin75]

As I understood we can run Kano's compiled cgminer under latest stock Bitmain's firmware. We just need some linux geek who has a little free time to try it.  

I couldn't get it to work even with all the linking and everything else mentioned in Kano's README, it would hang after launch ... even if you could get it to work, you'd lose all your changes after a reboot (since you either have to overwrite cgminer or modify /etc/init.d/cgminer.sh), so you'd might as well just be running Kano's firmware ...

Yeah, 225/6386 thus far (30 minutes in) is giving me about the same hashrate (0.85% increase), and more than double the hardware errors (7.43% vs. 2.33%) ...

What was your value for 'timeout' and where did you get it from?

I don't recall ... I started with the values at the top of this thread but the timeouts seemed to go in the wrong direction compared to the stock config, and to a degree, logic (getting longer with higher clocks), so I flipped them around and use 36 on 218 ... I probably used 35 on 225 ...

[d2dtk]

What exactly do the timeouts do for the chips? I'm doing 200mhz @ 36 for timeout because 40 seemed to high

[Hyacin75]

Modified with a time of day asic speed schedule -

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my %schedule = (
        0 => [ 218, 218,218,218,218,218,218, 218,218,218,218,218,218, 218,218,206,206,206,206, 206,218,218,218,218, ],
        1 => [ 218, 218,218,218,218,218,218, 218,218,218,218,218,218, 218,218,206,206,206,206, 206,218,218,218,218, ],
        2 => [ 218, 218,218,218,218,218,218, 218,218,206,206,206,206, 206,206,196,196,196,196, 196,206,206,206,196, ],
        3 => [ 196, 196,196,196,196,196,196, 196,196,206,206,206,206, 206,206,196,196,196,196, 196,206,206,206,196, ],
        4 => [ 196, 196,196,196,196,196,196, 196,196,206,206,206,206, 206,206,196,196,196,196, 196,206,206,206,196, ],
        5 => [ 196, 196,196,196,196,196,196, 196,196,206,206,206,206, 206,206,206,206,206,206, 206,218,218,218,218, ],
        6 => [ 218, 218,218,218,218,218,218, 218,218,218,218,218,218, 218,218,206,206,206,206, 206,218,218,218,218 ],
);

my ($hour, $wday) = (localtime(time))[2,6];

my $s2pooldata = `echo "pools|" | nc 192.168.1.99 4028`;
chomp($s2pooldata);
my $currclock = `sshpass -p 'admin' ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no root\@192.168.1.99 ps w | grep 115200 | grep bitmain | grep -v grep | tr -s ' ' ' ' | cut -d'-' -f2- | cut -d' ' -f4 | cut -d':' -f5`;
chomp($currclock);

my $RESTART = 0;

if ( $s2pooldata =~ /btcguild/ ) {
        system("sshpass -p 'admin' scp -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no /path/to/s2-cgminer.conf root\@192.168.1.99:/config/cgminer.conf");
        $RESTART = 1;
}

if ( $currclock !~ /${$schedule{$wday}}[$hour]/ ) {
        my $asicfile = "asic-freq.config." . ${$schedule{$wday}}[$hour];
        system("sshpass -p 'admin' scp -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no /path/to/$asicfile root\@192.168.1.99:/config/asic-freq.config");
        system("sshpass -p 'admin' ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no root\@192.168.1.99 cp /config/asic-freq.config /etc/asic-freq.config");
        $RESTART = 1;
}

if ( $RESTART == 1 ) {
        system("sshpass -p 'admin' ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no root\@192.168.1.99 /etc/init.d/cgminer.sh stop");
        sleep 5;
        system("sshpass -p 'admin' ssh -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no root\@192.168.1.99 /etc/init.d/cgminer.sh start");
}

In my case I use it to keep my room from getting insanely hot while I'm here and more specifically, while I'm trying to sleep (like I would and should be right now if the room wasn't insanely hot from it running at 206, lol) ... could be useful for anyone on time of day hydro billing though if they wanted to run it at lower clocks during the more expensive times ...


This requires, for my specific schedule values -

s2-cgminer.conf
asic-freq.config.196
asic-freq.config.206
asic-freq.config.218

files to be in the current directory or an absolute path to them specified ...

[d2dtk]

Cleaned and applied Antec Formula 6 Nano diamond on the bottom 2 boards but ran out before I could compete the other 8. Huge drop in temperature,  usually stayed about 49-52c now 45-47c.

[Rabinovitch]

Then for you it's time to overclock your S2. 

[d2dtk]

Then for you it's time to overclock your S2. 

I had it running at 200 then at 212 but reset it to stock when I did the boards. Only have the original PSU so I can only push it so far before it's all hardware errors :/

[Rabinovitch]

225 Mhz, 1,207.93 GHash/s at ozco.in pool. Continue to monitor.