[Guide] Dogie's Comprehensive Bitmain Antminer S3 Setup [HD]

[dogie]

how far can you over clock with just 2 pci e leads?

As far as you want to burn your PSU up. At stock you're at about 180W per PCI-E, the maximum implementation I've seen in the wild is 240W and that's so far over the specifications for 18AWG its insane.

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[dogie]

well dont want to burn it obviously, and ideally 150watt per pcie?

75W is the official spec for 6 pin, 150W for 8 pin.

[zulover]

ok got it.

[zulover]

got one of theses platimax 1500watt supply they have a 12 pin connector at the psu side splitting to 2 x8pin pcie, the wire gauge is quite thick, 1 cable could cover 1 s3?

[dogie]

got one of theses platimax 1500watt supply they have a 12 pin connector at the psu side splitting to 2 x8pin pcie, the wire gauge is quite thick, 1 cable could cover 1 s3?

If its 16AWG then sure, those things are beastly.

[zulover]

got one of theses platimax 1500watt supply they have a 12 pin connector at the psu side splitting to 2 x8pin pcie, the wire gauge is quite thick, 1 cable could cover 1 s3?

If its 16AWG then sure, those things are beastly.

yep 16awg written on the connectors and theyre staying pretty cool, ill have go at overclocking on that one.

[allcoinminer]

Anyone tried the pool balance options in Antminer S3?

[dogie]

Anyone tried the pool balance options in Antminer S3?

No, never had a reason to. Why do you want to pool balance out of interest?

[allcoinminer]

Anyone tried the pool balance options in Antminer S3?

No, never had a reason to. Why do you want to pool balance out of interest?

I have a reason for that.  
I like to know whether its possible to set quota for these three pools.
Say for example, like 25% to first pool, 30% to second and 45% to the third.

[dogie]

Anyone tried the pool balance options in Antminer S3?

No, never had a reason to. Why do you want to pool balance out of interest?

I have a reason for that. 
I like to know whether its possible to set quota for these three pools.
Say for example, like 25% to first pool, 30% to second and 45% to the third.

Not with the default software, no.

[ZiG]

Anyone tried the pool balance options in Antminer S3?

No, never had a reason to. Why do you want to pool balance out of interest?

I have a reason for that. 
I like to know whether its possible to set quota for these three pools.
Say for example, like 25% to first pool, 30% to second and 45% to the third.

Not with the default software, no.

Yes...with the default software...

..."Balance: Change multipool strategy from failover to even share balance.
Load Balance: Change multipool strategy from failover to quota based balance..."

From S3 Manual...:

https://bitmaintech.com/files/download/Antminer%20S3%20Manual_EN_2014.7.16.pdf

Cheers, 

ZiG

[allcoinminer]

Anyone tried the pool balance options in Antminer S3?

No, never had a reason to. Why do you want to pool balance out of interest?

I have a reason for that.  
I like to know whether its possible to set quota for these three pools.
Say for example, like 25% to first pool, 30% to second and 45% to the third.

Not with the default software, no.

Yes...with the default software...

..."Balance: Change multipool strategy from failover to even share balance.
Load Balance: Change multipool strategy from failover to quota based balance..."

From S3 Manual...:

https://bitmaintech.com/files/download/Antminer%20S3%20Manual_EN_2014.7.16.pdf

Cheers,  

ZiG

I saw the manual much earlier and I was asking whether its possible to set a specific quota to pools.
Say, we need to set 25% of the total hash power to first pool, 30% to second and 45% to the third.
Look at bitmain's post on P2Pool there additional parameter can be added in the username field with "+" operator.
Like wise I'm expecting some quota to be set via some additional parameter passing with username like for p2pool or password field like in nicehash.

[Truman]

Hey,

having not a x but a "-" in a row?
Can somebody help please?

[allcoinminer]

Hey,

having not a x but a "-" in a row?
Can somebody help please?


[im]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/67023860/s3minus.JPG[/img]

First of all, appreciating you to post the status page image of your faulty miner.
Which Power supply you are using and what are the loads you are giving to that PSU?
Now do the below step and report back again.
First Turn Off your miner PSU. Remove all PCI Power Cables and Ethernet Cable from S3.
Wait for a minimum of 5 minutes and connect the PCI Power cables and internet back and turn on your PSU.
Now, run the miner for 10 minutes check the stats page take a screen shot.
Do a restart and wait for 30minutes and take another screenshot of the stats page.
If you are having problem in hashrate or x or - in the second image report back with both the images.

[psahx]

Anyone tried the pool balance options in Antminer S3?

Dogie, I really appreciate whatever you do for the community, hope everyone else does too. You are one dedicated person, I would like to see more like you on bitcointalk. Just want to give you a friendly suggestion: it is not embarrassing, if you are not aware of something, you can just say "I don't know". Please, avoid taking advantage of your reputation for making false statements.

Thank you.

Best of Both Worlds
-------------------

I hate long blocks, like everyone, and I hate pool hopping, because it never works.
So, here is what I did. Your mileage may vary.

For all my miners, I added ghash.io as a failover pool, Slush is primary.

Then, on the configuration page for the Antminer S3 miners, I changed 'Pool Balance' from Failover to Balance.
Initially this did not work so great, and Ghash was rejecting a lot of shares. After
looking around a bit, the reason became clear. Slush was sending me work with a
difficulty of around 128 +/-, and Ghash was sending me work with a difficulty of
1024. 50% of a S3 is not up to that.

The good news is that Ghash allows you to set the difficulty of your work. So, I went
to the workers section and set all of my miners to 128, then rebooted them all. The
rejections went way down.

Next, I let them run about 10 minutes so Slush could score them, and again updated
their difficulty to match what Slush was using.

All 8 of the S3 miners are now showing about 200 GH/s +/- on both Slush and Ghash.
Perfect.

The Antminer S2 does not have the balance option, but I wanted it to do the same thing.

So I found this link searching on Google:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20992/can-i-set-up-cgminer-to-mine-in-different-pools-by-a-defined-ratio

I suppose it will work for anyone using CGMiner, but just tried it on my S2.
I changed the quota numbers to 50 for Slush, 50 for Ghash.

Don't forget to add the last line: "load-balance" : true,

Oh, and on the S2, you will find the config files in /config instead of /etc/config, and the pw is admin, not root like on the S1 and S3.

Anyway, now all 9 miners are balancing successfully between Slush and Ghash. I have 9 legs on a roller coaster and the other 9 on a freight train ... doesn't sound healthy, but so far, so good.

[dogie]

Dogie, I really appreciate whatever you do for the community, hope everyone else does too. You are one dedicated person, I would like to see more like you on bitcointalk. Just want to give you a friendly suggestion: it is not embarrassing, if you are not aware of something, you can just say "I don't know". Please, avoid taking advantage of your reputation for making false statements.

Thank you.

Being unaware of a niche feature isn't meaning to 'abuse my position', sorry. I stand to gain nothing either way. There still isn't any reason to load balance.

[MaverickMarz]

Hi everyone,

I'm new at mining and I want to buy a couple of these on the manufacturer website. I have never done business with China so I'm a bit scared. Will I have to pay a tax or shipping if I buy from their site and ship it to Florida? Is there any difference between the different batches? Any tips are welcomed.

About the payment process. I bought a couple of coins at CoinBase, can I use their wallet to pay for their site? how much should I donate to the transaction in order to make it faster?

I was thinking about getting a couple of this PSU: Rosewill CAPSTONE-650. It's a Gold certified 54A PSW for under 100$ and it includes 4 PCI-e with 6+2 pins.

Thanks for all your help! 

[jowaybea]

Hi everyone,

I'm new at mining and I want to buy a couple of these on the manufacturer website. I have never done business with China so I'm a bit scared. Will I have to pay a tax or shipping if I buy from their site and ship it to Florida? Is there any difference between the different batches? Any tips are welcomed.

About the payment process. I bought a couple of coins at CoinBase, can I use their wallet to pay for their site? how much should I donate to the transaction in order to make it faster?

I was thinking about getting a couple of this PSU: Rosewill CAPSTONE-650. It's a Gold certified 54A PSW for under 100$ and it includes 4 PCI-e with 6+2 pins.

Thanks for all your help! 

Fear not!  Bitmain is the best shipping from China I have ever heard of.  There is no extra tax or shipping when ordering from Bitmain directly.  My 3rd and 4th S3's from batch 5 will be arriving here in FL tomorrow or Thursday.  My 1st and 2nd were from batch 1.  The only significant difference between batches (that I have heard of so far) is price and shipping date.  Although some are reporting that batch 4+ miners are hashing faster than B1-3.

I don't really know anything about CoinBase, but I can't imagine why you couldn't pay directly from their site.  Transaction donations these days should be between .001 and .005 BTC for reasonable processing time.

That PSU looks good as long as it's one S3 per PSU .  Don't try to stack two to one.  But with 4PCI-e cables, it should be able to overclock as much as your S3's can handle.

[Biodom]

About the payment process. I bought a couple of coins at CoinBase, can I use their wallet to pay for their site? how much should I donate to the transaction in order to make it faster?

Coinbase pays the miners fee themselves, so you don't need to put in any extra.
However, it takes for coinbase up to 1hr sometimes to have the first confirmation, so your transaction would timed out initially, but they (bitmain) usually reconcile it later either by themselves or if you send them email with your transaction id. If time is of no particular importance, but you want a peace of mind, send your coinbase coin to blockchain.info wallet first and pay from there, paying minimal fee of 0.0001 btc or slightlly above.

[allcoinminer]

Dogie, I really appreciate whatever you do for the community, hope everyone else does too. You are one dedicated person, I would like to see more like you on bitcointalk. Just want to give you a friendly suggestion: it is not embarrassing, if you are not aware of something, you can just say "I don't know". Please, avoid taking advantage of your reputation for making false statements.

Thank you.

Being unaware of a niche feature isn't meaning to 'abuse my position', sorry. I stand to gain nothing either way. There still isn't any reason to load balance.

I'm not indulging in other arguments between you both but, I like to point out that there are many good reasons to load balance between pools, atleast for me.
I got the detail from the cgminer developer to use it directly in CGminer.
I can use the pool balance option for diverting a part of some of my miner's hash power which I rented for long term before overclocking.
I overclocked the miners and gained around 125Ghs additional for each mining Rig. I have 3 of such rigs.
Since all are on long term rentals, 125*3 = 375Ghs is going to waste if I'm not using it or giving free to rented miners.
So this will help me divert the additional 375Ghs from the already rented rigs to rent further or use my own.