Hacking BFL Monarchs and servicing them while times are weird.

[lightfoot]

Ok, it looks like BFL's Monarch board is shipping, pictures are starting to pop up, and I'm looking at the one on Ebay and going "MMMMM It would be FUN to FIDDLE WITH IT". Yep. It looks very cool....

Edit: I just bought one on Ebay for $1k worth of Bitcoin. Yep, by Wednesday it will be MINE! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Ahem. So I thought I would start a thread for people to post their pictures, thoughts, and the like. I really am not interested in whining posts, so I will attempt to moderate this thread specifically to technical discussions.

And in a "support the people who bought them and put my bitcoins where my mouth is" I've just sent 8 bitcents to an early owner so he can get a P3 meter and a temp sensor so we can see what they do and get some data.

Congrats to BFL for shipping, let's see what we have...

C

[1715018876]

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[OgNasty]

I have provided wattage and temperature readings to lightfoot.  I will let him discuss the technicals.

As far as operation, these things were plug and play.  They make less noise than the singles, and I was impressed with how quiet they are.  They do dump a ton of heat, but can also operate at extremely high temperatures.  I don't have a thermometer in my mining closet, but the wall was over 100 degrees and these are able to operate with only a house fan pointed at them, which is nice since in the same environment my CoinTerra rig is nearly worthless without a direct A/C line running to it.

Actual performance at the pool is a bit shy of what was expected.  I tested one on GHASH.IO for a quick comparison and saw 660GH/s vs 620GH/s on P2Pool.  With my kill-a-watt saying they use 520watts per Monarch, that gives a real efficiency rating of ~0.8W/GH.

[lightfoot]

Ok, Ognasty was nice enough to take pictures, and I'll upload the key ones here. Or to some sharing site then go from there.

First, the money shot: A shot of the back of the board:



Thought: Holy fuck. That is one serious way to cool down the 12 volt to .6 volt power subsystem. The FETs are on the other side of the board along with the 2708 type gate drivers. At high frequency switching dropping that much one can expect a lot of heat from the high side FETs as they buck the 12 volts down to .6 as they are switching on and off (switching current is a lot more complex than on state current).

That heat sink and fan is covering it all up to the chips. Good idea, but man that is big.



Image number 2 in terms of interesting: This is the switching system for the FETs. Seeing it up close is interesting, the rows of chips in the center are the FET drivers, high and low side. Six channels per side, those bottom chips are probably 6 phase power sequencers. Equally interesting are the little heat sinks covering the high side FETs; wonder how hot those are getting as most of the heat on that style FET is dropped into the board and not out the top (they may be ballast sinks, to react to instant temp/load changes until the board itself saturates the heat and draws it out the back through the copper substrate). Hm.

010NE2LI is a reasonable choice for the low side FETs, you want two because switching issues are minimal on the low side (most of the time they are on to keep the rail close to .6 volts). The high side ones however are another story: You can't put two FETs in parallel because the issue on the high side is gate capacitance. They have to switch from full off to full on *fast* since during the time they are switching they have to drop all of the current at 12 volts going down to .6. Dropping 100 amps at 12 volts will incinerate a FET unless you transition quickly. Thus the lower the gate capacitance the better. Paralleling FETs doubles the current but also doubles the capacitance and leaves the FETs in that state a lot longer.

Interesting.

Then the chokes, and some white stuff, might be the heat sink compound from the chip to water block. Probably more efficient heat transfer than the singles since those had 8 little chips with not much area on top. If this is pulling similar power on one much bigger chip then surface area works in their factor. Hm....


Back of the chip. The temp here would be interesting, they're pulling all the heat up through the chip top and into the heat sink, this would tell how efficient the heat sinks are.

More thoughts later. Very interesting though....

[Taugeran]

OgNasty. Are you willing to uncap it (remove water cooler) so we can get a die shot?

Plx

Need ASIC pr0n

[lightfoot]

At this point, that could be tricky :-) Has BFL ever posted a picture of their chip anywhere?

Someone buy me a unit and I'll "unbox" it in real time. Then try to put it back together again :-)

Meantime I got some of the temp numbers from Og. I'll look at them tonight, post some of the highlights tomorrow. First glance though is that the heat is being taken off the chips very efficiently with those water blocks.

[MrTeal]

At this point, that could be tricky :-) Has BFL ever posted a picture of their chip anywhere?

Someone buy me a unit and I'll "unbox" it in real time. Then try to put it back together again :-)

Meantime I got some of the temp numbers from Og. I'll look at them tonight, post some of the highlights tomorrow. First glance though is that the heat is being taken off the chips very efficiently with those water blocks.

[lightfoot]

Well there is that... Very pretty.

[OgNasty]

OgNasty. Are you willing to uncap it (remove water cooler) so we can get a die shot?

I don't think so.  I'm sure lightfoot won't be able to fight the urge to buy a Monarch much longer...

[Rabinovitch]

Guys, almost 3k USD for 1 Th. WHY do you need it?..  

[Taugeran]

....

I think I went blind for a moment.

<3 ASIC pr0n

[jadefalke]

At this point, that could be tricky :-) Has BFL ever posted a picture of their chip anywhere?

Someone buy me a unit and I'll "unbox" it in real time. Then try to put it back together again :-)

Meantime I got some of the temp numbers from Og. I'll look at them tonight, post some of the highlights tomorrow. First glance though is that the heat is being taken off the chips very efficiently with those water blocks.

Mr. Teal, will you build up an own Board for that chips, like the habanero?

[crazyates]

Mr. Teal, will you build up an own Board for that chips, like the habanero?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think BFL is selling raw chips like they were with their 65nm stuff. They're only selling them inside the Monarchs.

[lightfoot]

Well, now I did it: I am an official proud owner of a BFL 700gh monarch, just bought on Ebay for "$1,000 in Bitcoin". Great... :-)

My guess is I'll have it by Wed/Thu and I'll sit down and take it apart. Because no one else is doing so right now, so why the heck not?

:-) Then... Then we shall see what we can do with it. Bwahahahahaha!!!!!!!

Ahem.

C

[k9quaint]

Well, now I did it: I am an official proud owner orderer of a BFL 700gh monarch, just bought on Ebay for "$1,000 in Bitcoin". Great... :-)

My guess is I'll have it by Wed/Thu and I'll sit down and take it apart. Because no one else is doing so right now, so why the heck not?

:-) Then... Then we shall see what we can do with it. Bwahahahahaha!!!!!!!

Ahem.

C

FTFY and good luck

[lightfoot]

OgNasty. Are you willing to uncap it (remove water cooler) so we can get a die shot?

Plx

Need ASIC pr0n

I will do so by next weekend. One is coming in from Ebay by Wednesday.

[Taugeran]

Mr. Teal, will you build up an own Board for that chips, like the habanero?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think BFL is selling raw chips like they were with their 65nm stuff. They're only selling them inside the Monarchs.

I'm sure if you contacted sales they would entertain you if you had a large enough production volume

[lightfoot]

FTFY and good luck

No actually this one is in hand from a guy, I've talked to him and seems legit. I will at least run it for a day or two before taking it apart, wonder what kind of thermal mating compound I will need.

One big thing will be baselines, need to know what the temps are on the backs of the chips and the FET drivers. Watch it with the scope to see what the clock rates are, stuff like that.

We'll find out Thursday. I'm really curious to see what this thing looks like and what makes it go.

C

[lightfoot]

Well, it's here. 700gh sticker, solid little thing, BFL Monarch.

Can't power it up because I have to go out. Will try to get it running in the Danger lab later this evening. Bad assed looking thing though, the board is *solid*

C

[lightfoot]

She's up. Running bfgminer 4.5.0 and started hashing with no problems. Running right now with both plugs and a Corsair 500 power supply, plug area is a bit warm. Cables are not. Board temp at back is 119f right behind the chips, 105 overall pretty much all around.

Hash speed 660gh. Not bad. It's making a high pitch squeak from the power supplies, probably the chokes resonating from the frequency. Interesting.

More in next post. How this thing works....

C

[lightfoot]

Now for the really interesting thing: The output from chiliflash.

DEVICE: BitForce SC-28nm SHA256
FIRMWARE: 1.4.2
Serial Number: 4320250
ASIC Installed: 2
IAR Executed: NO
PLL Latency: 48
Channel Parallelization: YES @ 16
Max Queue ID: FFFF
Scan Interval: 50ms
Total Engines: 1800
CORTEX-00: 4480MH/s
CORTEX-01: 5603MH/s
CORTEX-02: 6375MH/s
CORTEX-03: 6062MH/s
CORTEX-04: 6495MH/s
CORTEX-05: 5616MH/s
CORTEX-06: 3080MH/s
CORTEX-07: 2240MH/s
CORTEX-08: 4840MH/s
CORTEX-09: 6800MH/s
CORTEX-0A: 6160MH/s
CORTEX-0B: 6495MH/s
CORTEX-0C: 5280MH/s
CORTEX-0D: 5100MH/s
CORTEX-0E: 5852MH/s
CORTEX-0F: 3456MH/s
CORTEX-10: 6495MH/s
CORTEX-11: 4763MH/s
CORTEX-12: 5629MH/s
CORTEX-13: 5629MH/s
CORTEX-14: 4400MH/s
CORTEX-15: 4320MH/s
CORTEX-16: 5950MH/s
CORTEX-17: 3960MH/s
CORTEX-18: 5616MH/s
CORTEX-19: 6375MH/s
CORTEX-1A: 5950MH/s
CORTEX-1B: 6062MH/s
CORTEX-1C: 6375MH/s
CORTEX-1D: 6270MH/s
CORTEX-1E: 5100MH/s
CORTEX-1F: 3464MH/s
CORTEX-20: 4113MH/s
CORTEX-21: 6160MH/s
CORTEX-22: 5629MH/s
CORTEX-23: 6800MH/s
CORTEX-24: 6375MH/s
CORTEX-25: 6375MH/s
CORTEX-26: 6270MH/s
CORTEX-27: 5629MH/s
CORTEX-28: 6375MH/s
CORTEX-29: 6062MH/s
CORTEX-2A: 5184MH/s
CORTEX-2B: 6800MH/s
CORTEX-2C: 6688MH/s
CORTEX-2D: 6270MH/s
CORTEX-2E: 6270MH/s
CORTEX-2F: 6270MH/s
CORTEX-30: 6160MH/s
CORTEX-31: 6495MH/s
CORTEX-32: 6495MH/s
CORTEX-33: 5629MH/s
CORTEX-34: 6800MH/s
CORTEX-35: 5950MH/s
CORTEX-36: 6375MH/s
CORTEX-37: 5434MH/s
CORTEX-38: 5720MH/s
CORTEX-39: 6495MH/s
CORTEX-3A: 3960MH/s
CORTEX-3B: 4763MH/s
CORTEX-3C: 5720MH/s
CORTEX-3D: 5720MH/s
CORTEX-3E: 6576MH/s
CORTEX-3F: 6375MH/s
CORTEX-40: 6928MH/s
CORTEX-41: 6034MH/s
CORTEX-42: 5950MH/s
CORTEX-43: 6688MH/s
CORTEX-44: 6576MH/s
CORTEX-45: 5525MH/s
CORTEX-46: 6060MH/s
CORTEX-47: 6368MH/s
CORTEX-48: 6375MH/s
CORTEX-49: 6165MH/s
CORTEX-4A: 6270MH/s
CORTEX-4B: 6576MH/s
CORTEX-4C: 6165MH/s
CORTEX-4D: 6165MH/s
CORTEX-4E: 6464MH/s
CORTEX-4F: 6464MH/s
CORTEX-50: 6576MH/s
CORTEX-51: 5950MH/s
CORTEX-52: 6464MH/s
CORTEX-53: 6464MH/s
CORTEX-54: 6165MH/s
CORTEX-55: 5970MH/s
CORTEX-56: 4932MH/s
CORTEX-57: 5572MH/s
CORTEX-58: 6688MH/s
CORTEX-59: 6270MH/s
CORTEX-5A: 6480MH/s
CORTEX-5B: 6368MH/s
CORTEX-5C: 5656MH/s
CORTEX-5D: 6368MH/s
CORTEX-5E: 5865MH/s
CORTEX-5F: 5239MH/s
CORTEX-60: 6480MH/s
CORTEX-61: 6368MH/s
CORTEX-62: 6256MH/s
CORTEX-63: 5865MH/s
CORTEX-64: 5474MH/s
CORTEX-65: 5775MH/s
CORTEX-66: 5775MH/s
CORTEX-67: 5865MH/s
CORTEX-68: 6464MH/s
CORTEX-69: 6368MH/s
CORTEX-6A: 5970MH/s
CORTEX-6B: 5474MH/s
CORTEX-6C: 5775MH/s
CORTEX-6D: 5775MH/s
CORTEX-6E: 6160MH/s
CORTEX-6F: 5474MH/s
CORTEX-70: 6368MH/s
CORTEX-71: 6075MH/s
CORTEX-72: 5865MH/s
CORTEX-73: 5572MH/s
CORTEX-74: 5005MH/s
CORTEX-75: 6160MH/s
CORTEX-76: 5174MH/s
CORTEX-77: 5474MH/s
CORTEX-78: 6165MH/s
CORTEX-79: 6160MH/s
CORTEX-7A: 5572MH/s
CORTEX-7B: 5775MH/s
CORTEX-7C: 5474MH/s
CORTEX-7D: 6064MH/s
CORTEX-7E: 5390MH/s
CORTEX-7F: 4776MH/s
Total Processing Power: 746416 MH/s
ASIC CORTEX Count: 128
ASIC Channels: 128
Queue Depth:383
Critical Temperature: 0
Total ASIC Thermal Cycles: 0
Total PCB Thermal Cycles: 0
OK

That is very interesting. More in a bit.

C

[ABitNut]

Quick scan tells me the slowest is:
CORTEX-07: 2240MH/s

And the fastest is:
CORTEX-40: 6928MH/s

That's an huge difference if you'd ask me. Keep the info coming, it's really interesting to see!

[lightfoot]

So what do we have here? 128 "cortexes", each being 4-6gh in power, and 1800 "engines" on the board. So 64 cortex things, 900 engines per chip approx..

Hm. Back on the old 65mn chips you had 16 engines per chip, 8 chips per board, but the engines were buried and only the "chip" showed up as an exposed thing. Here it seems like there is another level, we have 900 or so engines on a die, arranged into 64 virtual "chips". So each virtual "chip" has around 14-15 engines hashing at 6gh, it's kind of like putting a whole bunch of little 428mh engines and letting them run wild on a set of problems.

Need to think about this overnight, not sure how BFG is assigning jobs to the chips or whatnot. Need sleep, anyone else feel free to chime in on what they see.

C

[lightfoot]

Quick scan tells me the slowest is:
CORTEX-07: 2240MH/s

And the fastest is:
CORTEX-40: 6928MH/s

That's an huge difference if you'd ask me. Keep the info coming, it's really interesting to see!

Sure, engines are like that and all, the 65nm would sometimes come up with 15 engines, 14, even 8 engines if you were doing odd clocking things. The trick was balancing everything. Hm.

[klintay]

nice how far can these things be pushed in terms of overclocking ?

[klondike_bar]

nice how far can these things be pushed in terms of overclocking ?

be patient - thats what this thread is here to find out

[SLok]

She's up. Running bfgminer 4.5.0 and started hashing with no problems. Running right now with both plugs and a Corsair 500 power supply, plug area is a bit warm. Cables are not. Board temp at back is 119f right behind the chips, 105 overall pretty much all around.

Hash speed 660gh. Not bad. It's making a high pitch squeak from the power supplies, probably the chokes resonating from the frequency. Interesting.

More in next post. How this thing works....

C

Is that on windows or linux, any reason to not use 4.7 or 4.8? I thought monarch support just started at 4.7?
Do you also see messages like "sanity check, device is processing unknown work, device is missing queued job. device flushed (goes by too fast), failed to find work for queue results" in the bfgminer cmd window?

[lightfoot]

Is that on windows or linux, any reason to not use 4.7 or 4.8? I thought monarch support just started at 4.7?
Do you also see messages like "sanity check, device is processing unknown work, device is missing queued job. device flushed (goes by too fast), failed to find work for queue results" in the bfgminer cmd window?

Windows, and that's because my dedicated laptop that wasn't in use was running 4.5. Last night was hard, just got in from days of travel (NY, ATL, etc) and my brain is toasty.

I'll upgrade to 4.8 tonight then take a more in-depth look. So since you have these things, please post about what you have seen, what you observe. Have you taken them apart yet? Powered them down? Stuck them out a window (mine currently is in the window blowing the hot air *out* of the house :-)

C

[lightfoot]

Guys, almost 3k USD for 1 Th. WHY do you need it?.. 

Because it is there.

C

[Taugeran]

Lightfoot Here is a plot for you of the Cortex listings:

LINK

Feel free to leave comments in the sheet and here

[smracer]

OgNasty. Are you willing to uncap it (remove water cooler) so we can get a die shot?

Plx

Need ASIC pr0n

Here you go.

[Taugeran]

OgNasty. Are you willing to uncap it (remove water cooler) so we can get a die shot?

Plx

Need ASIC pr0n

Here you go.

NOW that is a sexual experience right there.

*drool*

[Syke]

Guys, almost 3k USD for 1 Th. WHY do you need it?.. 

Because it is there.

C

Must be nice having so much money you can just throw it away for fun.

[wpgdeez]

Guys, almost 3k USD for 1 Th. WHY do you need it?.. 

Because it is there.

C

Must be nice having so much money you can just throw it away for fun.

People do it all the time, it's called a hobby.

[Syke]

People do it all the time, it's called a hobby.

That's one expensive hobby.

[RedZeppelin]

People do it all the time, it's called a hobby.

That's one expensive hobby.

Compared to collecting battletanks?

[Unacceptable]

Guys, almost 3k USD for 1 Th. WHY do you need it?.. 

Because it is there.

C

Must be nice having so much money you can just throw it away for fun.

People do it all the time, it's called a hobby.

No...it's called,"Mining at home" 

[lightfoot]

OgNasty. Are you willing to uncap it (remove water cooler) so we can get a die shot?

Plx

Need ASIC pr0n

Here you go.

More. How about the other chip? What kind of heat sink compound was on it? Anything like the Singles?

I can see lights under the back one, so that's interesting. Wonder how it sequences the power.

C

[lightfoot]

People do it all the time, it's called a hobby.

That's one expensive hobby.

Sort of. Part of the reason I do it is the reason I bought a jally back in Jan of 2013: I was really curious as to what these things were and how they worked. When I found this community, I decided to follow my old technology rule which says that information freely gathered should be shared for free, but my skills and services should be paid for. I've done that with electric motor controllers, watches, clocks, and now bitcoin hardware.

That's why I posted everything I learned on boosting the jallies, and offered to do it for pay because I was using my physical skills (and because I wanted other people to do it as well, money is a great incentive). Some people paid me, some thanked me, some sent me parts and bitcoin stuff to keep it going. I'd have to pay taxes on it anyway, so why not invest in a Monarch thing if it wasn't too insanely priced?

That's why I paid OgNasty for his P3 meter and temp probe, in return for pics and early telemetry. That made me want to get one so I could take it apart here so here I am.

I won't make back my bitcoins mining with it, but maybe we can all work together and wring these things out for all they're worth. Or learn something interesting about hardware. Or make a cool video of burning it out. So there's that.

And the fun. It's weird and fun to fiddle with.

C

[Syke]

so why not invest in a Monarch thing if it wasn't too insanely priced?

It is insanely priced.

I won't make back my bitcoins mining with it...And the fun. It's weird and fun to fiddle with.

ASICminer tube. You get to fiddle a bunch, and earn back the bitcoins!

[lightfoot]

Do you also see messages like "sanity check, device is processing unknown work, device is missing queued job. device flushed (goes by too fast), failed to find work for queue results" in the bfgminer cmd window?

Interesting. When I first powered up I got a nice 700gh. After an hour I shut it down to switch power supplies, fired up, and saw some error messages and about 600gh speeds.

Shut it down, went back to previous supply, started up. Same.

This afternoon I shut it down, let it sit for 20 minutes to cool off, powered it up. 700gh, no errors I can see (I don't stare at it, just check every once in awhile). Solid as a rock.

One odd thing: I did notice the power supply high pitch frequency from the chokes was different. Maybe when the board is cycled hot it does a similar thing to what the old Singles did when they would power up more slowly. But letting it sit for a few mins seems to have restored it. Note it's been running for 6 hours now without a problem.

What are you seeing. Can you post the messages? Do they all do that, can you try shutting off the one that does for 15-20 mins? How does it hash?
C

[lightfoot]

It is insanely priced.

Eh. Most miners are. By the time you get them you won't make much money anyway. So all miners are overpriced if you expect money to fall from the sky (I never got this).

ASICminer tube. You get to fiddle a bunch, and earn back the bitcoins!

Hm. URL? Are people blowing those up and such?

I never really got into hacking things like the blades or block erupters or those chinese ones. No real artistic interest. I did fix someone's gridseed, but that was kind of simple like an erupter.

I wonder if there is a market for Neptune repair. I thought about the X3's, but HashFast can't seem to figure out how to make them and they are catching fire, which is serious problems.

C

[lightfoot]

Regarding that spreadsheet: Thank you! That's interesting.

So what can we think here:

Most of these cortex things are hashing at 6400. Fastest reasonable speed is 6700. So if we assume 128 of them, and 6.7gh each we get 857gh as the max hashing speed at this voltage/clock combo. This is where I would start screwing with the clock speed; the trick was if you clocked faster you got more hashes but sometimes fewer engines as they errored out. Sometimes it was worth it, sometimes not.

Hm. Anyone else able to post their chiliflash values? More would be helpful; I have a sample size of el-one.

[Pt0x]

Where's the picture of the shed with the new addition???

[SLok]

Do you also see messages like "sanity check, device is processing unknown work, device is missing queued job. device flushed (goes by too fast), failed to find work for queue results" in the bfgminer cmd window?

Interesting. When I first powered up I got a nice 700gh. After an hour I shut it down to switch power supplies, fired up, and saw some error messages and about 600gh speeds.

Shut it down, went back to previous supply, started up. Same.

This afternoon I shut it down, let it sit for 20 minutes to cool off, powered it up. 700gh, no errors I can see (I don't stare at it, just check every once in awhile). Solid as a rock.

One odd thing: I did notice the power supply high pitch frequency from the chokes was different. Maybe when the board is cycled hot it does a similar thing to what the old Singles did when they would power up more slowly. But letting it sit for a few mins seems to have restored it. Note it's been running for 6 hours now without a problem.

What are you seeing. Can you post the messages? Do they all do that, can you try shutting off the one that does for 15-20 mins? How does it hash?
C

posted this on bfl forum too, edited to today's findings;
"I'm getting errors on 1 of 2 monarchs, switched usb cables, ports, tried powered usb hub, un-powered, direct into pc. I noticed on powering the monarchs, one has a 1 red led going on/off/on/off etc. near the back usb, the other one with the errors has 2, one with the same on/off sequence, and one that blinks fast about 6 times, then goes off for a sec., then blinks fast again, etc.
errors are:
"sanity check, device is processing unknown work,
device is missing queued job. device flushed (goes by too fast)
failed to find work for queue results", then it hashes a couple of shares, and the same errors pop up again, and this repeats itself over and over, on the same monarch."

Later noticed they occur on bfl0 and bfl1, probably normal, I don't know if those messages in the command window are new for bfgminer 4.7.x and higher?

later

"Yeah, switching psu/usb/cables with the other one brings no difference, what does the fast blinking led next to the once-per-second flashing one on the error one mean? Even when it is only powered up and not hashing, it shows the same fast blinking of a second led. Doesn't look like I'm missing out on much hashrate though, it's running as it is specced, over 790-840GH for 2x 400GH rated units."

Actually a 400GH and a 425GH unit, and labelled so on the small fan's side. BFGminer reports couple of degrees above room temp, more shed temp, running about 22C. Odd thing is I found bfgminer shut down 2 times now. I'm kind of busy and don't have time to sit down with the miners and host and the bfgminer manuals to see what's to adapt, but I guess overclocking goes by fw like the sc's did?
And 5% and 4% hw errors btw, 0% and 0% rejected.

[bcp19]

Do you also see messages like "sanity check, device is processing unknown work, device is missing queued job. device flushed (goes by too fast), failed to find work for queue results" in the bfgminer cmd window?

Interesting. When I first powered up I got a nice 700gh. After an hour I shut it down to switch power supplies, fired up, and saw some error messages and about 600gh speeds.

Shut it down, went back to previous supply, started up. Same.

This afternoon I shut it down, let it sit for 20 minutes to cool off, powered it up. 700gh, no errors I can see (I don't stare at it, just check every once in awhile). Solid as a rock.

One odd thing: I did notice the power supply high pitch frequency from the chokes was different. Maybe when the board is cycled hot it does a similar thing to what the old Singles did when they would power up more slowly. But letting it sit for a few mins seems to have restored it. Note it's been running for 6 hours now without a problem.

What are you seeing. Can you post the messages? Do they all do that, can you try shutting off the one that does for 15-20 mins? How does it hash?
C

posted this on bfl forum too, edited to today's findings;
"I'm getting errors on 1 of 2 monarchs, switched usb cables, ports, tried powered usb hub, un-powered, direct into pc. I noticed on powering the monarchs, one has a 1 red led going on/off/on/off etc. near the back usb, the other one with the errors has 2, one with the same on/off sequence, and one that blinks fast about 6 times, then goes off for a sec., then blinks fast again, etc.
errors are:
"sanity check, device is processing unknown work,
device is missing queued job. device flushed (goes by too fast)
failed to find work for queue results", then it hashes a couple of shares, and the same errors pop up again, and this repeats itself over and over, on the same monarch."

Later noticed they occur on bfl0 and bfl1, probably normal, I don't know if those messages in the command window are new for bfgminer 4.7.x and higher?

later

"Yeah, switching psu/usb/cables with the other one brings no difference, what does the fast blinking led next to the once-per-second flashing one on the error one mean? Even when it is only powered up and not hashing, it shows the same fast blinking of a second led. Doesn't look like I'm missing out on much hashrate though, it's running as it is specced, over 790-840GH for 2x 400GH rated units."

Actually a 400GH and a 425GH unit, and labelled so on the small fan's side. BFGminer reports couple of degrees above room temp, more shed temp, running about 22C. Odd thing is I found bfgminer shut down 2 times now. I'm kind of busy and don't have time to sit down with the miners and host and the bfgminer manuals to see what's to adapt, but I guess overclocking goes by fw like the sc's did?
And 5% and 4% hw errors btw, 0% and 0% rejected.

Just an FYI, the light below the blinking one (which indicates ASIC initialization when solid, hashing when blinking) is related to the FGPA.  In the older code it was off, in the newer code it has the fast blink then off on a ~2 sec cycle.  If the FPGA is erased, it lights dimly.

Have you seen the 4.2.0 custom build BFG on the BFL website?  I know it doesn't seem anywhere near as prone to the sanity checks (unless you stop/start BFG without cycling power on the card)  The FPGA buffers the work done and submits upon BFG restart and you get a mass of work not found.  This buffer send seems to cause BFG to hiccup as I see an occasion 'failed to send queue' which goes away if I then cycle power on the card and restart BFG.

[lightfoot]

Actually a 400GH and a 425GH unit, and labelled so on the small fan's side. BFGminer reports couple of degrees above room temp, more shed temp, running about 22C. Odd thing is I found bfgminer shut down 2 times now. I'm kind of busy and don't have time to sit down with the miners and host and the bfgminer manuals to see what's to adapt, but I guess overclocking goes by fw like the sc's did?
And 5% and 4% hw errors btw, 0% and 0% rejected.

Hm, ok, that's still quite good, so this is not affecting hash rate. I'll take a look at mine tomorrow, still solid as a rock at 702gh. One set of FETs is running at 100C (quite warm, not super hot yet), the other at 80c (eh). I might put a fan on the front, but no errors, error rate 1.9%.

Hm. I just put a little BFL jally fan pointing at the top side FET heat sinks head on, temps dropped from the 90's to the 60's. Note to self: Dropping FET heat can be done with a simple little fan pointing at them head on. Very interesting, I may have some room to play with like this. Drill 2 holes in the mounting bracket for the old jally standoffs and it will be permanent.

I'm going to let it run for 24 hours like this. Then go from there.

C

[lightfoot]

I really should go to bed but I thought I'd share this with you Slok:

I found this super cool little windows app called "Restart on Crash" version 1.3.3.174. It will restart an app if it crashes, if it crashes again it will back off for a few seconds, etc. Keeps my miners running no matter what. No evidence of spyware, I trust it on a mining rig.

Mine like hell!

C

[SLok]

Quick update, found bfgminer off again, odd since it shut down at 6.15AM, same time as yesterday. Internet by home plugs in the shed (over power line) may be the culprit, making a 40 meter utp cable tonight to try tomorrow. The custom bfgminer 4.2 shuts down right away, I restarted everything before trying it.
BCP about the leds, nearest one to the back usb port act similar on both units, one unit has an extra led, it blinks about 6 times very fast, then off for a sec, then blinks about 6 times very fast, then off for a sec., and so on.
I've set several back-up pools, no change, will look into that restart app. too, thanks for the tips lightfoot and bcp.

[Delarock]

Your threads are still my favorite. I've been so far removed from the mining world since I shut my miners off a few months ago, now I have a reason to pay attention again. 

[Biffa]

Quick update, found bfgminer off again, odd since it shut down at 6.15AM, same time as yesterday. Internet by home plugs in the shed (over power line) may be the culprit, making a 40 meter utp cable tonight to try tomorrow. The custom bfgminer 4.2 shuts down right away, I restarted everything before trying it.
BCP about the leds, nearest one to the back usb port act similar on both units, one unit has an extra led, it blinks about 6 times very fast, then off for a sec, then blinks about 6 times very fast, then off for a sec., and so on.
I've set several back-up pools, no change, will look into that restart app. too, thanks for the tips lightfoot and bcp.

Had problems with powerline and miners in my garage. Just ran a cable instead and never had a problem again.

Still use it for other equipment though without issue.

[SLok]

Just tried bfgminer 4.2 custom build from the .exe instead of a batch file, pop-up showed it wouldn't run because it's 64bit, need a 32bit version. It's a hot day, 23C and at least 26 in the shed, temps still not out of line I think?
Just placed a huge fan covering both monarch's water block sides, the messages as seen in the pics stay the same though. BCP are those common on more units, or should I look further? Will still try the utp later, so far I ran them with wifi (5 meters from AP) and by said home plugs.

[lightfoot]

Hm, that's interesting. I think I'll get the BFG code and see if I can find this error. Checked my unit, 698gh, 1% errors, no odd messages. Can you log the messages to a file so we can see them in situ?

In the meantime I can say as a flat fact: Putting a little fan in front of the FETs 4 inches away will reduce my operating temps from 90c to 60c, and will reduce the on-heatsink-FET temps from 100c/80c to 65c/50c.

Moving air across heat sinks makes the difference. Even the smallest amount of air movement drops the temps 30-40c.

C

[lightfoot]

Also what speed is being reported by Eligius? Say the 22 minute numbers, do they match the lower or higher of the 3 BFG numbers?

The pool is kind of the final solution on speed, you're not getting rejects so I'm curious.

[OgNasty]

Some advice...  When I found my bfgminer was shutting down, turning off all the power supplies and then turning them back on fixed any stability issues.  I also included a line in my .bat file so that if bfgminer does shut down, it automatically restarts.

[SLok]

Also what speed is being reported by Eligius? Say the 22 minute numbers, do they match the lower or higher of the 3 BFG numbers?

The pool is kind of the final solution on speed, you're not getting rejects so I'm curious.

22.5 minutes 809.57 Gh/s 254464sh, went for a drink, refreshed the page, and....22.5 minutes 765.59 Gh/s 240640sh, next refresh and the same 22.5 minutes   809.57Gh/s 254464sh again.

I never considered eligius' status page to be accurate, is the 22 min. number any good as a reference? BFGminer low shows 776, mid 807, high 854 and up till 940
BCP both units have the solid on led, that goes on/off when hashing. One has a second led just below the first one, it blinks fast about 6 times (so fast it's impossible to count the actual number), then it goes off for a sec., it does this from powering up, and keeps doing it. There are more leds, just noticed 1 or 2 between the pcb and the copper plate, solid on, I see the reflection on the sledge's base plate under the right chip.

Lightfoot have you tried getting anything by jtag, or is that what you got as said earlier, with chiliflash?

Ognasty, I restart the pc and miners every time I make a change or after a shut down bfgminer, shouldn't be a problem there. The fan on the fets made no change so far, after 6 hours hashing.

edit; no time for the utp now, but I doubt it will change anything.

[lightfoot]

Lightfoot have you tried getting anything by jtag, or is that what you got as said earlier, with chiliflash?

Chiliflash. Basically it's a serial app that sends a ZCX and reads back status. I've never been able to talk to these things with a serial program like PUTTY, never know the baud rate or stop bits. Oh well, someday.

I haven't tried to download the code yet, if the ROMs are protected that won't work. I don't think the Atmel will brick if you just try to read, I'll give it a shot tomorrow after running for a day with no problems.

Do they make a high pitch whine? I don't think that is a problem between BFG and queue. Still, you're getting more hashing than you bought, so be happy. Let's think this through for a bit, if you can get some sort of details on the message it might help. Maybe the two messages are related. Thinking.

Who else is getting those messages, and where are they?

C

[SLok]

No whining sound at all, I'm pretty happy with the units and their speed, just curious what the errors mean and a possible fix, if necessary. About that second led too, what does it indicate?
Running both off a single server psu, I was wondering, could a 60GH SC psu (the BFL ones) cope with the 210-250W draw of a 400GH unit?

[lightfoot]

No whining sound at all, I'm pretty happy with the units and their speed, just curious what the errors mean and a possible fix, if necessary. About that second led too, what does it indicate?
Running both off a single server psu, I was wondering, could a 60GH SC psu (the BFL ones) cope with the 210-250W draw of a 400GH unit?

Well, hm. If fans make no diff and your units run cool we can deduce that at 200gh per chip the FETs are not getting very hot. At 350gh per chip (me) they start to get hot and need a fan. They can run at 100c, but like on the singles, that's hot.

A limiter might be the FETs, if we put a water block on them and the FET drivers it might allow us to draw off a lot of heat as we go to 800 and beyond. So.... Who do we know that can find water blocks of a size that can cover all six power channels from FET to FET?

That's project 1. Get that in place, I'll order one, and we can start cranking.

Slok, your units are more interesting now. If you can run the ZCX command and tell us how many and what speed the cortexes are, we can compare them to mine. Maybe your units run all of them slow. Maybe you have B grade chips and whole bunches are not running. If they are all running slow, we might be able to boost.

C

[Taugeran]

If he throws numbers up I can throw together charts to start a comparison table and averages etc

[SLok]

Slok, your units are more interesting now. If you can run the ZCX command and tell us how many and what speed the cortexes are, we can compare them to mine. Maybe your units run all of them slow. Maybe you have B grade chips and whole bunches are not running. If they are all running slow, we might be able to boost.

C

ok, but how, can't find that chiliflash app.

[Taugeran]

Slok, your units are more interesting now. If you can run the ZCX command and tell us how many and what speed the cortexes are, we can compare them to mine. Maybe your units run all of them slow. Maybe you have B grade chips and whole bunches are not running. If they are all running slow, we might be able to boost.

C

ok, but how, can't find that chiliflash app.

Current Firmware: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zoewijezzhfl3bs/Chili14e.hex
Flash Utility: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xpccbhfkbpinov8/ChiliFlash.exe
Utility Source: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zn8gkojly2f87wx/ChiliFlash.rar

Alternate FW:
Voltage limited to 1.1V, can prevent overcurrent conditions on cards with almost all cores enabled.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rfa4kuigov99sg8/Chili14e1v1.hex
1V limited, to bring power use down to ~4J/GH
https://www.dropbox.com/s/b9f9ne7ilwl3ap8/Chili14e1v0.hex

Previous FW
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8qhhoqmvtk6i6jj/Chili14d.hex

Flashing instructions:
Open the exe file in Windows (or inspect the source of the VS project and compile yourself), and select the comm port for the card from the drop down list. Note that you need the default FTDI/VCP drivers (ie, the ones you'd use for bfgminer) installed to see a comm port, you can't have the WinUSB drivers at this point.
Open the port, and you should see a bunch of information including the current FW version, the number of cores on each chip and their frequency.
Click browse and navigate to the hex file you want to flash, and then click program. The progress bar will increment and the LEDs on the unit will binary count as it programs, and when it's done the program will prompt you to power cycle the unit, and the inner and outer 4 LEDs on the board will alternatingly flash until you do.


Should you need to program the FTDI chip, you can use the following links
FTDI Programming Template: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gkbcih32atez8qb/BFL%20FTDI.xml
FT_PROG utility: http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Utilities/FT_Prog_v2.8.2.0.zip

[lightfoot]

Thanks. In the meantime I found if I power the miner off, then on I can get the spurious queue errors. If I power off then leave it off for 1.5 hours they don't come back when I power on and mine. I'll let it run today to verify, and start building a Raspberry Pi so I can catch the errors. If anyone else has a dump of the queue errors and can send them to me, PM me.

C

[SLok]

Thanks Taugeran,

DEVICE: BitForce SC-28nm SHA256         DEVICE: BitForce SC-28nm SHA256
FIRMWARE: 1.3.0                                 FIRMWARE: 1.3.0
Serial Number: 4170662                         Serial Number: 4170752
ASIC Installed: 2                                  ASIC Installed: 2
IAR Executed: NO                                 IAR Executed: NO
PLL Latency: 3                                     PLL Latency: 3
Channel Parallelization: YES @ 16            Channel Parallelization: YES @ 16
Max Queue ID: FFFF                              Max Queue ID: FFFF
Scan Interval: 50ms                              Scan Interval: 50ms
Total Engines: 1652                              Total Engines: 1584
CORTEX-00: 4590MH/s                          CORTEX-00: 3311MH/s
CORTEX-01: 4515MH/s                          CORTEX-01: 4214MH/s
CORTEX-02: 3672MH/s                          CORTEX-02: 4354MH/s
CORTEX-03: 4144MH/s                          CORTEX-03: 4214MH/s
CORTEX-04: 3848MH/s                          CORTEX-04: 4108MH/s
CORTEX-05: 3732MH/s                          CORTEX-05: 2528MH/s
CORTEX-06: 3848MH/s                          CORTEX-06: 3160MH/s
CORTEX-07: 3311MH/s                          CORTEX-07: 2952MH/s
CORTEX-08: 4264MH/s                          CORTEX-08: 3978MH/s
CORTEX-09: 3864MH/s                          CORTEX-09: 3672MH/s
CORTEX-0A: 4424MH/s                          CORTEX-0A: 4214MH/s
CORTEX-0B: 4508MH/s                          CORTEX-0B: 4515MH/s
CORTEX-0C: 4284MH/s                          CORTEX-0C: 4354MH/s
CORTEX-0D: 3010MH/s                          CORTEX-0D: 3672MH/s
CORTEX-0E: 2709MH/s                          CORTEX-0E: 3672MH/s
CORTEX-0F: 3010MH/s                          CORTEX-0F: 2576MH/s
CORTEX-10: 4186MH/s                          CORTEX-10: 3311MH/s
CORTEX-11: 4043MH/s                          CORTEX-11: 3311MH/s
CORTEX-12: 4043MH/s                          CORTEX-12: 3978MH/s
CORTEX-13: 4108MH/s                          CORTEX-13: 4214MH/s
CORTEX-14: 3256MH/s                          CORTEX-14: 3504MH/s
CORTEX-15: 3421MH/s                          CORTEX-15: 2408MH/s
CORTEX-16: 3600MH/s                          CORTEX-16: 2844MH/s
CORTEX-17: 3612MH/s                          CORTEX-17: 3732MH/s
CORTEX-18: 3924MH/s                          CORTEX-18: 3504MH/s
CORTEX-19: 4592MH/s                          CORTEX-19: 3848MH/s
CORTEX-1A: 3660MH/s                          CORTEX-1A: 3256MH/s
CORTEX-1B: 3848MH/s                          CORTEX-1B: 4736MH/s
CORTEX-1C: 4108MH/s                          CORTEX-1C: 3978MH/s
CORTEX-1D: 4018MH/s                          CORTEX-1D: 3732MH/s
CORTEX-1E: 3157MH/s                          CORTEX-1E: 4340MH/s
CORTEX-1F: 4018MH/s                          CORTEX-1F: 3913MH/s
CORTEX-20: 2952MH/s                          CORTEX-20: 2664MH/s
CORTEX-21: 5152MH/s                          CORTEX-21: 3796MH/s
CORTEX-22: 3978MH/s                          CORTEX-22: 3157MH/s
CORTEX-23: 4043MH/s                          CORTEX-23: 4018MH/s
CORTEX-24: 3612MH/s                          CORTEX-24: 3311MH/s
CORTEX-25: 3848MH/s                          CORTEX-25: 3010MH/s
CORTEX-26: 2960MH/s                          CORTEX-26: 4440MH/s
CORTEX-27: 3256MH/s                          CORTEX-27: 3732MH/s
CORTEX-28: 3597MH/s                          CORTEX-28: 3256MH/s
CORTEX-29: 4186MH/s                          CORTEX-29: 3612MH/s
CORTEX-2A: 3864MH/s                          CORTEX-2A: 4515MH/s
CORTEX-2B: 3476MH/s                          CORTEX-2B: 4305MH/s
CORTEX-2C: 3366MH/s                          CORTEX-2C: 4088MH/s
CORTEX-2D: 4515MH/s                          CORTEX-2D: 4515MH/s
CORTEX-2E: 3913MH/s                          CORTEX-2E: 2920MH/s
CORTEX-2F: 4200MH/s                          CORTEX-2F: 4144MH/s
CORTEX-30: 3936MH/s                          CORTEX-30: 4144MH/s
CORTEX-31: 4830MH/s                          CORTEX-31: 3311MH/s
CORTEX-32: 3924MH/s                          CORTEX-32: 4088MH/s
CORTEX-33: 4043MH/s                          CORTEX-33: 3366MH/s
CORTEX-34: 4424MH/s                          CORTEX-34: 3672MH/s
CORTEX-35: 3913MH/s                          CORTEX-35: 3540MH/s
CORTEX-36: 4590MH/s                          CORTEX-36: 3978MH/s
CORTEX-37: 3060MH/s                          CORTEX-37: 4088MH/s
CORTEX-38: 4662MH/s                          CORTEX-38: 2754MH/s
CORTEX-39: 4152MH/s                          CORTEX-39: 2336MH/s
CORTEX-3A: 4662MH/s                          CORTEX-3A: 3311MH/s
CORTEX-3B: 4186MH/s                          CORTEX-3B: 3311MH/s
CORTEX-3C: 3060MH/s                          CORTEX-3C: 3157MH/s
CORTEX-3D: 3792MH/s                          CORTEX-3D: 3913MH/s
CORTEX-3E: 2488MH/s                          CORTEX-3E: 3892MH/s
CORTEX-3F: 2709MH/s                          CORTEX-3F: 4088MH/s
CORTEX-40: 4515MH/s                          CORTEX-40: 2408MH/s
CORTEX-41: 3978MH/s                          CORTEX-41: 3366MH/s
CORTEX-42: 4440MH/s                          CORTEX-42: 3212MH/s
CORTEX-43: 3796MH/s                          CORTEX-43: 3396MH/s
CORTEX-44: 3552MH/s                          CORTEX-44: 4512MH/s
CORTEX-45: 3612MH/s                          CORTEX-45: 3780MH/s
CORTEX-46: 3492MH/s                          CORTEX-46: 0MH/s
CORTEX-47: 3552MH/s                          CORTEX-47: 2849MH/s
CORTEX-48: 4354MH/s                          CORTEX-48: 2142MH/s
CORTEX-49: 4144MH/s                          CORTEX-49: 3783MH/s
CORTEX-4A: 3672MH/s                          CORTEX-4A: 3978MH/s
CORTEX-4B: 3504MH/s                          CORTEX-4B: 4214MH/s
CORTEX-4C: 3848MH/s                          CORTEX-4C: 3245MH/s
CORTEX-4D: 3783MH/s                          CORTEX-4D: 3906MH/s
CORTEX-4E: 4018MH/s                          CORTEX-4E: 3240MH/s
CORTEX-4F: 4018MH/s                          CORTEX-4F: 3614MH/s
CORTEX-50: 4665MH/s                          CORTEX-50: 3311MH/s
CORTEX-51: 4816MH/s                          CORTEX-51: 3060MH/s
CORTEX-52: 4736MH/s                          CORTEX-52: 4380MH/s
CORTEX-53: 3552MH/s                          CORTEX-53: 4284MH/s
CORTEX-54: 4736MH/s                          CORTEX-54: 4380MH/s
CORTEX-55: 4018MH/s                          CORTEX-55: 3060MH/s
CORTEX-56: 3504MH/s                          CORTEX-56: 4088MH/s
CORTEX-57: 3492MH/s                          CORTEX-57: 4088MH/s
CORTEX-58: 4424MH/s                          CORTEX-58: 3212MH/s
CORTEX-59: 3913MH/s                          CORTEX-59: 3492MH/s
CORTEX-5A: 4590MH/s                          CORTEX-5A: 2920MH/s
CORTEX-5B: 4088MH/s                          CORTEX-5B: 4354MH/s
CORTEX-5C: 3731MH/s                          CORTEX-5C: 3256MH/s
CORTEX-5D: 3913MH/s                          CORTEX-5D: 2870MH/s
CORTEX-5E: 2920MH/s                          CORTEX-5E: 2870MH/s
CORTEX-5F: 4365MH/s                          CORTEX-5F: 4018MH/s
CORTEX-60: 3366MH/s                          CORTEX-60: 3396MH/s
CORTEX-61: 4380MH/s                          CORTEX-61: 3256MH/s
CORTEX-62: 4736MH/s                          CORTEX-62: 4320MH/s
CORTEX-63: 3366MH/s                          CORTEX-63: 4365MH/s
CORTEX-64: 4074MH/s                          CORTEX-64: 4018MH/s
CORTEX-65: 4144MH/s                          CORTEX-65: 3906MH/s
CORTEX-66: 4380MH/s                          CORTEX-66: 4365MH/s
CORTEX-67: 4018MH/s                          CORTEX-67: 3552MH/s
CORTEX-68: 4354MH/s                          CORTEX-68: 3731MH/s
CORTEX-69: 4665MH/s                          CORTEX-69: 4170MH/s
CORTEX-6A: 4284MH/s                          CORTEX-6A: 4380MH/s
CORTEX-6B: 3913MH/s                          CORTEX-6B: 3962MH/s
CORTEX-6C: 3256MH/s                          CORTEX-6C: 4365MH/s
CORTEX-6D: 3552MH/s                          CORTEX-6D: 4018MH/s
CORTEX-6E: 4144MH/s                          CORTEX-6E: 3627MH/s
CORTEX-6F: 3962MH/s                          CORTEX-6F: 4380MH/s
CORTEX-70: 4648MH/s                          CORTEX-70: 3731MH/s
CORTEX-71: 4354MH/s                          CORTEX-71: 3201MH/s
CORTEX-72: 3965MH/s                          CORTEX-72: 2960MH/s
CORTEX-73: 4816MH/s                          CORTEX-73: 3796MH/s
CORTEX-74: 4144MH/s                          CORTEX-74: 3311MH/s
CORTEX-75: 3552MH/s                          CORTEX-75: 3504MH/s
CORTEX-76: 4018MH/s                          CORTEX-76: 4380MH/s
CORTEX-77: 3157MH/s                          CORTEX-77: 3146MH/s
CORTEX-78: 3864MH/s                          CORTEX-78: 3913MH/s
CORTEX-79: 4830MH/s                          CORTEX-79: 4590MH/s
CORTEX-7A: 4515MH/s                          CORTEX-7A: 3848MH/s
CORTEX-7B: 4284MH/s                          CORTEX-7B: 4088MH/s
CORTEX-7C: 4284MH/s                          CORTEX-7C: 4214MH/s
CORTEX-7D: 3311MH/s                          CORTEX-7D: 3731MH/s
CORTEX-7E: 3396MH/s                          CORTEX-7E: 3906MH/s
CORTEX-7F: 2664MH/s                          CORTEX-7F: 4018MH/s
Total Processing Power: 502813 MH/s      Total Processing Power: 467971 MH/s
ASIC CORTEX Count: 128                      ASIC CORTEX Count: 127
ASIC Channels: 128                             ASIC Channels: 127
Queue Depth:383                                Queue Depth:381
Critical Temperature: 0                         Critical Temperature: 0
Total ASIC Thermal Cycles: 0                 Total ASIC Thermal Cycles: 0
Total PCB Thermal Cycles: 0                  Total PCB Thermal Cycles: 0
OK                                                    OK

[Taugeran]

Chart pron this evening once I get off work!

Things I noticed at a glance:

All cores on both boards are pretty significantly below 5G compared to lightfoot's which had a high of like 6.9-7G

Your right board has a totally dead cortex; either a broken data line or malformed hashing engines. Methinks data line see next line.

The cortex and ASIC channel count on right board is 127 vs left(128)

Queue depth differs by 2 as well

This would lead to ~ 3 queue items per cortex (128*3=384; 127*3=381)

-Taug

[lightfoot]

Quick update, purring like a kitten, 680gh, no errors.

I'll take it apart tomorrow. I have to see what the board looks like. I guess it's bye bye warranty or something.

C

[bcp19]

Also what speed is being reported by Eligius? Say the 22 minute numbers, do they match the lower or higher of the 3 BFG numbers?

The pool is kind of the final solution on speed, you're not getting rejects so I'm curious.

22.5 minutes 809.57 Gh/s 254464sh, went for a drink, refreshed the page, and....22.5 minutes 765.59 Gh/s 240640sh, next refresh and the same 22.5 minutes   809.57Gh/s 254464sh again.

I never considered eligius' status page to be accurate, is the 22 min. number any good as a reference? BFGminer low shows 776, mid 807, high 854 and up till 940
BCP both units have the solid on led, that goes on/off when hashing. One has a second led just below the first one, it blinks fast about 6 times (so fast it's impossible to count the actual number), then it goes off for a sec., it does this from powering up, and keeps doing it. There are more leds, just noticed 1 or 2 between the pcb and the copper plate, solid on, I see the reflection on the sledge's base plate under the right chip.

Lightfoot have you tried getting anything by jtag, or is that what you got as said earlier, with chiliflash?

Ognasty, I restart the pc and miners every time I make a change or after a shut down bfgminer, shouldn't be a problem there. The fan on the fets made no change so far, after 6 hours hashing.

edit; no time for the utp now, but I doubt it will change anything.

There are actually 4 lit LEDs under the water block there (7 total LEDs), they indicate good voltages present for 5.0, 3.3, 1.8 and either 1.5/1.2 volts.

As seen from the data you uploaded, you have a board with 'B' chips on it as the engine counts are roughly 800 engines per chip.

There are 64 'tiles' per chip and 16 engines per tile for a total of 1024 engines per chip.  I've not run across a pair of chips that have all 1024 running, I think the closest was around 2028.

[Taugeran]

Lightfoot Here is a plot for you of the Cortex listings:

LINK

Feel free to leave comments in the sheet and here

Sheet updated with Slok's 2 boards and breakdowns

[lightfoot]

There are 64 'tiles' per chip and 16 engines per tile for a total of 1024 engines per chip.  I've not run across a pair of chips that have all 1024 running, I think the closest was around 2028.

Ok, so each "tile" is kind of like a little BFL chip of yore. Those had 16 little engines in each chip, but were addressed in software as a single "chip". Different chips had different numbers of engines running, a few had all 16, most had 14-15 and a really crappy chip would have only 8 engines (65nm chips).

Question in my mind is what makes a "B" chip. I'd kind of expect engines to be out at random, some cortexes with all engines, some dead as rocks based on the variations in manufacture. Or maybe the missing engines will run at lower clocks, and this is the best balance of power to performance.

Meantime today's runs included stopping the BFGMiner and restarting a few times without powering down the Monarch. I'm running on a single 500 watt Corsair power supply with both plugs plugged in, keeping it simple. No errors at all with the exception of the queue errors that pop up because of stale jobs left when you stop and start. It hums quietly, does not change the hum, does not pop any errors once running. Likewise speed is a solid 690gh, solid as a rock.

So I think I can say the following:

• if the unit is running and hashing normally the odd errors do not pop up
• If I restart BFGMiner when there are no errors, the errors do not show up again once running with one exception
• If I power the unit off then on, the pitch of the FET/Chokes changes and the errors start popping up at random
• If I leave it off for over an hour the errors go away upon restart and the FETs are quieter

Never dull.

C

[SLok]

BFGMiner running without shutting down for 3 days now, on 4.7 and both monarchs on an un-powered  usb hub.

edit;   and 1 hour later it has shut down again. Trying 4.8 now...

[lightfoot]

Shoot. Did you try the auto-restarter thing?

C

[lightfoot]

So in the meantime I have been thinking about cranking up the speed on this unit. 700gh is nice, but maybe we can get a bit more. Like 800-900gh.

From what I can see, the big problem isn't heat on the chips; those water blocks are keeping the chips nice and cool. Way cooler than the BFL singles, and because the chips seem to be thinner, they can dump heat up as easily as down. We should be able to warm them up more, especially as it get cold.

The problem is the FETs. Specifically high-side. I noticed even with that big heat sink and fan on the back of the board plus the heat sinks on top the one side was running at 100c. That's hot. Putting a fan on the front side dropped it into the 60's, but it points out that if we go faster we need to dump heat. And fast.

We could put a corsair type water block on the back to cool the plane, but I don't think that's where the heat is. And we would need a double sized one to cool under the chokes as well. So what kind of top cooling solution would provide:

1) A way to dissipate the heat off the tops of those FETs into a water block
2) A way to move heat off the FETs *fast* as it builds up.

That's the trick: A standard heat sink isn't going to cut it. Maybe a heat pipe system designed for memory chips or something. Does anyone make custom heat pipes or something like it?

Then we either need code or a way to figure out how to fake the clock signals. Don't have a clue on either. The VRM looks to be hand-hackable, the reference voltage is set via an 8 bit input. Might be able to hot-wire it.

Hm.

C

[SLok]

Shoot. Did you try the auto-restarter thing?

C

Don't think that would work, a manual restart gives me a blank bfgminer screen after probing the com ports, I need to restart the pc and powercycle the miners to get something hashing again. Now 4.7 behave erratic too, and I'm on 4.8 again.

[lightfoot]

Shoot. Did you try the auto-restarter thing?

C

Don't think that would work, a manual restart gives me a blank bfgminer screen after probing the com ports, I need to restart the pc and powercycle the miners to get something hashing again. Now 4.7 behave erratic too, and I'm on 4.8 again.

Ok. 4.8 is solid here on app restarts and hasn't crashed yet. That 4.2 code worked even hot starting the miner. Haven't tried running it for any length of time on my um.. raspberry pi. Note it takes a minute after the code comes up to start hashing, might be doing speed checks. if you run multiple miners that time may be additive (check back in 10 mins for example)

C

[SLok]

Are you using the restartoncrash with the .bat file or bfgminer.exe?

[alh]

While it's a big effort, I would think "immersion cooling" would solve the problem for the FET's. The fan and radiator could be lifted from the structure, and the actual hashing board could be immersed. This is all off the cuff on my part, since I have never actually done, only seen it done on the Cray-2 Supercomputer in the 1980s.

Just my $.02 on the topic (which is EXTREMELY interesting).

[Unacceptable]

While it's a big effort, I would think "immersion cooling" would solve the problem for the FET's. The fan and radiator could be lifted from the structure, and the actual hashing board could be immersed. This is all off the cuff on my part, since I have never actually done, only seen it done on the Cray-2 Supercomputer in the 1980s.

Just my $.02 on the topic (which is EXTREMELY interesting).

It has been done with a KnC board as a test,not sure if he followed thru on it  

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7216.msg7645130#msg7645130

[sbogovac]

[...] The problem is the FETs. Specifically high-side. I noticed even with that big heat sink and fan on the back of the board plus the heat sinks on top the one side was running at 100c. That's hot. Putting a fan on the front side dropped it into the 60's, but it points out that if we go faster we need to dump heat. And fast. [...] A standard heat sink isn't going to cut it. Maybe a heat pipe system designed for memory chips or something. Does anyone make custom heat pipes or something like it? [...]

Maybe something like this?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=405986.320

Look at the pictures where there's a heatsink on the FET's (both front [Gleb Gamow September 15, 2014, 05:37:37 PM] AND back [LittleD September 15, 2014, 05:04:42 PM] side examples there) with a fan mounted over it...

[lightfoot]

Well, with BFL under this cloud of stupidity, I realized that there's nowhere to send RMAs. Given that I own a Monarch and have taken it apart a fair bit, I'll make this offer to the community:

If your Monarch shuts down, blows up, or ceases to hash post here and let me know. I'll send you my address, and I'll fix the thing for you. Right now what I can see failing is the FETs, which I can fix as I have pulled a lot of them on the 65mn gear.

I have the tools, I have the cred, and I want to help the people who have these units. Price is free or whatever you want to pay me for this. I'd rather help than scalp.

Post wherever, this is an open offer. Let's pull together and mine like hell.

Lightfoot

[Taugeran]

Well, with BFL under this cloud of stupidity, I realized that there's nowhere to send RMAs. Given that I own a Monarch and have taken it apart a fair bit, I'll make this offer to the community:

If your Monarch shuts down, blows up, or ceases to hash post here and let me know. I'll send you my address, and I'll fix the thing for you. Right now what I can see failing is the FETs, which I can fix as I have pulled a lot of them on the 65mn gear.

I have the tools, I have the cred, and I want to help the people who have these units. Price is free or whatever you want to pay me for this. I'd rather help than scalp.

Post wherever, this is an open offer. Let's pull together and mine like hell.

Lightfoot

+1++ cred

[SLok]

Lightfoot you really want a 64bit OS and BFL's custom build 4.2.0 BFGMiner, all the errors from the screenshots I posted are gone and speed is 10% up. I'm running win7pro 64bit on an amd3200+ 1GB ram laptop. Too bad my hp mini's hardware can't handle 64bit.

[lightfoot]

Yep. I will say that even after rebooting with their specific OS it works great. Which is mildly odd, but odd is odd. I really should just install 64 bit Windows 8 on my mining laptop, it's one of those "one of those days" things.

Meantime 700gh, solid as a rock now.

C

[SLok]

Nice, I hope the bfgm shut-offs are over here, seeing how it goes so far I'm confident. 400, 425 and 475GH rated, doing well. Go 4.2.0 man



Must send the cap one back....must se....must sssss...

[ComaWombat]

Chiliflash. Basically it's a serial app that sends a ZCX and reads back status. I've never been able to talk to these things with a serial program like PUTTY, never know the baud rate or stop bits. Oh well, someday.

I haven't tried to download the code yet, if the ROMs are protected that won't work. I don't think the Atmel will brick if you just try to read, I'll give it a shot tomorrow after running for a day with no problems.

Haven't tried chiliflash, but yesterday I tried my AVR Dragon and Atmel Studio for the first time ever. I bought a Jalapeno again just for testing it and flashed in a 1.29 firmware to try it out.

And today I gathered all my courage and tried it on my 550 GH Monarch. I was surprised to find the same Atmel controller on the Monarch that the Jallies had. And when I powered up the Dragon the Monarch somehow reset itself and overclocked itself from 650 to 710 GH. It was a bit terrifying experience when cgminer started spewing errors when I browsed through the device programming pages on the Atmel Studio. But yeah, the Molly didn't brick itself as a revenge for trying to read the secured firmware.

So what's next? We're waiting for somebody to post the firmware source code to wikileaks?

[lightfoot]

Well, here's a Monarch pic for everyone.



This is a view inside the pump from a leaking Monarch that came in to me for someone. The water was leaking, and the Monarch is dead. Dead part is simple: I can see that the FETs on the left side are shorted, the gate to drain resistance is 0 (ie: short) while the gate to drain on the other one is 50 ohms (good gate).

So I took off the water block, opened it up and found it flooded. Cleaned it out, put water in the unit by taking off the right side hose, and that's what I saw.

Those bubbles are indicitive of a water leak. Looks to be right at the junction in the pump where the water pipe goes into the pump. I am not certain of course, but it looks like a defect in the pump.

Interesting. Anyone else got a monarch that's dripping? Is it coming from inside the pump housing? Which side?

C

[lightfoot]

And today I gathered all my courage and tried it on my 550 GH Monarch. I was surprised to find the same Atmel controller on the Monarch that the Jallies had. And when I powered up the Dragon the Monarch somehow reset itself and overclocked itself from 650 to 710 GH. It was a bit terrifying experience when cgminer started spewing errors when I browsed through the device programming pages on the Atmel Studio. But yeah, the Molly didn't brick itself as a revenge for trying to read the secured firmware.

So what's next? We're waiting for somebody to post the firmware source code to wikileaks?

That's very interesting. So you didn't try to program it, but you hooked up the unit. Did you try reading the code? Did you get anything at all?

The reason it's el-interesting-o is that there's a little user page for data and the official page for code and all that stuff on the Atmels. You might have cleared the data field when you tried to read the code. Now, normally that would spell fuck-ola, but what if BFL used the same code load and put the "run at lower speeds" commands in the data field. By clearing it you got a default monarch (which I think has some sort of speed control like the Single/60's had, there is no way my Monarch comes up at 699gh every time)

Hm. There is a way to change the clock speed. Which means they needed to store state. And the chipset on there does support dynamic setting of voltage points, that's in the Intersil documentation. How can I write commands out to the USB port using something as dumb as HYPERTERM or PUTTY? Is it possible to just connect to the USB serial port and say "ZCX", "ZAA", "ZAB", etc and just fuzz the damn thing until we trip over something?

[lightfoot]

Oh and put a nice strong fan in front of those FETs. They can drop heat both ways, take the heat off the top as well as the back and watch the back temps. Is it hashing faster?

Thinking about it, you may have found the way to speed up Monarchs. :-)

C

[ComaWombat]

That's very interesting. So you didn't try to program it, but you hooked up the unit. Did you try reading the code? Did you get anything at all?

The reason it's el-interesting-o is that there's a little user page for data and the official page for code and all that stuff on the Atmels. You might have cleared the data field when you tried to read the code. Now, normally that would spell fuck-ola, but what if BFL used the same code load and put the "run at lower speeds" commands in the data field. By clearing it you got a default monarch (which I think has some sort of speed control like the Single/60's had, there is no way my Monarch comes up at 699gh every time)

Well, I got no firmware to program it with. Except for BFL FW from last year... I'm not entirely sure when the "reset/overclock" happened, but I think it was when I powered on the Dragon without doing anything. Or maybe when I read the chip info. Definitely the change happened before I tried to read the firmware.

And the firmware has the "security bit" set, so there's no way to read it with the Atmel Studio. Trying to read it just gives the security bit message.

Just power cycled the "550 GH" to try to get it to lower speed again but to no avail. At 700 GH indicated by cgminer the unit eats up 470W and my current psu for it is 500W, so I'm very close to danger zone again. I'd much rather have 650 GH @ 420W. But I did point more powerful fans towards the fets yesterday. The faster unit indicates 58-60 C and the slower one 50-52 C which  at least sounds fine. There could still be components crying in pain but I just wouldn't know about them.

[lightfoot]

Ok. Well I got the new FETs in and decided to take the old ones off this board. Symptom was a .3 ohm resistance on the 12 volt line instead of the normal 300 or so ohms.

Started pulling FETs, then found they were not coming off. Fuck these things are small. Too small for my normal picker, I'm going to need a special nozzle. Then I realized my pre-heater was broken.

*grumble* Took pre-heater apart, wire had broken at the phenolic junction between normal wires and the nichrome type wire in the heater. Fixed it, back in business.

Here's a little thought if you think you can burn these FETs off with just hot air: Forget it. In order to remove them without damaging the board, you have to take the board to 380F pre-heat, then sit on them at 450c air for *30* seconds each. Say what you want about the board, but man does it pull HEAT away from these FETs.

Started pulling, did the left 6 and no change to the resistance. 7-10 same thing, started feeling really grumpt because I have to PUT THESE BACK! Then I did #11. Instantly resistance went to 300 ohms. And the underside of the FET was bad. Looks like I found the bad one.

Now to let things cool, then put on new fets tomorrow. I'm going to need flux for this one, these are going to be hell to solder back on. But do-able, and I have now proven that FET shorts are what shut down power supplies.

On ward. We're getting there. By the way if anyone else wants to follow along give it a go!

C

[MrTeal]

Ok. Well I got the new FETs in and decided to take the old ones off this board. Symptom was a .3 ohm resistance on the 12 volt line instead of the normal 300 or so ohms.

Started pulling FETs, then found they were not coming off. Fuck these things are small. Too small for my normal picker, I'm going to need a special nozzle. Then I realized my pre-heater was broken.

*grumble* Took pre-heater apart, wire had broken at the phenolic junction between normal wires and the nichrome type wire in the heater. Fixed it, back in business.

Here's a little thought if you think you can burn these FETs off with just hot air: Forget it. In order to remove them without damaging the board, you have to take the board to 380F pre-heat, then sit on them at 450c air for *30* seconds each. Say what you want about the board, but man does it pull HEAT away from these FETs.

Started pulling, did the left 6 and no change to the resistance. 7-10 same thing, started feeling really grumpt because I have to PUT THESE BACK! Then I did #11. Instantly resistance went to 300 ohms. And the underside of the FET was bad. Looks like I found the bad one.

Now to let things cool, then put on new fets tomorrow. I'm going to need flux for this one, these are going to be hell to solder back on. But do-able, and I have now proven that FET shorts are what shut down power supplies.

On ward. We're getting there. By the way if anyone else wants to follow along give it a go!

C

If you want to invest a little in equipment, I'd recommend a thermal imager. They're incredible tools for debugging these kinds of problems since they can detect <1C temperature differences. Solder on a couple wires and use a current limited power supply, and you can see quite quickly which fet is the one that's shorted.

[lightfoot]

Might be a good idea, although I just burned my finger on a FET. On the positive side I have .598 volts on the chip now, however at least one of the six FETs is not placed right (sparked due to improper solder joint on the inside pins) and another one was drawing more current than it should.

Still, power is back on one side, we have control. I'll put this to bed now and look at it tomorrow, but these FETs are way more difficult to reflow solder than TO series parts. I might have to flux both the board and the fet pins on the inside to get enough heat transfer, and even that might not be enough.

I might need a full blast IR preheater that can take the board to molten Pb free temps. Time to check Ebay, anyone else got a good recommendation for a rework heater/reflow unit?

These are seriously high heat transfer components. Oh well, what better way to learn?

[MrTeal]

Might be a good idea, although I just burned my finger on a FET. On the positive side I have .598 volts on the chip now, however at least one of the six FETs is not placed right (sparked due to improper solder joint on the inside pins) and another one was drawing more current than it should.

Still, power is back on one side, we have control. I'll put this to bed now and look at it tomorrow, but these FETs are way more difficult to reflow solder than TO series parts. I might have to flux both the board and the fet pins on the inside to get enough heat transfer, and even that might not be enough.

I might need a full blast IR preheater that can take the board to molten Pb free temps. Time to check Ebay, anyone else got a good recommendation for a rework heater/reflow unit?

These are seriously high heat transfer components. Oh well, what better way to learn?

I use one of these, and it works quite well especially given the price.
http://www.circuitspecialists.com/bk7050.html
It even has a snazzy little adjustable holder for the air wand, so you can warm it up, set up the wand and then just hold the tweezers when it's time to pull it off.

[bcp19]

Ok. Well I got the new FETs in and decided to take the old ones off this board. Symptom was a .3 ohm resistance on the 12 volt line instead of the normal 300 or so ohms.

Started pulling FETs, then found they were not coming off. Fuck these things are small. Too small for my normal picker, I'm going to need a special nozzle. Then I realized my pre-heater was broken.

*grumble* Took pre-heater apart, wire had broken at the phenolic junction between normal wires and the nichrome type wire in the heater. Fixed it, back in business.

Here's a little thought if you think you can burn these FETs off with just hot air: Forget it. In order to remove them without damaging the board, you have to take the board to 380F pre-heat, then sit on them at 450c air for *30* seconds each. Say what you want about the board, but man does it pull HEAT away from these FETs.

Started pulling, did the left 6 and no change to the resistance. 7-10 same thing, started feeling really grumpt because I have to PUT THESE BACK! Then I did #11. Instantly resistance went to 300 ohms. And the underside of the FET was bad. Looks like I found the bad one.

Now to let things cool, then put on new fets tomorrow. I'm going to need flux for this one, these are going to be hell to solder back on. But do-able, and I have now proven that FET shorts are what shut down power supplies.

On ward. We're getting there. By the way if anyone else wants to follow along give it a go!

C

If you want to invest a little in equipment, I'd recommend a thermal imager. They're incredible tools for debugging these kinds of problems since they can detect <1C temperature differences. Solder on a couple wires and use a current limited power supply, and you can see quite quickly which fet is the one that's shorted.

Along these lines, if you have a constant current power supply and apply ~2-3v to the PCIe pins you can see the shorted FET glow under IR, saving the time and trouble of removing good FETs.

[lightfoot]

Update: Two Monarch have come in for servicing under the feed a homeless person program. And it looks like people will be fed this T-day. Good.

The first one was a 500gh Monarch that had the coolant leak out of it and was shorting out power supplies. Blown FETs as discussed. I've tried to put on new little metal ones, but I am running into three problems:

1) These boards are *heavy*. As in so much copper that they literally dissipate heat from my air tools faster than I can put it down. Even with a full 380F of pre-heat with a 15 minute preheat time *and* pulling off the back heat sink *and* using Kesterel liquid flux *AND* running my heat want at 425C I can barely get the metal FETs off.

2) I haven't figured out quite how to put them back on; the problem is the gate and source pins are *under* the FET and heating through those FETs with this much heat isn't the best of ideas. I might need a bigger preheater.

3) Did I mention these boards are heavy?

So I did what I usually do: I tried something else. BFL left on the old T-MAX pins for the bigger more traditional FETs, so I went to the Digi-Key cupboard and gave some a try.

I used two types of high frequency FETs on the Jalapenos: 052NE3LS types and CSD17506 types. The 17507s that were typically used had high gate capacitance, and running them in parallel was kind of a bad idea. 17506's and 052's have much lower capacitance, with the 052's trading some gate values for more power handling.

Bad idea here: Those Intersil drivers are running the FETs at way higher frequencies for power balancig. Gate float, blew the 052's. Boom.

Next up: 17506's. Put them on and even though they have lower on current max values they spend most of their time in transition switching and can get in and out of the death zone much faster. They don't even get *WARM* for Christ's sake.

So running 6 of them on the right side chip is giving me 275gh at 28c. Very cool, very smooth, running well. The left side is still shorted from the water damage, need to work on that a bit more to see what's up.

Now you may be thinking "How is he cooling the chip with a broken water block". Well...

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!



Yep. That's an old Single/50 heat sink on a Monarch with a Single fan on a stand-off. I actually used the little plate on the back as a gauge, went into the shed, and used the drill press to drill four holes around the edge, then tapped them with the 3mm tap. Then mounted it to the chip with AS5 heat sink compound and screwed it in the back with screws using the little springs to maintain tension without cracking the chip. The other side doesn't need a sink because the power FETs are not working (and three are removed).

Yep. It works. The back of the board behind the chip is reading a bit warm at 50c, but the heat sink is also reading 50c which means it's transferring heat optimally. And oddly enough it works, I haven't run it for more than 30 minutes but it is quite thermally stable.

I'm going to give Cool-IT another few days to respond, then try fixing the leak by potting the water block inside the housing. That should do it since the pressures are low, but it's water, so who knows.

More later. Moral: They can be fixed. Now you know how.

[lightfoot]

Second one just came in from England. Very interesting, didn't work on arrival, would power up but did not hash. Running Chiliflash on it to do a ZCX showed the board as running but with 0 chips.

Got it in, powered up. Same situation. Checked the voltages at the FET chokes: .6 volts, solid as a rock. Chips were cold on the back. So something was wrong.

Removed the back heat sink and noted the insulator had slipped a bit. Put it back on with the same old heat sink compound, fired the board up. All engines showed up, 750gh potential.

Looks like what happened is the heat sink shifted slightly or something and was shorting out the 1.2 volt power supply to the Monarch chips. Like the Singles, the Monarchs appear to have at least two power supplies, one for the hashing engines (the big .6 volt ones) and one for the hotel circuits since you can't do signal switching on .6v.

Anyway, fired it up and it started hashing but the back of the board under the monarch chip started to get hot. Bad thermal coupling. Pulled the water block again, cleaned the chip and block with 95% isopropyl and then the 1/2 cleaning stuff for heat sinks from Radio shack and put on a thin later of AS5. Put block on, GENTLY screwed down the screws in a cris-cross pattern to even out the torque, and fired it up. 30c on each side, got the thermal interconnection.

Seems to run, ran for 15 minutes at 700gh. Will once again screw with it some more tomorrow.

So if you have a Monarch that isn't running, check the right side water block. It might be shorting a power line.

Good luck and mine like hell.

[OgNasty]

So if you have a Monarch that isn't running, check the right side water block. It might be shorting a power line.

Pics?

[lightfoot]

I'll try to take one over the weekend. The unit is back together and hashing.

Very interesting tidbit: It runs a bit hotter/faster than mine (730gh vs. 700) and I noticed it cut out while mining. When it did I heard the "USB device disconnect and reconnect" sound which was very unusual.

Researched: I'm running both miners on Corsair CX500 supplies, which are being pushed to the edge. Apparently the extra draw on this unit is just pushing it over on the CX, which causes a power sag after a few hours.

It's on a CX750M now, seems to be happier. I also noticed the fans are running a bit faster, so it was probably pulling the 12 volt rail below 11 volts, which means "on the edge dude". So if you have a Monarch on a CX500 class power supply and it's dropping off after a few hours try a bigger power supply.

Back to work. And back to DigiKey for an order of the low side FETs for this other board. Might also throw in a FET driver as well. Still not sure why it is back-feeding power through the low side FETs on channel 3 only, really really weird.

C

[lightfoot]

Well, after getting some parts and working with the oscilliscope I think I can see what the problem is with the left side of the now-air-cooled Monarch. It was burning FETs, but what was weird is that the *bottom* side FETs were being burned. As in smoke. But it still could put out power to the hashing engines. Weird.

So I took off the choke to isolate it from the other supplies thinking they were backfeeding or something. Still boom. Pulled the top side FET and the bottom ones, they were not shorted. Put them back in, smoke.

Then I realized what was going on: I pulled the FETs again, cranked out the scope and looked at the signals on the gates of the FETs on the other channels. With the choke out the left side was in "hiccup" mode, where it sends a brief pulse to the FETs and looks for the current across the chokes. With one choke out you wouldn't see the current, so the system would stay in the "pulse the FETs each second". The low side and high side FETs for channels 1,2,4,5,6 were all reasonable, hiccup, hiccup.

The low side of channel 3 was also ok. However the high side was locked on. Solid 5 volts.

BINGO. That was it. The high side FET was always conducting power to the rail, so when the low side FETs closed they closed into a short, then opened from a short. The top side FET was always closed, so switching losses were none. The low side was switching, and thus burning up.

Reason? The FET driver for channel 3 was where the leak hit. It was soaked, shorted, and now was holding the high side on. Yep, that will do it.

The problem is those drivers are QFN packages. Which means that they have to be perfectly flat against the board, and a hair's difference in orientation is enough for them to fail. They totally suck and I hate placing the bigger ones which I can align using sight. These are tiny things, only 8 pads total.

But at least I know what's going on. And I can make a guess that if someone has a Monarch that had a leaking water block and is having overheats in the FET areas, they might not need to swap the FETs, but the associated FET channel driver.

I'll try swapping it over the weekend. Ug, I hate QFN. And with this much copper it's going to be FUN to preheat that region enough that I can get surface tension to mount those chips. I hat QFN, I really, really do.

But if I do manage to place it, the side should come back up. We'll see.

[lightfoot]

Quick update: Fixed a few more Monarchs, that's good. When a FET shorts, it seems to immediately disrupt the 6 phase power supply output and shuts down the board so it doesn't burn anything badly. Then since it is shorted, a power supply will simply crowbar on startup. Makes sense.

I've got a few more coming in this weekend for repairs, so I should be busy early next week. If they have the FETs shorted it should be an easy fix to swap them out and get them back on the road again.

I just found out that it looks like BFL is no longer under receivership, which means that they will be able to get back to doing RMAs and shipping again. Good.

I'll have to think about what this means in the long run, but in the meantime the Monarchs that are in the shipping pipeline to be repaired will be fixed under the current "donate the money to a food bank" program. Maybe I'll extend it till next week while they get on their feet or something, I'm sure they are probably busy, so if you have a problematic Monarch that needs repair let me know and I'll take a look at it.

[OgNasty]

I've got 2 Monarchs with the radiators bulging on the side of their tops. One of them has started having overheating issues as a result... I'm letting them run for now, but thinking a custom radiator solution might be the easiest way to handle it, unless BFL actually starts processing RMAs again.

[lightfoot]

*Nod*. What kind of symptoms do you see with the overheat? Can you post a picture of the one that's doing it?

Actually you still have that temp sensor thing. Check on the back of the unit in that square of space behind each chip and tell me what the temp is. That's the temp of the back of the chip coming through the board and should be pretty accurate. Also check the temp on the top of the radiator manifold, point it at the inlet hose and the return hose, that tells us the radiator efficiency.

I'll do the same once I wake up and get some coffee into me.

[peonminer]

Wow... so the monarchs that did make it to light.... are on the edge of exploding.

[lightfoot]

Perhaps. I've run into two leaking units so far but when I checked one of them out under a loupe I saw that the pump housing itself inside of the little lid had a tiny hair crack in it (you could see the bubbles coming out). There's a pic a few pages back. I tried contacting the Cool Air people, but didn't get much of a response.

Good question. Does anyone know if the CPU hot-rodders run into leaking water systems? I *do* remember that Apple did it on one of their systems, then stopped doing it due to leaks. G5's if I recall. Hm.

Cooling is fun: One problem is you need to have a temperature differential as well as some sort of fluid flow in order to cool anything. 70 degree air flowing across a heat sink on a 200F chip will cool far more than 100F air going over the same sink. It's not a 1-1 linear thing, it's a logarithmic thing.

I've talked to people who ran them in >100F rooms and were wondering why they were temperature-faulting. Heat's a bitch, no doubt and these miners are generating amazing levels of it in very small spaces. If the room is warm then less heat will transfer which results in hotter fluid. Heat the fluid too hot and it will expand. Expands too much and stuff will get interesting (though I would expect the pump to plate rubber gasket to leak before the radiator blows up). Might be worth a test with a blowtorch on one of my old sedion water coolers from the Chili days....

Another issue is air/water flow rates. Fans and pumps are weird, they too move geometrically more air the faster they rotate. Which means if you lower the voltage and fan speed by a bit, you get a lot less airflow (swept area times pitch and stuff like that). Bring the fan speed up too high and you will have cavitation issues as the fan blades literally "stall" in the air.

And then it's always better to pull a fluid (air is a fluid) through a radiator instead of pushing it through. When you push you create little vortices all over the place that impede the flow of heat from the radiator/heat sink into the air.

I remember when I was running water cooling on my 8 chip jally I was puzzled that when I ran the Corsair water pump at full speed the unit got *hotter* by a good bit. Checking the temps I saw that water was flowing too quickly over the heat sink in the pump, and wasn't picking up the heat. Slowing it to medium speed worked best, slow speed didn't work as well (but was still better than fast).

One thing I did see: When I ran two Monarchs (mine and another person's) on a single 750 watt supply (pulling 800 or so watts. Oh well), they were both running much hotter than they were when I ran each one on it's own 500 watt supply. Checking I noticed the front fan air flow was a lot less, and the radiator were hotter. I checked the voltage at the supply and saw that it was 11.2 volts instead of 12.

*That* is interesting. Technically you can run a Monarch at <11 volts but the fans and pumps will now run a lot slower. Lower RPMs on the fans means a lot less airflow. It's possible that's part of the problem.

I haven't been thinking much about this, as my main thought was on keeping the FETs cool. I'll fiddle with this a bit over the weekend. Hm....

[OgNasty]

*Nod*. What kind of symptoms do you see with the overheat? Can you post a picture of the one that's doing it?

Actually you still have that temp sensor thing. Check on the back of the unit in that square of space behind each chip and tell me what the temp is. That's the temp of the back of the chip coming through the board and should be pretty accurate. Also check the temp on the top of the radiator manifold, point it at the inlet hose and the return hose, that tells us the radiator efficiency.

I'll do the same once I wake up and get some coffee into me.

Everything is in line with my other Monarchs temperature reading wise using the gun.  I just had to point an extra house fan at it and move it to a cooler spot and it's not throttling anymore.  It ran as cool as the others before I noticed the "bubble" on the radiator (looks like swelled paint over a leak).  I imagine it lost a little bit of water and that's causing it to run about 6 degrees hotter according to cgminer.  The two Monarchs showing these symptoms weren't sitting level, for airflow reasons.  I suspect that Monarchs need to be run while sitting level, or else it will cause the radiators to leak over time.  I've got them sitting level now, so I am curious to see whether the leaking will stop and the problem will get worse or not (they don't appear to be leaking)...  My advice, keep these things sitting level.

Update: 1 of the leaks got worse.  Had to be taken offline.  

Update: The other one is also now offline. 

[lightfoot]

Well, the 300gh unit is back up and running, but with a slightly higher error count than normal. 15%, normally I see 2-5%. It's also a tiny bit slower, 280 or so instead of 300. Most of the errors are on the front chip but it's purring along and mining for the owner.

The two 700's are a different pair: One of them is running with one of it's two chips normal, the other 100% errors. Checking the FETs I see the voltage is a lot lower on that side; either the whole chip is toast or all of the FETs on that side are damaged. Or a *low* side FET failed, but that would create a hell of a hot spot. I may hook it up to the scope this weekend to see if the gates are all smooth or if one channel is odd (pointing to an intermittent FET).

The second one is dead. Removing the FETs I found that the PCB under the FET itself was burned in two places on both sides. Nothing spectacular, just a <1mm pad had vaporized under the FET. Result is I can't put a new one on, I did a quick try swapping in 17506 FETs but they can't hold 350gh a side without blowing up. They can hold 250, so I may rebuild this one as a 500gh unit.

Or I will have them RMAed with BFL. The water blocks on all of them share a common thread: Leaks or serious weirdness in the front block. I haven't see this on other units and the guy has other Monarchs that are fine. This miht just be a case where a bad batch of cooling blocks leaked over time, which then caused the chips to overheat with spectacular power draws and interesting results.

The 300 held because when it heated up the damage was minor. On the 700's one knocked out a side, and the other ran till the FETs failed hard. Not unbelievable.

Interesting. Well, I'll try replacing the FETs on the left side this weekend to bring the one unit back to normal, and will then try lower speed FETs on the other one and drop the voltage to the point where it will run at 500 or so. That should do it.

In any event since I am experimenting at this point on my own time, flag, and dollar I will stand behind my work personally: If I have to donate a SP20 (same 1.7th) to make things right I'll do that.

[wpgdeez]

This is a great service you are doing for everyone. Kudo's.

[lightfoot]

Thank you. I did what I could, since the FTC receiver wasn't doing.... well much of anything. It was the best I could do under the circumstances.

That said, I just heard that BFL is sending out RMA responses and such, so as a result I am out of business. Hurray!

Now I get to think about what I want to do next. Not sure, need to think about that. Maybe the question is how can I help the home bitcoin mining community?

[Bicknellski]

Thank you. I did what I could, since the FTC receiver wasn't doing....

WTF dude?

What sort of kool-aid are you on?

The FTC action didn't stop RMA processes or refunds read the court documents.

BFL did nothing to rectify issues even when they had the opportunity during the FTC receivership.

Let us see how many RMA's get done now... I suspect few. Considering they failed to RMA many in the past which is well documented.

Refunds and RMAs something that could be happening right now, could have been happening in the past, and should be continuing right now.

I wonder why they aren't?

---

Here is a thought stop propping up BFL and their crap.

[ComaWombat]

Wow... so the monarchs that did make it to light.... are on the edge of exploding.

Not all of them. My two Monarchs have soon been running for three months with no leaks, no overheating and zero problems. The only "problem" is slight dust accumulation between the fans and the radiators but I can solve that problem in no time.

So I feel good and bad at the same time after mining happily and profitably evil coins (Paycoin) with evil hardware. 

[Serjster]

My 2 monarchs have been doing awesome pumping out 1.4 Th/s for over 3 months without any problems, and if you're having any "failed to find work for queue results" it's because you're using the wrong app. Get the one directly from BFL, a custom build for monarch, which will maximize your hash rate and get rid of that error, you can get it here: http://www.butterflylabs.com/drivers/bfgminer/

[The_Prof]

I have a question...

Thanks to my countries magic power issues one of my boards got damaged. At a quick glance it seems that the IC for the fan control took the most damage. I have ordered more to replace the damaged on and the secondary as a precaution. However, even with this in mind it has issues while I'm trying to mine with it.

So the question is:
Could the blown chip be the source of the errors while testing mining or is there another problem that someone could be aware of if this has happened to them before/as well. If not I guess the best would be to replace the IC then test again. could end up a long process...

Lastly, I will have spares of these IC's as you can only order batches of 10. If anyone needs them feel free to ask.

[helipotte]

I have a question...

Thanks to my countries magic power issues one of my boards got damaged. At a quick glance it seems that the IC for the fan control took the most damage. I have ordered more to replace the damaged on and the secondary as a precaution. However, even with this in mind it has issues while I'm trying to mine with it.

So the question is:
Could the blown chip be the source of the errors while testing mining or is there another problem that someone could be aware of if this has happened to them before/as well. If not I guess the best would be to replace the IC then test again. could end up a long process...

Lastly, I will have spares of these IC's as you can only order batches of 10. If anyone needs them feel free to ask.

Just PM lightfoot.  I did and he sent me a TON of info about replacing mosfets.  One of my cards blew a few due to a storm induced blackout.

[The_Prof]

Will do, thanks.

[helipotte]

Does anyone have access to the firmware or AVR project files for these?  Would love to make some changes to the firmware.

[dextronomous]

HI guys.


Does anyone have a compiled win7x64 bfgminer for bfl monarch pci?

usb works fine, cannot seem to even after drivers let any bfgminer recognize the thing or spit errors..

thanks again guys.

[lightfoot]

Yes, I have it although I'll have to re-zip. No biggie. Technically it was built off shareware license, thus I don't have a problem putting it somewhere. PM me with a box ID, I can also send over the FTDI config file from one of the units I have here, get FT-Prog.

C

[grandpa86]

are you still repairing monarchs?

[lightfoot]

Haven't been in this thread for awhile, but yes I can probably help. What seems to be wrong with it?

[dextronomous]

Wow,

so sorry lightfoot, did i not respond to you about the software i asked, but then again, but to start putting those bfl monarch's into
a system, pci, etc, is a nice job. i don't even know where i put mine, 4 of them, 700ghs/ i guess, brandnew, almost, used shortly, btw.

they did work fine usb. so i guess will do that part anyway someday with them.. 

do you have them updated somewhere, i don't need servicing, but i have drivers original ones that should work somehow in windows 7, but with pci 64bit,  no go..
thanks gain for helping.

[lightfoot]

Hm. If they are first generation Monarchs (2 power plugs per board) then you need to run the special 4.20 version of BFGMiner on 64 bit Windows. Annoying, but it works. Or you can run BFGMiner on Unix, that also seems to work. Later models (3 PCI power plugs) can run the latest BFGMiner without issue.

I never really put them in a PC; the water blocks and such required too much fiddling around to make them fit.

Hope this helps. They were good units, just a bit too slow for modern times.

[grandpa86]

Thanks for answering. I really did not know anyone else to ask. As far as I can tell it has just quit hashing. I am an absolute total novice although I have been mining with this Monarch for a good while. What would probably make the most sense would be to box it up and send it to you. My email is lwd86@hotmail.com you can tell me whether it is worth repairing.

[lightfoot]

Ok. I'll PM you my info, I'll take a look at the little thing.

[grandpa86]

I took it off the mount and inspected it closely. There is a chip of some sort in the lower right hand corner that appears to be burned. The label appears to be U17. Little square thing with 4 prongs. Thanks. grandpa86

[lightfoot]

Oh post a pic or a link to a imgur or something.

[AlpacaBros]

Hi lightfoot,

I have been give 8 BLF Monarchs.  I would like to get them up and running.  Been working with BFG but getting errors.  Can I get a copy of the special 4.2.0 miner?

2017-06-06 09:31:17] BFL 1ct: Failed to find work for queue results: D887,47,0

I think this is similar to the error I read about from the previous posts.

Thanks

Matt

[lightfoot]

Yeah, that. I see BFL doesn't have the software download, let me see if I have a copy here.
C

[AlpacaBros]

Thanks - really appreciate that.

[AlpacaBros]

Hey lightfoot,

Is this the correct version - bfgminer-4.2.0-win64.zip?

Thanks

Matt

[AlpacaBros]

Ok - I don't think that is the version because all I got was an error message saying "This is Gibberish"

[lightfoot]

Try this for a copy of the software:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/f82ace9scav0jml/Bfgminer-For%20Monarchs.zip?dl=0

Download, extract, fix the bfgminer.conf file to include your pool, username, password, etc and you should be good to go. Needs 64 bit windows 7,8,10.

C

[AlpacaBros]

Hey lightfoot,

I tried the link and just got this.

Error (429)
This link is temporarily disabled. The person who shared it hit their daily limit of traffic or downloads. Learn about traffic limits.

Thanks

[lightfoot]

Hey lightfoot,

I tried the link and just got this.

Error (429)
This link is temporarily disabled. The person who shared it hit their daily limit of traffic or downloads. Learn about traffic limits.

Thanks

That stinks. Make sure you're not using tor, pm me your email and I'll send it.
C

[AlpacaBros]

lightfoot,

Thanks so much.  It is working perfectly.  No errors - nothing.

[lightfoot]

lightfoot,

Thanks so much.  It is working perfectly.  No errors - nothing.

Yep the first gen firmware had some oddness on out of order responses the software compensated.

Anyone else need it feel free to use that link.

[Ed.Snowden]

So what was the final results? How much were you able to stably overclock? How efficient can they be when underclocked? Why does mine have 3 pcie power ports while the instructions say 2? I think that this thread is and was interesting, why no updates or final summary? Also the link to the mining program for the first generation monarch's is dead.

[lightfoot]

They can run a good .5 w  /gh. Nice part is how quiet they are. 3 plug units were the best just run them.

[Ed.Snowden]

I just got my monarch, new, unused (supposedly) from eBay. I can't try it out yet because the power supply that I ordered hasn't arrived yet. I know that it's not efficient enough for modern mining, but I think that it's just plain cool looking, with it's little radiator and everything exposed for view on the desktop. And if I run it at work the electricity won't matter. The power supply that I ordered is an EVGA 80+ Gold Rated 650GQ power supply. Do you think that it was a good choice for the 700 Monarch? Has anyone ever tried WaterWetter added to the coolant? It prevents bubbles from forming on aluminum, it's worth up to 30°f in automotive applications.

[lightfoot]

Don't open the loop unless you have a spare heat sink set (some guy is selling them on Ebay for $20 each, if your Monarch had a leak in the cooling system that's a nice fix). Those things run the chips quite warm (60c) and any disruption in cooling will blow the chips since it is *very* thin (which really helps with heat dissipation).

Use the V3X and FBX values to slow it down, remember the second digit is hexidecimal but voltages above 4 are locked out) and have fun with it.

[Ed.Snowden]

  I can't get it to work! When I plug it into my laptop, it isn't recognized...like nothing was plugged in. I installed the newest Virtual COM Port Drivers (http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm) and everything works with my little Butterfly BFL60, but the Monarch just sits there with the fans and pumps running. What do I do now? My laptop is Windows 7 and I'm using BFG Miner 5.4.2, maybe I need a different OS for usb?

[lightfoot]

Check in hardware settings/device manager to see if a COM port is appearing. Also if the thing has two plugs you need to use the special 4.20 version of BFGMiner. If three use the latest version.

C

[Ed.Snowden]

It has 3 pcie power ports, it is the latest version, nothing at all happens to my PC when I plug it in (not even the sound when a device is connected) like nothing is connected at all. When I connect the BFL60, without the drivers it makes a sound and looks for drivers and when I connect the Monarch NOTHING happens at all. And BFG Miner can't find it.
I'll take it to a local computer shop and have them trouble shoot it tomorrow, but tonight I'm depressed and disgusted with it.

[Ed.Snowden]

OK, it was the USB printer plug, after plugging and unplugging the cord a couple of times the PC found it. How hot should it get? It's running 60-70c .It seems hot! I went on eBay and ordered a new cooling system. The new problem now is that half of the device threads consistently give an error "Failed to find work for queue" and my pool says that I'm running at 410...not 700
Advice will be welcomed. My other miners were all plug-n-play.

[Ed.Snowden]

I ran it for 2hrs with a small household fan pointed at the pumps/copper plates. It ran 65c and my pool says 516.5ghz but half of the device threads still give the error! 

[lightfoot]

It probably has two power plugs; you need to get the 4.20 version that had a custom requeuing trick to fix that.

Get the $19.00 heat sinks on Ebay, I just got one and they are brand spanking new. Warning, remove all the old heat sink compound from the chips and screw them down carefully as the chip is *exceptionally* thin.

60-70c is about the right temps. Set your max temp to 80c or so in bfgminer.conf just to be on the safe side, and mine away! Two of these will keep a bedroom toasty warm at 10 degrees F.

[Ed.Snowden]

It has 3 pcie power ports all 3 are connected to the new PSU. I can't try version 4.20 because the download link is dead.I DID order the cooling system from eBay (https://www.ebay.com/itm/COOLIT-Systems-Eco-III-120FB-Liquid-Cooling-System-BFL-Butterfly-Labs-Surplus/162791485695?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649)($31.64)

60-70c is about the right temps. Set your max temp to 80c or so in bfgminer.conf just to be on the safe side, and mine away!

If 70°c is normal then I probably don't need the cooling system. I searched my PC for "bfgminer.conf" it doesn't exist. I believe that the "runme.bat" file is how to configure bfgminer, I haven't even been able to add a second user, the examples in the "read me" make no sense to me, without a user friendly gui...I'm lost.

[lightfoot]

It has 3 pcie power ports all 3 are connected to the new PSU. I can't try version 4.20 because the download link is dead.I DID order the cooling system from eBay (https://www.ebay.com/itm/COOLIT-Systems-Eco-III-120FB-Liquid-Cooling-System-BFL-Butterfly-Labs-Surplus/162791485695?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649)($31.64)

60-70c is about the right temps. Set your max temp to 80c or so in bfgminer.conf just to be on the safe side, and mine away!

If 70°c is normal then I probably don't need the cooling system. I searched my PC for "bfgminer.conf" it doesn't exist. I believe that the "runme.bat" file is how to configure bfgminer, I haven't even been able to add a second user, the examples in the "read me" make no sense to me, without a user friendly gui...I'm lost.

Hm. I have the code here somewhere, let me see if this works.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9vcjl4djwvdtwfc/Bfgminer-For%20Monarchs.zip?dl=0

[Ed.Snowden]

"Restricted Content
This file is no longer available. For additional information contact Dropbox Support."

[Ed.Snowden]

OK 4.2.0 version (http://bfgminer.org/files/4.2.0/)
This version doesn't seem to have an EXE file, and a BAT file doesn't work either.  How is this used?

[lightfoot]

Try this one:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tpmpf7u03wxpl74/Bfgminer-For%20Monarchs.zip?dl=0

If that doesn't work PM me your email and I'll send a copy over

[helipotte]

I have always had good luck using CGminer for early low serial number monarchs.  And the latest Bfgminer with the later ones.  What firmware does your unit have?  If it is 1.4.2 CGminer might work well.

[Kuschelweich]

Have been reading the official underclocking documentation on these, but it's fairly sparse about what you can actually expect to get from the huge range of frequency settings available. Basically I'd be interested in finding the absolute best W/GH these can produce.

One thing that I can't find any more information about is the 2x Mode mentioned in the manual other than that it's only available with voltage indexes of 4 or above. I even used an archive to search the old BFL forums, but nothing about it there either. Is it actually worth messing with? Does it double performance or some such?

Thanks! 

[lightfoot]

Have been reading the official underclocking documentation on these, but it's fairly sparse about what you can actually expect to get from the huge range of frequency settings available. Basically I'd be interested in finding the absolute best W/GH these can produce.

One thing that I can't find any more information about is the 2x Mode mentioned in the manual other than that it's only available with voltage indexes of 4 or above. I even used an archive to search the old BFL forums, but nothing about it there either. Is it actually worth messing with? Does it double performance or some such?

Thanks! 

F0D and F1D are the values above FFX. To be honest heat is your key indicator of efficiency, when the heat starts rising faster than linearly then you know you're entering the too much power zone.

Right now I get great efficiency using FEX and FCX on a pair of 2 plug BFL Monarchs being used to keep a room (quite) warm. They're running off a pair of 700 watt supplies, probably pulling under 300 watts each, so around .4w/gh and pulling around 62c at the chips. Which given the silence is not bad and probably profitable.

[Ed.Snowden]

I gave up. Too complicated. I ordered 5 S4's and a Wi-Fi hotspot and Ethernet to Wi-Fi bridge. Electricity is FREE at work. The Monarch is a beautiful paperweight. It's running over 500gig, even with half of the strings erroring out. It says  "Failed to find work for queue" and "sanity check" very, very fast and then it mines the other half of the strings.

[Ed.Snowden]

@helipotte...

I have always had good luck using CGminer for early low serial number monarchs.  And the latest Bfgminer with the later ones.  What firmware does your unit have?  If it is 1.4.2 CGminer might work well.

I've been downloading and installing tons of $h👁t ; curl, glib, gettextruntime, pkg-config, gtkruntime, libtool, mingw, etc., since you posted this reply and I'm still no closer to getting CGminer to work. Why doesn't someone make a miner with a Windows installer, I don't know linux, or command prompts, can't I BUY a simple quality mining program? Trying to get these mining programs to work really makes me appreciate the router like GUI interface in my Antminers.
P.S. I already tried Multiminer, it didn't detect any of my devices, it just started mining with my GPU (Nvidia) useless.

[Ed.Snowden]

Does anyone have a copy of the original Bfgminer for Monarchs? I have the queue-ing error problem. Please provide a link, ANYONE.
Creating a download link to virtually any of your files is easy with a FREE Google Drive account, just upload the file and click on link sharing.

[Ed.Snowden]

Thank you Lightfoot for the elusive BFG for Monarchs!👍
I'll leave a link for anyone else that needs it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sVJlHESfIDfzuFyWQRkQEqVt7XouqDBz/view?usp=drivesdk

[BadgerHobbs]

Has anyone tried using the BFL Monarch in the PCIE slots in their PC?

I've ordered 3 BFL Monarchs that are arriving on Thursday to try out for fun and was wondering if anyone had actually tried putting them into their motherboard. I'm getting the 500Gh/s versions so just one will be pulling about 290w from my computer's PSU (I've plugged an Antminer S1 (350w) into it in the past with no issues but it was sketchy af ). I couldn't find anything online about someone trying it out so i thought that i would ask, if not ill be sure to try it out

[lightfoot]

Has anyone tried using the BFL Monarch in the PCIE slots in their PC?

I've ordered 3 BFL Monarchs that are arriving on Thursday to try out for fun and was wondering if anyone had actually tried putting them into their motherboard. I'm getting the 500Gh/s versions so just one will be pulling about 290w from my computer's PSU (I've plugged an Antminer S1 (350w) into it in the past with no issues but it was sketchy af ). I couldn't find anything online about someone trying it out so i thought that i would ask, if not ill be sure to try it out

It should work: Use the BFGMiner 4.20 code on them and it will pick up the PCIe slot. There is no performance difference and you still need to mount the radiator but it will work.

[BadgerHobbs]

Cheers, I'll be sure to update if i have any issues

[Benjaminplease]

Trying to get my 2 monarchs to work.

The admins keep deleting my posts and not sure if my pm's are going through.

Thanks Ed for the bfg link. Need to reinstall.

Does the code for the cfminer coding transfer 100% to bfgminer?



Does awesome miner work with monarch BFl 700? In order To do cryptomining auto switching

[cbjarscoobs]

Trying to get my 2 monarchs to work.

The admins keep deleting my posts and not sure if my pm's are going through.

Thanks Ed for the bfg link. Need to reinstall.

Does the code for the cfminer coding transfer 100% to bfgminer?



Does awesome miner work with monarch BFl 700? In order To do cryptomining auto switching

I got my two 500ghs monarchs running off the BFG 4.2 provided in this thread but only pulling 280 watts at 350 ghs. My 700 ghs keeps erroring out with the 4.2 bfgminer

[cbjarscoobs]

Don't open the loop unless you have a spare heat sink set (some guy is selling them on Ebay for $20 each, if your Monarch had a leak in the cooling system that's a nice fix). Those things run the chips quite warm (60c) and any disruption in cooling will blow the chips since it is *very* thin (which really helps with heat dissipation).

Use the V3X and FBX values to slow it down, remember the second digit is hexidecimal but voltages above 4 are locked out) and have fun with it.

do we put the V3X and FBX in the .conf file? Trying to find the syntax, but struggling to find the answer.

[Benjaminplease]

Trying to get my 2 monarchs to work.

The admins keep deleting my posts and not sure if my pm's are going through.

Thanks Ed for the bfg link. Need to reinstall.

Does the code for the cfminer coding transfer 100% to bfgminer?



Does awesome miner work with monarch BFl 700? In order To do cryptomining auto switching

I got my two 500ghs monarchs running off the BFG 4.2 provided in this thread but only pulling 280 watts at 350 ghs. My 700 ghs keeps erroring out with the 4.2 bfgminer

When you say erroring out do you mean the "sanity check" or it stops?

Mine did a lot of sanity checks then it would warm up and run ok. Kept a fan on it so it wouldn't overheat but made some coin on it...

[Kuschelweich]

Don't open the loop unless you have a spare heat sink set (some guy is selling them on Ebay for $20 each, if your Monarch had a leak in the cooling system that's a nice fix). Those things run the chips quite warm (60c) and any disruption in cooling will blow the chips since it is *very* thin (which really helps with heat dissipation).

Use the V3X and FBX values to slow it down, remember the second digit is hexidecimal but voltages above 4 are locked out) and have fun with it.

do we put the V3X and FBX in the .conf file? Trying to find the syntax, but struggling to find the answer.

BFL had a underclocking manual for these, it's somewhat brief but does explain this a bit. I'll see if I can post the manual here, but here's some excerpts from it:

Passing commands:

Code:

bfgminer  <network & hashing related parameters…> --set bfl:_cmd1=F0D --set bfl:_cmd1=V5X 

Setting Frequency:
To set the regular frequency, command: ‘F’,’<INDEX>’,’X’ can be used.  This sets the frequency index in regular mode (the slower mode). To operate in the fast 2x mode, ‘F’<INDEX>’D’ must be used.   
For example, to set the frequency to index 3 in regular mode, ‘F3X’ must be submitted. To set the frequency index to 1 at 2x mode, ‘F1D’ should be used. Once either command is issued, the on-board controller recalibrates all the engines on the board to decommission the ones that can’t operate with the new frequency setting. It is HIGHLY recommended to set the core-voltage to proper value before changing the frequency. 
Since the on-board ASICs use Ring-Oscillators, frequency index cannot be accurately mapped to any number (variance could be as high as 40%). Temperature and core voltage will affect the frequency as well.

[eroxors]

I have two Monarchs that seem to have faulty temperature sensors and they stop hashing very quickly after bootup. Any way to fix the problem?

I have another with 15% HW error rate, any ideas on this?

[eroxors]

I have two Monarchs that seem to have faulty temperature sensors and they stop hashing very quickly after bootup. Any way to fix the problem?

I have another with 15% HW error rate, any ideas on this?

Error rate is only this high with the custom BFL bgfminer 4.2. On 4.10 it seems better and hashrates are higher. However, I'm getting a "failed to find work for queue results" on one Monarch and the two with temp monitor issues do not show up at all.

[BadgerHobbs]

I'm having major issues with my 750GH/s Monarch. When i plug my 500GH/s versions into my PSU, they work fine. But when i plug my 750GH/s model in, nothing happens. I have to turn the PSUoff and on again to get it working with my 500GH/s model. Please help!

[eroxors]

I'm having major issues with my 750GH/s Monarch. When i plug my 500GH/s versions into my PSU, they work fine. But when i plug my 750GH/s model in, nothing happens. I have to turn the PSUoff and on again to get it working with my 500GH/s model. Please help!

I have a couple that are doing weird things as well, I will try underclocking based on Kuschelweich's post and report back.

[lightfoot]

I'm having major issues with my 750GH/s Monarch. When i plug my 500GH/s versions into my PSU, they work fine. But when i plug my 750GH/s model in, nothing happens. I have to turn the PSUoff and on again to get it working with my 500GH/s model. Please help!

Can you check the resistance across the pcie pins to see if it's shorting out? One failure mode on the Monarchs is the high side FETs short due to overheating which crowbars the power supply.

C

[lightfoot]

I have two Monarchs that seem to have faulty temperature sensors and they stop hashing very quickly after bootup. Any way to fix the problem?

I have another with 15% HW error rate, any ideas on this?

15% error rate is not a big deal, a few engines are screaming but they don't really pull power. As long as it hashes well let it be.

As for the faulty temp sensors, are you sure the water blocks are running? Listen for the water at the radiator top, then check around to see if there are any signs of leaks around the water blocks/pumps.

C

[BadgerHobbs]

I'm having major issues with my 750GH/s Monarch. When i plug my 500GH/s versions into my PSU, they work fine. But when i plug my 750GH/s model in, nothing happens. I have to turn the PSUoff and on again to get it working with my 500GH/s model. Please help!

Can you check the resistance across the pcie pins to see if it's shorting out? One failure mode on the Monarchs is the high side FETs short due to overheating which crowbars the power supply.

C

I don't have a multi-meter to check for resistance, however i have discovered that its plugged in and i attempt to powered it up, it smells of burnt plastic and i even thought that i saw a little smoke from one of the pumps or something.

[cbjarscoobs]

Trying to get my 2 monarchs to work.

The admins keep deleting my posts and not sure if my pm's are going through.

Thanks Ed for the bfg link. Need to reinstall.

Does the code for the cfminer coding transfer 100% to bfgminer?



Does awesome miner work with monarch BFl 700? In order To do cryptomining auto switching

I got my two 500ghs monarchs running off the BFG 4.2 provided in this thread but only pulling 280 watts at 350 ghs. My 700 ghs keeps erroring out with the 4.2 bfgminer

When you say erroring out do you mean the "sanity check" or it stops?

Mine did a lot of sanity checks then it would warm up and run ok. Kept a fan on it so it wouldn't overheat but made some coin on it...

http://i68.tinypic.com/wqpoqq.png

that is what i am getting. Just looks like it overheats. Fans are working and feels like the water is pumping around.

[Benjaminplease]

http://i68.tinypic.com/wqpoqq.png

that is what i am getting. Just looks like it overheats. Fans are working and feels like the water is pumping around.

Stupid question,  do you have a separate fan blowing on them? I used a floor fan and it made a big difference. Test the direction to be sure you're not blowing the hot air back into them. If you find another solution please post it.

[eroxors]

I have two Monarchs that seem to have faulty temperature sensors and they stop hashing very quickly after bootup. Any way to fix the problem?

I have another with 15% HW error rate, any ideas on this?

15% error rate is not a big deal, a few engines are screaming but they don't really pull power. As long as it hashes well let it be.

As for the faulty temp sensors, are you sure the water blocks are running? Listen for the water at the radiator top, then check around to see if there are any signs of leaks around the water blocks/pumps.

C

I believe you are correct, sir.

I can hear fluid when I shake it, but I can't hear any fluid moving when I turn it on. I can tell at least one of the pumps initiates, but the copper blocks heat up immediately, some shares are accepted and then when the temp reaches 85 they shut down. Too little fluid perhaps. I have ordered new cooling units, I'll see if that fixes the issue.

Another issue, I have a 700gh unit that only hashes at 320gh with bfg 4.10 and 400 with BFL custom bfg 4.2. Could this be another cooling issue with one of the units shutting down?

[cbjarscoobs]

I have two Monarchs that seem to have faulty temperature sensors and they stop hashing very quickly after bootup. Any way to fix the problem?

I have another with 15% HW error rate, any ideas on this?

15% error rate is not a big deal, a few engines are screaming but they don't really pull power. As long as it hashes well let it be.

As for the faulty temp sensors, are you sure the water blocks are running? Listen for the water at the radiator top, then check around to see if there are any signs of leaks around the water blocks/pumps.

C

I believe you are correct, sir.

I can hear fluid when I shake it, but I can't hear any fluid moving when I turn it on. I can tell at least one of the pumps initiates, but the copper blocks heat up immediately, some shares are accepted and then when the temp reaches 85 they shut down. Too little fluid perhaps. I have ordered new cooling units, I'll see if that fixes the issue.

Another issue, I have a 700gh unit that only hashes at 320gh with bfg 4.10 and 400 with BFL custom bfg 4.2. Could this be another cooling issue with one of the units shutting down?

I am having the exact same issue with my 700gh unit. What time s the other cooling unit u are ordering? Do you have a killawatt attached to see wattage draw? Mine seems to spike over 750 watt usage when I turn it on

[eroxors]

I have two Monarchs that seem to have faulty temperature sensors and they stop hashing very quickly after bootup. Any way to fix the problem?

I have another with 15% HW error rate, any ideas on this?

15% error rate is not a big deal, a few engines are screaming but they don't really pull power. As long as it hashes well let it be.

As for the faulty temp sensors, are you sure the water blocks are running? Listen for the water at the radiator top, then check around to see if there are any signs of leaks around the water blocks/pumps.

C

I believe you are correct, sir.

I can hear fluid when I shake it, but I can't hear any fluid moving when I turn it on. I can tell at least one of the pumps initiates, but the copper blocks heat up immediately, some shares are accepted and then when the temp reaches 85 they shut down. Too little fluid perhaps. I have ordered new cooling units, I'll see if that fixes the issue.

Another issue, I have a 700gh unit that only hashes at 320gh with bfg 4.10 and 400 with BFL custom bfg 4.2. Could this be another cooling issue with one of the units shutting down?

I am having the exact same issue with my 700gh unit. What time s the other cooling unit u are ordering? Do you have a killawatt attached to see wattage draw? Mine seems to spike over 750 watt usage when I turn it on

Good news. Lightfoot was correct, the issue was the coolers. I replaced the two non-functioning units and the monarchs are now hashing along nicely. I am going to try replacing the cooler on the 700GH unit tomorrow.

[lightfoot]

Great! Post how you did it (include things like did you remove the old compound from the chips, what you put on, screw torque amounts, etc) so other people can do this as well.

The Ebay coolers are a bargain....

[cbjarscoobs]

Great! Post how you did it (include things like did you remove the old compound from the chips, what you put on, screw torque amounts, etc) so other people can do this as well.

The Ebay coolers are a bargain....

Would I be able to take the pumps off a working 400mhs Unit and install them on a 700mhs?

[cbjarscoobs]

I have two Monarchs that seem to have faulty temperature sensors and they stop hashing very quickly after bootup. Any way to fix the problem?

I have another with 15% HW error rate, any ideas on this?

15% error rate is not a big deal, a few engines are screaming but they don't really pull power. As long as it hashes well let it be.

As for the faulty temp sensors, are you sure the water blocks are running? Listen for the water at the radiator top, then check around to see if there are any signs of leaks around the water blocks/pumps.

C

I believe you are correct, sir.

I can hear fluid when I shake it, but I can't hear any fluid moving when I turn it on. I can tell at least one of the pumps initiates, but the copper blocks heat up immediately, some shares are accepted and then when the temp reaches 85 they shut down. Too little fluid perhaps. I have ordered new cooling units, I'll see if that fixes the issue.

Another issue, I have a 700gh unit that only hashes at 320gh with bfg 4.10 and 400 with BFL custom bfg 4.2. Could this be another cooling issue with one of the units shutting down?

I am having the exact same issue with my 700gh unit. What time s the other cooling unit u are ordering? Do you have a killawatt attached to see wattage draw? Mine seems to spike over 750 watt usage when I turn it on

Good news. Lightfoot was correct, the issue was the coolers. I replaced the two non-functioning units and the monarchs are now hashing along nicely. I am going to try replacing the cooler on the 700GH unit tomorrow.

Did you use a walkthrough for replacing the coolers?

[eroxors]

Great! Post how you did it (include things like did you remove the old compound from the chips, what you put on, screw torque amounts, etc) so other people can do this as well.

The Ebay coolers are a bargain....

I bought the bulk package for $75. I have extras now. They came with the compound on the HS and I removed what was on the units with alcohol. I screwed the back brackets on opposing ends until the flexion on the bracket was almost inverted. It's very similar to a GPU HSF. One issue I had was a bracket was missing the rubber standoffs, but I had some rubber I cut to put in its place.


Sorry, but I didn't take pictures and I sold the Monarchs I had.

[eroxors]

Great! Post how you did it (include things like did you remove the old compound from the chips, what you put on, screw torque amounts, etc) so other people can do this as well.

The Ebay coolers are a bargain....

Would I be able to take the pumps off a working 400mhs Unit and install them on a 700mhs?

Probably. I did this once to test the problematic 700mhs unit I had, prior to getting the new units. I was never able to figure out the 700 unit I had that was hashing at 400 - 460. It wasn't cooling or power.

These units are very interesting. I'm impressed that BFL was able to produce such a decent unit (albeit hot-running and below performance expectations) given all of their failings.

[lightfoot]

These units are very interesting. I'm impressed that BFL was able to produce such a decent unit (albeit hot-running and below performance expectations) given all of their failings.

Yeah they had a tough time building the damn things. Main fault in retrospecitve was building such a fucking big chip; it ran so hot they couldn't run them in series like ants did, and trying to build a power step down supply that could feed the chips wound up with FETs that ran almost as hot as the chip (inefficient). A series string of 15 smaller chips would have been amazing, but they wanted to do the stupid plug it in your computer form factor.

And they were insane. Ah well, no more domestic US miner manufacturers. Ants or nothing.

[mkj_14]

apologies if this has been covered before.

i have a number of BFL Monarch.  they power up and run fine at idle.  within 5 minutes of mining the temps at 90C and cut off.  any ideas where i should start?


Thanks

[DaveF]

apologies if this has been covered before.

i have a number of BFL Monarch.  they power up and run fine at idle.  within 5 minutes of mining the temps at 90C and cut off.  any ideas where i should start?


Thanks

Could be several things.

1) Cooling pump is dead so the fluid is not moving.
2) All the coolant leaked out (or was drained)
3) The cooling blocks are not solidly attached to the chips.

If you know someone with PC liquid cooling experience they can usually tell you in a few minutes if it's any of those. And for the most part #1 and #2 they are easily (if not cheaply) fixable. #3 is quick and simple but usually not the issue.

Did you get them used or have you had them since new? Did they ever work?

-Dave

[lightfoot]

Dave's got it. I'd check first to make sure the fan on the front of the radiator is hooked up and working, then check to see if the radiator is getting warm (indication of pumps running). Then check to make sure the fan on the back works, then let's go from there.

C

[mkj_14]

Hi,  thanks for the reply's.

i bought them used at a very god price for a bit of fun.

1 - work but at a lower rate. (500 ghz instead of 700 ghz)
1 - I've got one to work, however runs a little hot (68 - 78 C)
2 - overheat within 5 minute of mining.

unfortunately there no one in my area that every seen water-cooling.  plus i couldn't trust the quality of work as I'm in working in the middle east at the moment.



Cheers

[mkj_14]

Just out of interest.

Has anyone been able to get the monarch to work on Dash Coin?

[cbjarscoobs]

Just out of interest.

Has anyone been able to get the monarch to work on Dash Coin?

Monarchs hash SHA256 coins. Dash is a different algorithm, won’t work.

[cbjarscoobs]

apologies if this has been covered before.

i have a number of BFL Monarch.  they power up and run fine at idle.  within 5 minutes of mining the temps at 90C and cut off.  any ideas where i should start?


Thanks

I have same issue but mine cut off in 5 secs not 5 minutes.

[mkj_14]

hi,  does anyone know where the temperature sensor are, and if there replaceable?  my showing 150 C at start up........could be the problem me thinks.

[cbjarscoobs]

hi,  does anyone know where the temperature sensor are, and if there replaceable?  my showing 150 C at start up........could be the problem me thinks.

i would like to know as well

[lightfoot]

Sorry, been away for awhile. The temp sensors are labelled T1 and T2. They are bottom center of the board, right outbound of the bottom two screws by the ISL chips that control the 6 phase FETs on each side.

You could ignore them by setting the temp on BFGMiner.conf to 200 or so, but make sure the temps on the chips really are reasonable before you do this.

C

[cbjarscoobs]

Sorry, been away for awhile. The temp sensors are labelled T1 and T2. They are bottom center of the board, right outbound of the bottom two screws by the ISL chips that control the 6 phase FETs on each side.

You could ignore them by setting the temp on BFGMiner.conf to 200 or so, but make sure the temps on the chips really are reasonable before you do this.

C

Got a IR temp reader, and looks like I am getting to hot. Looking next to the pumps. Is there a way to test the pumps without powering the board?

[lightfoot]

Sure, the pumps just use normal 12v fan plugs. Use an adapter to connect a fan to a 12v power supply and fire them up. You should be able to hear the water running in the radiator if they are working.

Any evidence of water leaking (on the copper plates or bottom metal frame)?

[cbjarscoobs]

Sure, the pumps just use normal 12v fan plugs. Use an adapter to connect a fan to a 12v power supply and fire them up. You should be able to hear the water running in the radiator if they are working.

Any evidence of water leaking (on the copper plates or bottom metal frame)?

No water leaking evidence at all. I quickly tested one pump per your suggestion but got nada. Would I need to power both pumps at the same time?

[lightfoot]

No each pump is independant. Try the second one, I haven't seen both fail together very often.

[cbjarscoobs]

No each pump is independant. Try the second one, I haven't seen both fail together very often.

I got 2 monarchs and somehow all 4 pumps are lifeless. I decided to sacrifice one. Any thoughts on where my pumps on this one went wrong? The little bit of liquid that did leak out was pretty black in color.

I have some burn/brown marks in the  in the middle

https://i.imgur.com/advZOYnl.jpg

One pump looks to have some green inside?

https://i.imgur.com/CobqcsHl.jpg

Think I snapped off the two wires for the pump controller.

https://i.imgur.com/prgaeZfl.jpg

here are other pictures for others interested

https://i.imgur.com/4QRnopzm.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jxGPyO7m.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZArTFV1m.jpg https://i.imgur.com/nTlVhAFm.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/D1OrSFVm.jpg https://i.imgur.com/0KlOhRmm.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7tIqYLKm.jpg https://i.imgur.com/fML0JOsm.jpg

[NotFuzzyWarm]

My guess is that the cooling systems failed from pure and simple corrosion. A result of the crappy cooler mfgr they used.
A side note to this - and owners of PC's using similar self-contained cold-plate/pump/heat exchangers:A while back I came across Intel's performance and design specs for their CPU coolers. One rather surprising thing I learned that that they all have a rather significant coolant loss rate - not from leaks, but from the fluid just slowly passing through the hose walls via osmosis. Up to 1/2 ounce per-year with ~ 0.2.-.3 oz/year as typical.

[BadgerHobbs]

I have a 750GH/s unit that when powered on, makes a few beeps and has loads of red lights flashing.

BFG miner is unable to detect it.

[cbjarscoobs]

I have a 750GH/s unit that when powered on, makes a few beeps and has loads of red lights flashing.

BFG miner is unable to detect it.

[...]

Do your pumps work? you can test the pumps without powering the board.

[lightfoot]

My guess is that the cooling systems failed from pure and simple corrosion. A result of the crappy cooler mfgr they used.
A side note to this - and owners of PC's using similar self-contained cold-plate/pump/heat exchangers:A while back I came across Intel's performance and design specs for their CPU coolers. One rather surprising thing I learned that that they all have a rather significant coolant loss rate - not from leaks, but from the fluid just slowly passing through the hose walls via osmosis. Up to 1/2 ounce per-year with ~ 0.2.-.3 oz/year as typical.

No, they're full of propolyne glycol and although they run under pressure they don't corrode. What kills them is the insane heat; and if the fan up front ever stops then they will overpressure and blow out the seals.

Water cooling is neat, but as we learned with toy trains everything is hell with water.

[BadgerHobbs]

Do your pumps work? you can test the pumps without powering the board.

All the pumps and fans are working fine.

[eroxors]

Anyone need parts? I have a few non-working units.

[aswithin]

Remember BFL_Josh?  Pepperidge Farm remembers.

[cbjarscoobs]

Anyone need parts? I have a few non-working units.

have an extra set of working pumps?

[eroxors]

have an extra set of working pumps?

Sorry for the delay. Yes I do and I need to get rid of some of these parts. PM me.

[dextronomous]

Hi there,
here i have 4 of them,
working but not being used.
https://tweakers.net/aanbod/2226242/4x-bfl-monarch-sha256-btc-miners-aangeboden.html

[epichaberdasher]

Is anybody still running theirs ?

I still have my 750GH dual water cooled unit in near mint condition in the closet. I collect rare computer parts so when i retired it i thought it was too well made and nice looking to get rid off.

Id like to fire it up again just to get the pumps and fluid moving inside, but i doubt it would work with any of the currrent versions of BTC miners or windows. And im not sure of the older miners that support the Monarchs will work with the current forks of BTC.

And i see lightfoot still has vast knowledge of these cards , he and kano helped me get mine running all those years ago. I really liked these, and I i really wish BFL was a better run company because they offered some truly unique products.

[os2sam]

Id like to fire it up again just to get the pumps and fluid moving inside, but i doubt it would work with any of the currrent versions of BTC miners or windows. And im not sure of the older miners that support the Monarchs will work with the current forks of BTC.

CGMiner will work just fine, UNLESS, your unit has the latest firmware which was made to explicitly to break functionality with CGMiner.  If so then you would need the old hacked version of BFG Miner.

You should be able to mine any Sha256 coin with it.

It will use an atrocious amount of electricity.  You would be better off getting the Gekko Science R606 which will surpass the Monarch in performance but use only around 100 Watts.  You would loose allot less money in electricity and have allot less noise and waste heat.

[epichaberdasher]

I think mine has the firmware that doesnt work with CGMiner.

Is there anyway to change it ?

I know its not worth using, i just want to fire it up for nostalgia reasons. Also back in the day i ran it underclocked at just under 400GH and i was able to run it on a ~300W PSU very quietly for almost a year.

[os2sam]

I think mine has the firmware that doesnt work with CGMiner.

Is there anyway to change it

Not that I'm aware of.

[lightfoot]

Oh let's see. I think there were three firmware versions.

The first Monarchs only seemed to work with BFGMiner 4.20 on Windows. It was weird, there were sync issues with all the little engines talking at once that blew up other versions with queue mismatch errors between requested work and produced work. I spent some time whacking away on the BFG code and I think I got it to work with later versions but it really wasn't worth the effort. Setting a very high difficulty helped here as the engines would not all be replying at the same time when they had a lot of work to do. But this caused stale blocks with P2Pool. Which doesn't exist anymore......

Second version was the best, worked with CGMiner and most others. I dont recall a third firmware version.

Changing firmware was not very easy, they made hardware changes through the runs and reflashing a Monarch board with different firmware would result in a bricked miner. Double fun was that the boards weren't easy to tell the difference from (other than when they went to the high frequency metal FETs on the later boards.)

I'd say just fire it up and let the pumps circulate to keep the rubber gaskets in those water blocks pliable. I still have the 4.20 code for the first generation miners if anyone needs it.

[epichaberdasher]

Thats good info !

Is there anyway of easily checking the firmware version ? I cant remember what stickers or anything being on the card. If its the second version i might as well fire it up on CGMiner just to get some heat into the fluid, if its the first version that only works on BFG 4.2, ill just power it up and let it run, is 4.2 even compatible with the current fork of BTC ?

[lightfoot]

If it has 2 power plugs its first gen. If three plugs (they could melt, I remember replacing those) it's later version and should work with CGMiner.

[epichaberdasher]

Mine has 3 power connecters.

I dont recall ever being able to get it to work with CGMiner, but i was using Linux and PCI-Express

Im guessing if you use Windows (10 ?) and USB it will work with CG Miner then ?

[lightfoot]

It should. As I remember, the 3 power units would also run on later versions of BFGMiner, which is nice cause you don't need to put in all those extra oddball drivers to make it work under Windows. Give BFGMiner a shot and see how it works.

[os2sam]

Sure, its worth a try.  But I was never able to get BFGMiner ,Mainline, to work with either of my Monarchs.  Only the original hacked version that BFL supplied worked.  It sounds like that's the version he has too so he should be good to go.

[lightfoot]

Sure, its worth a try.  But I was never able to get BFGMiner ,Mainline, to work with either of my Monarchs.  Only the original hacked version that BFL supplied worked.  It sounds like that's the version he has too so he should be good to go.

Did they only have two power plugs?

[os2sam]

Mine have three.  When I first got them ck worked with me a bit to get CGMiner to work with them.  Then they worked great for about 6 months and one died and had to RMA it.  When I got it back it had updated firmware and would never work with CGMiner again.  I tried the mainline BFGMiner and it wouldn't work either.  So I ran the BFL supplied hacked BFG Miner until I retired them in March f 2016.

And I was using USB on Win7.

[DaveF]

Just saw this on eBay.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Butterfly-Labs-Monarch-BPU700C-725-850GH-s-Miner-USB-or-PCI-E-Card-SHA256/183657624943

Does it belong to anyone of you here?

Was thinking of putting in a low-ball best offer, just because I thought they were cool back in the day and would just be putting in on a shelf, but figured I would check here 1st. Might be kind of useful next winter as a space heater too.

-Dave

[os2sam]

Not from me.

I was going sell mine for the price of shipping, but I was too lazy to get a quote and pack them up.  Sorry about that to whoever that was.

[lightfoot]

Pricey, but looks like one of the later generation ones. They do make good heaters, quiet and the water cooled radiator warms a room evenly....

[DaveF]

Not from me.

I was going sell mine for the price of shipping, but I was too lazy to get a quote and pack them up.  Sorry about that to whoever that was.

If you still have it and are US based and ever get motivated ping out to me, I'll take it. I had a few and as lightfoot said, dead quiet and throw more even heat then the R4 or an underclocked 1 board S9.

Not real reliable at times and you have to have a separate controller but still a neat piece of mining history.

-Dave

[DaveF]

So os2sam sent these to me (thank you) and one has been working fine with no issues and the other one not so much.
At 1st it was not seen by the PC at all, then it came alive and started working. Then it stopped again and is no longer seen.
Someone a while ago had a link with a bunch of schematics and test points for power. Does anyone have a copy?
Figure I would give it another quick look at before just shelving it.

Thanks,
Dave

[os2sam]

Dave,
What mining software are you using?

Those two miners have different firmware on them so one will work with CGMiner and one won't.  I couldn't get either to work with mainline BFGMiner.  So I had to use the old BFL supplied hacked version of BFG Miner.
Sam

[lightfoot]

I love watching this old thread. Post a pic of the non-working miner, I think if it has two PCI power plugs it's gotta use the old 4.20 software.

[DaveF]

Dave,
What mining software are you using?

Those two miners have different firmware on them so one will work with CGMiner and one won't.  I couldn't get either to work with mainline BFGMiner.  So I had to use the old BFL supplied hacked version of BFG Miner.
Sam

They both worked with the hacked BFG.

This one did not even show up as attached to the PC at first. Then it did, and it mined fine for a while. Then it just disappeared. Checked cables and power and such and all looks good.

Figured I would do a quick voltage test in some spots to see if it's even getting power where it should.

Beyond that, it probably is not worth the time. I picked them up as ulta-quiet 700 watt space heaters

-Dave

[os2sam]

They  did kick out some heat when I was using them.  Had to open a window in the winter in Wisconsin.  Well I hope you get the other one to work too.

[lightfoot]

So...... It's um.... been awhile.

While cleaning out some junk here in the lab I came across a box with my Jalapeno, some Titans, and a pair of Monarchs I bought on Ebay long ago. Everything was rusty, dusty, haven't been run in forever and last were used as space heaters because unlike Antminers they are kind of quiet....

And I figured "Why not, I wonder if they still work?" So I cleared my bench and started looking at all of this stuff.

First was to get the Jalapeno working. This was my 3 chip model, my 8 chip water cooled super Jally and the 7 chip air cooled Jally are upstairs somewhere. But I found a power supply, plugged it in, and fired it up. Fan was unbalanced (broken blades, these used to be tough to get) so I dug out a spare, swapped it, and then had to find BFGMiner.

Not easy: The Github repository seems abandoned and many of the modules needed don't.... seem to be in the right places. Finally found CGMiner, compiled it on a Pi, had the compile totally barf, found that the code was not great and the latest version of gcc doesn't allow all that redefining of variables, found the switch to ignore that, and got it up and running.

Next up, found a pool, connected the Jally and sure enough I'm mining at a blistering 10gh/s. At this rate my .01 minimum payout will take.... forever? Yeah. Forever. Even hitting the minimum share amount is like a couple of times a *day*. Not once a second anymore, maybe I'll just solo mine. Wonder if p2pool is still around.

Found another jally, gave it a whirl, it works too. This was a bog-stock model that I never flashed, changed, or hacked. 4gh speed. Which is about what they came with, I remember when we were flashing like nuts to get them to 5-6gh, then we started adding chips....

The Monarchs..... man, those are a different story. One literally exploded its FETs when plugged in, and the later model went to thermal shutdown pretty much immediately. I'll see if I can get it running, these were a lot more fickle, and my guess is the water coolers are shot, the FETs are insane, all of that stuff....

Do not plug those in.

Next week, I'll take a look at the Titans. Fujicoin anyone :-)

[DaveF]

So...... It's um.... been awhile.
....
The Monarchs..... man, those are a different story. One literally exploded its FETs when plugged in, and the later model went to thermal shutdown pretty much immediately. I'll see if I can get it running, these were a lot more fickle, and my guess is the water coolers are shot, the FETs are insane, all of that stuff....

Next week, I'll take a look at the Titans. Fujicoin anyone :-)

I know you know what you are doing but since I have have played with some of these in the last few years.
For the one that shutdown.

Do you see 'drip' from the coolers anyplace? And the obligatory did you have all the molex plugs in?
At least on my monarchs I had some that had 3 plugs and others with 2 and others with 4 and you needed all of them in.
Fan...pump...other and other no idea on the other.....

-Dave

[lightfoot]

Never seen one with 4 molex plugs. The ones with two do burn the plugs, I can replace those.

But I took the water loop apart and found some interesting stuff:
1) The loop was low on water. This is a big problem as the pumps *cannot* self prime. They need a full amount of water to work, otherwise you go into thermal la-la land.
2) Cutting those junk hoses off shows that it uses 7/16 inside diameter tubing with flanges so you can replace it with real tubes.
3) The real problem: The propolyne glycol or whatever they put in there precipitates out of the water into thin strings of gruel. This is a massive problem because:

4) It clogs the little water radiators inside the pumps.

If you pull the tubes off the pump, put real tubing on it, and immerse the right tube into a bucket of clean water and suck on the left tube (to prime it) you will get the propolyne out and some of the slime will appear. Dump that water and flush again with clean. Then turn on the pump and see if it pumps water through in a nice stream. If a dribble then you have to take the water block apart (8 screws) and you will find that on the back of the copper plate is what looks like a fine radiator with a white rubber thing in the pump.

What happens is the pump pushes water through the white things which forces the water *through* those tiny fins to pick up all the heat from the copper. If those find get clogged your pump will not flow and will not conduct worth a damn. Clean those fins with a toothbrush and soap and rinse it well.

More on refilling in a bit. Remember the pumps cannot prime themselves so there can't be air bubbles in the water system.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

More on refilling in a bit. Remember the pumps cannot prime themselves so there can't be air bubbles in the water system.

Quite true but nonetheless the system MUST have a small amount of air in it to allow for thermal expansion as the fluid gets hot. On the Intel liquid CPU cooler (a sealed system much like the BFL setup) that I use on my Render Beast the radiator is about 7/8 maybe 9/10 full and I'd guess the same should hold true for the BFL coolers. The radiator should be mounted so its outlet going to the pump inlet is on the bottom and fluid return on top so that air pocket is not circulated through the system.

[lightfoot]

Interesting point @notfuzzy: Thermal expansion is going to be needed, but any air that hits the pumps seems to fuck them over. Yaknow, I cut open one of the radiators and it is basically a two sided thing with one side going from the port down to the bottom of the radiator, where the bottom connects the two sides, then back up to the other port for output. If the pump catches a water bubble it's going to lose prime.

Putting the radiator upside down is a master stroke, it would solve the bubble problem, keep the pumps primed at all times, and of course BFL didn't do it :-) But I never thought of that....

Currently I'm running with an absolutely full radiator and rubber hoses that do have some give. Not sure how much added pressure there is, but maybe I should look into either a small air bladder type expansion tank to allow the fluid to expand without introducing air to the mix. Hm.....

[lightfoot]

Having fun dredging up old memories. One problem is that this 725gh miner here will mine at 725gh. Full blast out hot 71c chips, fans running at max, very much running on the edge with the FETs running at 90c even with the big heat sink on the back. Yes it will run, but not forever and any error will probably nuke it.

However. On the 3 power plug Monarchs there was a hack from BFL that allowed you to send it a command through USB to either set the clock speed (from F0X to FAX I think, maybe higher in hex) or the voltage from V0X (makes it a 3gh miner) to VAX (and maybe higher). The system would accept the command and auto-tune the voltage to produce the fewest errors, so it was best to just stick to playing with the "F0X" commands.

There was sort of a way to do it on the Bfgminer command line but it never worked for me. What I did was use the following command in a DOS/CMD prompt:

set /p x="F5X" <nul >\\.\COM12

Where COM12 is the COM port assigned to the Monarch's USB device (find it in Device manager, then expand the Serial ports). I put that in a batch file called mine.bat
Then I wait a few seconds and run bfgminer.

With F5X I get a nice 437gh speed, temp of between 50 and 57C, and most importantly I think the power efficiency goes from 1w/gh (at blazing full speed) to .5w/gh. Result is a nice warm 200 watt space heater that will mine 8 times as much coin for the heat as a BFL 50mh tube unit.

NOTE: You have to set this each time you power cycle the miner. When you power cycle, the miner will auto calculate speed and such for max hash rate which will turn your miner back into a seriously on the edge thing.

NOTE: I don't know if this works on the older 2 plug miners.

NOTE: Of course 8 times 0 is zero but hey, it is working :-)

Now to try and figure out why cgminer is barfing. I'm guessing they changed the response format of messages and never bothered to document it. Still I should be able to throw something into debug mode to find it out......

[NotFuzzyWarm]

It doesn't help that *all* flexible tubing allows water vapor to diffuse through the wall leading to coolant loss with no visual evidence of leaks or 'sweating'.. The material used makes the difference between almost no significant loss per year to 'oh crap!' in the same time. Norprene has the lowest diffusion rate.

Good article about mounting pump/radiator and touches on the tubing used to reduce loss: https://www.cclonline.com/article/2005/Guide/Water-Cooling-Kits/AiO-Water-Cooling-Best-Setup-Don-t-Get-It-Wrong-/

[lightfoot]

Meantime now that I have a cool running unit I want to stick the thing in my ATX box here with my Raspberry Pi's and just run it in slow and cool mode. Maybe I'll hit a block.

The real problem is the mining software: The driver.bflsc.c files in cgminer don't work.... well with the board. At 400mh speeds, the board is reporting only about 41 and 38gh speeds with a lot of "failed to find nonce" type errors. Bashing the code a bit, I can see that the error nonce being returned is always the same value, but the core number bounces around. Unfortunately cgminer can't show individual cores like bfgminer can, so that's not going to help. Running bfgminer shows 446/407gh speeds.

So about 90% of the cores don't work. But if I use bfgminer and look at the summary values per core I can see the core naming scheme is different. It labelels the chips as BFL 0aa, 0ab, 0ac.... through 0az then 0ba-bx then 0ca-cz... all the way up to 0ex. That is different as it's not splitting the engines by die but mushing them all together.

So 26*4 (a-d)+24 (ea-ex) =128 cores total. Or 64 cores per chip (each hashing at 4gh. I really wonder if they just took their old chip design and instead of putting one per chip they put 64 of them per bigger chip using a smaller fab process). But that's not important, if they are using 128 cores and the software wraps at 64 cores then yes that could be the problem.

Need to figure out how they did chip addressing. Hm. If they counted by hex numbers (0aa-0ae) then skipped to 0ba-be then 0ca-oce then that could be a problem. Only 5*5=25 cores would work which would still give us 100gh of speed instead of 400. Not right. About 12 cores should be working. Hm.

[Easteregg69]

X gets repressive as you steps up.