Hacking BFL Monarchs and servicing them while times are weird.

[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