ANTMINER S4 Discussion and Support Thread

[dlowings]

Anyone want to try one of these on a ckpool (kano's or my solo pool) and see how they fare? We don't have user selectable diff at the moment but it's just out of interest.

I just connected 3 , and they seem to work fine on this end …

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[Prelude]

Just one question in case I skipped it: Has the problem with the "underperformance" of the S4 been solved?

I am aware that the miners works with BTC Guild, but even after installing the posted "firmware" which updates cgminer I still only get ~110GH/s @ghash.io and other pools.
Thank you

This issue is that the S4 can't communicate it's need for higher share difficulty to the pool. Btcguild and ghash both work perfectly fine share difficulty manually set to 2048.

[-ck]

Anyone want to try one of these on a ckpool (kano's or my solo pool) and see how they fare? We don't have user selectable diff at the moment but it's just out of interest.

I just connected 3 , and they seem to work fine on this end …

Great. Sounds good, but I suspect it's because our pools' starting diffs are 1024 rather than any intrinsic awesomeness of the pool itself.

Here try these as an experiment. I've set up extra solo pool nodes so the same conditions as the solo.ckpool.org (ie solo mine to your bitcoin address)

First runs diff of 2048:
s4.ckpool.org:3333

Second starts at diff 1 like ghash would:
s4.ckpool.org:3334

Bear in mind that ckpool adjusts diff VERY quickly so it may still work okay.

[-ck]

This issue is that the S4 can't communicate it's need for higher share difficulty to the pool. Btcguild and ghash both work perfectly fine share difficulty manually set to 2048.

They shouldn't need to "communicate their need". It just means they're broken for lower diffs presumably because they can't keep up and just constantly overload when sending 15000 shares per second.

[dlowings]

Anyone want to try one of these on a ckpool (kano's or my solo pool) and see how they fare? We don't have user selectable diff at the moment but it's just out of interest.

I just connected 3 , and they seem to work fine on this end …

Great. Sounds good, but I suspect it's because our pools' starting diffs are 1024 rather than any intrinsic awesomeness of the pool itself.

Here try these as an experiment. I've set up extra solo pool nodes so the same conditions as the solo.ckpool.org (ie solo mine to your bitcoin address)

First runs diff of 2048:
s4.ckpool.org:3333

Second starts at diff 1 like ghash would:
s4.ckpool.org:3334

Bear in mind that ckpool adjusts diff VERY quickly so it may still work okay.

2 on :3333 and 1 on 3334 … both seem to still work fine .

[-ck]

Great. Sounds good, but I suspect it's because our pools' starting diffs are 1024 rather than any intrinsic awesomeness of the pool itself.

Here try these as an experiment. I've set up extra solo pool nodes so the same conditions as the solo.ckpool.org (ie solo mine to your bitcoin address)

First runs diff of 2048:
s4.ckpool.org:3333

Second starts at diff 1 like ghash would:
s4.ckpool.org:3334

Bear in mind that ckpool adjusts diff VERY quickly so it may still work okay.

2 on :3333 and 1 on 3334 … both seem to still work fine .

In that case then I will take credit for it in the ckpool code itself Thanks for testing, there is no need to keep those pool nodes online as they're identical to the solo pool just with a different starting diff so I'll be taking them down tomorrow but i'll leave them up in case others want to do similar tests. Note that you shouldn't mine long term on the diff1 node as it's not optimally set up for block finding.

[yxt]

kano.is after ~4h35m

Worker Name	Work Diff	Last Share	Shares	Diff	Invalid	Block %	Hash Rate
S4-3	1.37k	5s	4,682	6,268,852	0.730%	0.084%	1.64THs
S4-4	1.55k	2s	4,227	6,487,440	0.757%	0.086%	1.73THs

ckpool.org:3333 ~4h40m

{"hashrate1m": "2.17T", "hashrate5m": "1.79T", "hashrate1hr": "1.6T", "hashrate1d": "582G", "hashrate7d": "44.1G", "workers": 1}

[gentacomp]

S4 not satisfy me enough (plus btc prices)
Now waiting for L1

[Minnesooooota]

Bitmain, are you planning on resolving these issues for the 2nd batch? I am immensely dissatisfied with my batch 1 miner.

[dogie]

Dogie's comprehensive setup guide now up in super HD!

 

[dogie]

I'll be back in a bit now that's done to go through the last 15 pages or so to check for questions and to gather feedback.

[-ck]

So I worked with the bitmain guys just now on a workaround for the pool diff issue. Hopefully they'll post a fix for you to use. This should allow you to mine at other pools. While the hashrate will appear wrong when you first connect to them it should ramp up slowly to the correct value.

[cloh76]

Is it better to mine on a p2pool?  What's the difference from mining at btcguild?

[dogie]

Going through questions now, bare with me on the spam but I have to separate the different discussion threads otherwise everyone quotes everyone.

[-ck]

Is it better to mine on a p2pool?  What's the difference from mining at btcguild?

I'm quite sure you could use these on p2pool if you added +1500 to your username per client.

[dogie]

Bitmain, are you planning on resolving these issues for the 2nd batch? I am immensely dissatisfied with my batch 1 miner.

The difficulty issues are firmware related, not batch related and will be fixed shortly.

[dogie]

Ok - this is the worst batch of product I have ever gotten from Bitmain.  What is going on??  So far I have had 3 units with bad PSU's.  (One of them almost caught on fire) All of my settings are factory stock. NO overclocking.  One of the units has the amber "alarm" light on the PSU blinking and one unit has what appears to be asci code on the LCD.  So of 33 units purchased 5 are down.  That's 15 % of my units not running within a few days of implementation.  Bitmain I hope you're reading this and thinking of a resolution......

Contact Bitmain support for replacements.

[dogie]

Hi Bitmain

when I started the device everything seems to be okay. But after 4 minutes a lot of (x) appeared in ASIC status. When I do power cycle the situation is after 4 minutes the some. What should I do? 

Wow, this device has very short live with default settings. After 3 hours of running many chips crash. Really bad quality of the products. I hope that bitmain will send me a new device instead of this one!!!

That looks like a PSU problem to me, two boards aren't receiving enough to do much at all and the other two are struggling to keep up. The work that is being done is fine, there's just not enough juice to go around. If you've tried adjusting voltage up slightly then contact bitmain support.

[dogie]

Are the S3's ever going to launch?

...
Dogie, you have the ear of Bitmain is there any news on the S3 B10 launch other than "It's the Chinese New Year"?

I am tempted to buy a few of the 1.4T Prisma miners if the S3's don't go back on sale soon.

I'll try and find out. With BTC price @ $300 though, I wouldn't be too hopeful.

[dogie]

Does anyone know what username and password could I use for SSH access to S4? The device is freezed but SSH is live.
Thx.

root admin