ANTMINER U3 Discussion and Support Thread

[dogie]

It must be the overclocking that crashes the firmware and you MUST hard reset the whole thing. I suppose if you want to get 70ghs out of these puppies then you need to be ready to fix them everyday or create something to cut USB power and +12v with some kind of MCU... I could do it but not worth it really.

No, its not overclocking. My two has zombied from day one, before i even tried anything other than default. And one of them has only given me 40-45 for the most part since i got it.
Due to the shipping cost of them however, it's not worth it to return it from here, i'll just make sure to warn people of the low quality of these.. Too bad, other than that, i kind of like these units.

Yea, mine just ZOMBIED on normal settings. Bugger it. I cant be asked going to pull the cables out and in every single fucking day just for this... but they are pretty sweet. I think i need to come up with something clever and automated... dont have enough time though.. sucks.
I might as well overclock them a bit since I have to to replug the fuckers every 24 hours any way.

Morning routine +replug U3's CHECK...

What type of hub are you on, powered or not powered? USB 3.0 or 2.0? There is also some newer firmware being tested which may fix some of the soft images, but zombie'ing is usually a brief interruption on USB.

USB 2.0 Direct into Motherboard USB Slots, NO Hub, and proper USB shielded USB cable.
U3 12V Powered from 450WATT, separate PSU.

It happens only after some hours and a brief interruption USB should just restart mining, for example. Pull out USB cable, ZOMBIE after 10 seconds, plug in USB cable, ZOMBIE goes away.

In this situation the only way to remove ZOMBIE is to hard power cycle the unit, becuase cgminer does not pickup the USB, or if it does it cannot communicate with it, which means the firmware shat a brick sideways.

If you can turn off USB somehow, then thats the key to hard cycle the U3. I just noticed even with 12volt plugged, the red light inside goes out. Also, I deliberatly sacrificed a USB cable and cut the 5V. I wanted to see if I could just turn the PSU on and OFF which would also power cycle MCU on the U3. But no.. that would be to easy. The MCU is powered by the USB +5 and the ASICS are powered by the 12volt line.

Please note these are Pure deductions by trial and error. I have not fried anything, yet. Phew.

A powered USB hub will likely help, as there is some power draw through the USB port. You're right that windows / firmware / whatever it is controlling the device to the OS / cgminer shouldn't behave like that, but it does. I am not sure which party in that has control over a potential remedy.

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[irobb]

Update:

It's been running almost 24 hours with no zombie but the hashrate is lower now...

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

I suspect that the thermal compound is the culprit of the zombie.  It was spread all over the board on top of the surface mounted devices under the heat sink which probably caused the instability issues as it would heat up and create a medium for a short to take place...

Can someone else take theirs apart, clean off like I did, and see if that fixes the zombie issue?

[ppumkin]

Update:

It's been running almost 24 hours with no zombie but the hashrate is lower now...

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

I suspect that the thermal compound is the culprit of the zombie.  It was spread all over the board on top of the surface mounted devices under the heat sink which probably caused the instability issues as it would heat up and create a medium for a short to take place...

Can someone else take theirs apart, clean off like I did, and see if that fixes the zombie issue?

Hi- I will take mine apart today and see what is going on in there.

Last night I started the two using 250mhs and 800mV  and they have been running at 62.5ghs pretty nicely. about 12 hours later the one ZOMBIED.  I also created even MORE cooling to the heatsinks in like a custom wind tunnel design...

So I will take it apart and clean it. I have very good expeirence in electronics so I wont noob this up. Also got all the correct tools and liquids etc to do a proper job.

I suspect it wont help... the next route after this will be a powered USB hub. And I will connect that hub to the PC without the 5V channel and let the HUB power the units. Also put them on a 4 hour timer. turn of for 15 minutes and restart the whole thing. If I turn of the USB hub power then that should emualte pulling out the cable and restarting the MCU on next power up. I got all this on a sperate power adapter so I will just turn everything off, restart cgminer with some scripts and restart it. Then I can keep these settings at 62.5ghs and it will have some short resting periods (i hope that wont cause to much PCB strees) and it will restart and keep running till the cows come home.

OH- by the way, the same thing happened to me when it droped from ~60 to ~45 because of the voltage settings. Recomended is close to  800mv using a nice PSU like a computer one. I run mine on the stock PSU (240v) using 790mv and it got hot but didnt melt but that worried me so I just found and old PC and pulled the PSU and hooked it up to that. Its more effiecient any way and keep it at 800mv now.

[2n3906]

More evidence of some problems with the supplied power supply. This happened on day one.

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-Q7smhzWnXG0/VK7JKPgwLFI/AAAAAAAAiRM/kQrhYfQAQUA/w997-h665-no/IMG_1671.JPG

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Lx-2MqF0l0U/VK7JKDqGglI/AAAAAAAAiRQ/lRf2Eo2dhbQ/w997-h665-no/IMG_1672.JPG

[irobb]

WOW. I should pop mine open to see what it looks like too...  Yet folks seem to think that they only melt at stock settings...  They must have received a nicer version than us...

[irobb]

So check it out... Looks like I have been up and running for over 39 hours with no zombie...  However, it looks like only 3 of the 4 chips are working on my unit; thus the lower hashrates...

39 Hours before exiting:
https://i.imgur.com/XEbnJVB.jpg

Receive 1-3, missing #4:
https://i.imgur.com/RNlWvYI.jpg

[ppumkin]

OK I opened mine up and cleaned all that paste out, I forgot the stuff between the heatsink and the PCB..... shouldnt matter that much on that side.

This thermal paste is like stuffed inbetween the pins of the ASIC's... I couldnt clean it out without getting more aggressive and the last thing I needed is to kill an ASIC so I did my best by gently cleaning it for an hour and using alco wipes and some other SMD tools.

https://i.imgur.com/DiLIz5O.jpg

Fused spunk allover the fucking place

https://i.imgur.com/3LQeHyv.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/cl1lOOr.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/SerSo5j.jpg

Arctic Silver (Silver Oxide thermal paste)

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

Chilling at 62.5ghs on top of his brother

https://i.imgur.com/k4LNjLt.jpg


Ill let it run till tomorrow. We see what happens.

[irobb]

HAHAHAHAHA. That made me LOL. I used the same stuff... Alcohol wipes but then used a toothpick and toothbrush to really get the crap off the pcb and smd's...  Hope it solves your problem, excited to see.

[2n3906]

Well after all the info in this thread I am up and running. Thank you to all that contributed.

Setup:
Laptop running Fedora 20
1x U3
Power brick 19v @ 3.46A

Running around 60GH/s

[irobb]

When it zombies, let us know... lol 

[Phosphorous]

Yep, still looking for someone who has an unmodified miner that will go more than 24hrs without going ZOMBIE.

Dogie, you said there are 1000's of U3 owners out there with good units, where are they?

[dogie]

OK I opened mine up and cleaned all that paste out, I forgot the stuff between the heatsink and the PCB..... shouldnt matter that much on that side.

Arctic Silver (Silver Oxide thermal paste)

You should NOT use AS5 on a unit like this which has exposed pins and other electronics on the PCB. AS5 is conductive and may cause problems. Additionally, its thermal conductivity is only a 1/10th of what they claim it to be, is 4x less than other competitors and up to 5x more expensive. You can see the full independent paper here, results on page 8.

[irobb]

Funny... I used AS (white version) and it seemed to "fix" my zombie issue.

Perhaps it's more a matter of how well the compound is applied versus its conductivity.

[dogie]

Funny... I used AS (white version) and it seemed to "fix" my zombie issue.

Perhaps it's more a matter of how well the compound is applied versus its conductivity.

Do you mean arctic ceramique? That's specifically designed for open chip designs [ie GPUs, miners] as its nearly non conductive.

[irobb]

Yep - that's the stuff.

[alh]

From my "CPU Thermal Pasting" days, I thought the whole idea was to use the stuff VERY sparingly, even more so than the very small "new blobs" shown. In the CPU days it almost seemed like an art form to get the amount "just right", certainly nothing like what was done at the factory.

[ppumkin]

OK I opened mine up and cleaned all that paste out, I forgot the stuff between the heatsink and the PCB..... shouldnt matter that much on that side.

Arctic Silver (Silver Oxide thermal paste)

You should NOT use AS5 on a unit like this which has exposed pins and other electronics on the PCB. AS5 is conductive and may cause problems. Additionally, its thermal conductivity is only a 1/10th of what they claim it to be, is 4x less than other competitors and up to 5x more expensive. You can see the full independent paper here, results on page 8.

Good to know. I did check make sure it wasn't touching the pins.
Very interesting white paper.
So what do you recommend then to be used generally?

[dogie]

OK I opened mine up and cleaned all that paste out, I forgot the stuff between the heatsink and the PCB..... shouldnt matter that much on that side.

Arctic Silver (Silver Oxide thermal paste)

You should NOT use AS5 on a unit like this which has exposed pins and other electronics on the PCB. AS5 is conductive and may cause problems. Additionally, its thermal conductivity is only a 1/10th of what they claim it to be, is 4x less than other competitors and up to 5x more expensive. You can see the full independent paper here, results on page 8.

Good to know. I did check make sure it wasn't touching the pins.
Very interesting white paper.
So what do you recommend then to be used generally?

After reading the paper yesterday, now I'm not sure. I'll probably trackdown one of those unknown brands mentioned but for now I'm finishing my tube of ceramique.

[ppumkin]

From my "CPU Thermal Pasting" days, I thought the whole idea was to use the stuff VERY sparingly, even more so than the very small "new blobs" shown. In the CPU days it almost seemed like an art form to get the amount "just right", certainly nothing like what was done at the factory.

That is right. I used to work at IT shops for years and this was treated very critical! No noobs allowed.

But I have seen Noobs smear the entire tubes onto the processors and there was no issue with these PC's for years. Just viruses.
So I kind of got paralysed to this "extreme" application and jsut put a blob that wont go allover the place like on these Ants, I mean these Ants are mental, I dont think I ever seen anything like THIS before. Even the wors noob application didnt go allover the motherboard it was just like oozing out from under the heatsink.

Cleaning this stuff is the worst. If you look at my img where I cleaned it you can still see all the past inbetween the tiny 0.125 pitched pins. There is no way to get that out without intesive brushing wiht tooth brush, like the other poster did. I didnt go that far because it seems like that may have been a bit TOO much.

[irobb]

Well, luckily for me I ordered mine off Amazon.  They are taking care of it and accepting the return for full refund with free return shipping.  Good luck to you guys - I did learn a lot from this little miner...