I've been pretty successful, though there has been quite a bit of trial and error.
Temperature-wise, they hate being hot. I have one right now that throttles consistently whenever it gets close to 58C, but it is running the 896 firmware. I've trial-and-errored through all of the firmwares, even auto tune. Looking at the math for my situation, it made more sense for me to run the a/c 24/7 rather than slowing them down. I'm waiting on an order of 120mm fans to upgrade all of mine with, to hopefully keep them nice and cool until october. After all the dicking around with them that I've done, I really just want to have a setup I can leave running and forget about it.
I started on OSX, running them all off of a Mac Mini. I learned that they hate lots of traffic on USB, so the hub you choose, and what else you are running along with it matters a bunch. While the MacMini was dedicated to mining, it did fine as long as I didn't forget to remove any external drives on the chain. Keeping the USB cables away from the power cables seems to help. The hub I got was a 11 port saitek thingy that looked good, but in the end is probably too cheap. I cannot get two of the ports on it to work with the singles, and if I move it around too much I need to restart all of them.
For the last week they have been mining off of a dedicated headless DockStar, using ArchLinux and that same crappy USB hub. I finished reorgnizing my office, and have the Mac Mini as my desktop now. It's been working like a charm, no problems at all.
tl;dr: keep them cool, and watch their USB connections. If you can keep em cool, overclock them as high as they'll go and leave em alone.
I've been finding a similar problem with the BFL singles. They seem to be very sensitive with hubs and USB traffic. However, one of the singles has been starting out fine on a computer by itself when there is a fresh start (using Bitminter) and hitting 800+MH. However, within minutes it drops to half of the hashing power...and loads of errors in the bitminter window. We've tried many confirugration changes to try to find the happy spot, but so far, no success acheiving sustained nominal values. The temperature stays below 50C. My others are all averaging 750MH (10% below nominal). Again, they seem too sensitive to USB traffic or movements, and can make each other drop out (on Bitminter at least). So, I'm pretty eager to trade these back in when & if the next gen is ready.
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