Here's the newest thread on the S9 upgrades, and it's gonna stay active. Just a heads up, this isn't about Bitmain's hash boards.
The builder prefers to stay anonymous, so no names here.
From what I've seen, this is more efficient than Bitmain's setups.
I've got both a single board and a two-board configuration.
Quick update: I'm focusing on mods for just one board since I've come up with a better airflow design that works great with that setup.
For now, here’s a sneak peek.
Check out the details below.
Photos:
On the right is the new hash board; the PCB matches the size of the original S9 to fit in its enclosure. I’ve covered the serial number.
At the top, there are 7 capacitors on the PCIe jack side of the board.
If you count the chips, it looks like there are 51.
The older S9 on the left has 63 chips and no caps on the PCIe jack side.
Same as above, just twisted for a clearer view.
In the second photo:
The S9 is at the bottom with 6 caps, and you can see the burnt PCIe jacks since it's an older board.
So, we’re looking at 51 chips vs 63 chips and 7 caps vs 6 caps.
I won’t dive into the smaller details or close-ups this time.
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June 6 edit.
I am getting an s9 upgrade kit.
3 drop in hashboards.
If you have spare s9's you could hold them and wait for my test results.
The boards are due today.
Working firmware will be released to me on Monday.
I have agreed to not say the builder's name.
I have been told the new boards will have high medium low settings.
When I do testing I will test
1 board miner on all 3 speeds
2 board miner on all 3 speeds
3 board miner on all 3 speeds
info here and info at YouTube will be posted.
if gear is as speed and watts have been told to me. they may be worth holding onto your s9's for a few weeks.
Since I don't have boards or firmware or prices.
I will leave this thread locked for now.
I have told by the builder that
They are more efficient and they hash more than the s9e.
so they will hash higher than 16.0 th and burn less then 1280 watts
So I will set a three board unit up and show the hashing differences soon. Maybe Sunday morning.
So pcb boards = same size. this is smart enough. have to drop into the s9 case.
heat sinks = very close or the same. makes sense as it is a generic part.
chip count bitmain = 63
chip count. mystery builder = 51
cap count bitmain = 6
cap count. mystery builder = 7
My goal will be determine if the gear does as well as promised.
Make some more s9 space heater units.
note I sold 7 pieces of braiins based gear and used 2 boards . I don't want those people to feel screwed over.
So if this turns out good. I will see what I can do.
Those sales helped me talk with this builder into the idea of building better space heaters.
I will just see how if all plays out. But if it plays out well those buyers will be happy they supported me.
I have finally gotten gear to mine.
I have some old controllers.
So I was to load this firmware into the controller via the gui option.
new bitmain firmware means burn an sdcard.
and load via sd card slot.
I will try that tomorrow.
Right now I set gear to low and auto tune.
I am running it to btc.viabtc.com its mining away. I will know iif it makes specs for low in the morning.
interesting - when you say mystery builder - do you mean these are not bitmain boards?
edit - I re-read it and see that you have another company making these - at first I thought you were modifying the S9's
Exactly they are a non bitmain company .
They made 51 chip boards vs 63 chips.
But the pcb board is the exact size as an Antminer board.
Here are some screen shots. showing a two board running. the gui mining status and the pool numbers.
this uses 616 watts. to do 11th. about 56-57 watts a th.
I need a lot more testing on this.
I will be making a you tube soon.
since it is a non bitmain chip the freq range is different then the s9 chips.
low setting with tuning tries freq 450 with best volts/watts
pll option allows you to pick any freq from 450-570 and then try to tune for best efficient numbers
since my hope is building better space heaters I asked if I can go lower then freq 450 and use the pll tuning .
so I am trying 2 boards and pll freq 400 option.
hope to drop hash rate to 9-10th and power to 520-560
auto tuning takes more then 20 minutes
here is a nice feature temp of every chip.
look at middle board it is not connected in any way reads -99
freq set of 400 yields
watts at 531
hash at 10.31
only 51-52 watts a th
this is actually better then expected
looked pool side and I get
watts at 531
hash at 9.84 th
about 53-54 watts a th. this is what I expected to get.
I use this psu and volts supplied to it are 240
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-643956-201-1200W-HSTNS-PL30-Platinum-Plus-Hot-Plug-Power-Supply-643933-101/312798058602?
My braiins gear does about 85 watts a th. I can set it lower then freq 400. so I can do 300 watts to 350 watts with a two board miner braiins. but far less efficient then this gear.
I will run this at freq 400 for a few more hours
I will drop to freq 350 to see if we can get lower watts and not lose efficiency.
It would be nice to go to 475 watts and 8.75 th. on freq 350.
here are freq 350 numbers.
the settings
the hash gui
note that fan sensor is weird I will replace fan to see if it goes away
replaced fan. and get correct readings so fan had a bad tach wire.
looks like at freq 350 watts are steady at 463
and hash fluxes from 7700 to 8400. I am going to run over night to see if it gets a more stable hash rate.
I will also see viabtc long time avg
if it does 8000 at 463 it is 56-58 watts. if it does 8400 it is 54-55 watts
I like these hash boards so much I ordered some better quality fans and will test some more.
I locked the older s9 mod threads.
I would not mind having three 1 board miners using these hash boards.
hashing at 6th and using about 320 watts.
let me know when they come available, I still have one S9 I could swap them in on and see how it works. 1 or 2 boards would be great as it could run on 110 v - with proper fans maybe even be decent enough to put in the house lol
thinking of my grandson who wants to mine but has no job so he is not getting any large power hungry asic lol
the new boards need some work in terms of correct fan and best down clock.
The stock s9 fans are shit. and i have a lot of old ones.
I ordered some higher end fans.
the ones i order for my sales thread were nice with braiins firmware which allow huge downclock and a very quiet miner that uses 80 watts a th. about 5th for two boards and four hundred watts.
these boards auto tune to 450 freq at about 55 watts a th.
but that 5.3-5.5 hashing at say 325 watts. it has flakey tuning i kind of want to play with it more.
It cycles a bit when it tunes.
Older Avalons would do this. Some times they would boot every 2-4 hours or
It means fans pick up speed just a bit every 2-4 hours.
I know the fans I am using are some of the lower quality ones bitmain would use on s9's
I am hoping to get the gear to run really stable with out upticks in the fan and or reboots.
At 55 watts a th for a lottery machine burning well under 400 watts closer to 290-310 watts it should be good For space heating and pretty quiet.
New fans come next week.
Now if you just want to run it with 3 board at low speed and don't care about noise I am doing 910 watts and 16.1 th about 56-57 watts a th at the k-watt meter.
I use the 1200 watt hp psu blue jack for platinum. Found on ebay for cheap
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-643956-201-1200W-HSTNS-PL30-Platinum-Plus-Hot-Plug-Power-Supply-643933-101/312798058602?
I hope to do 1 board miners
that do 4.8 th at 266-286 watts
the three testing boards were sold to me for the shipping cost about 60 USD from asia to USA no taxes due to cheap price.
If the new fans come and don't get lost with fedex I will have 3 fully operational next week.
I will also be talking with builder about purchase of boards in order to make more of these.
I have some very specific ideas on one board units I think I can mod inside of the s9 cases in a better way.
I would like to get the units to run at 500 or 550 freq
I have tested
freq
300 -------
350 ------- 228 watts and 4.1th good sound levels
400 ------- 266 watts and 4.8th good sound levels
450 ------- 291 watts and 5.3th a bit too loud
500 -------
550 -------
well when you can get more - i would be wanting 4 boards - I have 2 s9 cases would do 2 boards per case. the S9 boards I can sell or even donate to sidehack to use for his r606's maybe.
two board run decent.
My issues so far are quiet. not efficient . I can get 53 to 59 watts on different settings which are within the specs I was given. 54 to 60. with 54 at the 450 freq setting.
The new fans come next week I will see what I can do.
I will also ask them for boards.
I did a different one board design. I have same shitty fans.
But my airflow is working better it Seems good.
not very loud.
but nice temps
on middle setting.
6.3 th and 335watts.
the mod takes ten minutes.
it should be fire resistant.
Oh noes this is not fair... Does it use the same Xilinx controllers? Did he supply its own custom controller?
Will this mystery maker ever use the R4 form factor? Because that's a winner for a heat spreader right there...
Is this going to become commercially available for others?
I wonder what chips are those asics...
Yes, it does.
Phill, this is pretty normal, I ran a custom firmware on a few gears and some of them needed over 10 hours, some even need a whole day to actually stop rebooting, the reason why this happens is the fact that the step-down settings are set at minimum to ensure that you are getting the best of each chip, so even if 50 chips are lowered to the frequency they like and you are left with 1 chip that needs to go lower, say chip 5
chip no 5 > frequency 450 > run for 5 mins > collect results > bad > lower frequency to current frequency -1
chip no 5 > frequency 449 > run for 5 mins > collect results > bad > lower frequency to current frequency -1
sometimes a chip may only run well at say 350, so that's nearly a 100 steps-down if each reporting cycle needs 5 mins that's 400 mins or nearly 7 hours, and then eventually that bad chip might actually not like the voltage at all, and then voltage needs to be changed and the auto-tune starts all over again, so you should allow more time, let them tune for 24 hours, if they fail, then go with the lower settings.
I use a bitmain controller I have a lot of them mine had old firmware and I was able to use Bitmain gui to upgrade it.
Most will need to burn a micro sd card and move the pin to boot with the card.
I can make a really good one board out of it.
I came up with a very nice way to maximize cooling off 1 board.
Running the unit on low with lessor fans I can keep chips under 80c and fans under 3000 rpm.
note how exit chips are warmer.
below it fired up on low with custom 3000 rpm fans
the flow design I did seems to work on keeping chips cool
What is the best Watts per TH you achieved for this type of cooling with a single board? also, it would be best if you ask the "mystery maker" about the max temp their chips can handle, 80 is pretty good for the regular BM1387B/ BM1387 chips but it could be a bit high for the new chips, so better safe than sorry, especially that you are planning on selling these gears, so it's not just about you losing a few boards, but also getting yourself in troubles with your clients.
Good luck with this great project phill, let me know if you need my help at any point.
With the new air flow design I can get 54-56 watts.
But this will take a lot more design and testing.
I have good 3000 rpm fans
I have shit 6000 rpm fans
I am waiting on really good 4900 rpm fans.
When you are making a niche product you some times have to restrict stuff of it fucks up.
I need to know what fans are strong enough but not too strong as I am not trying to run hard and fast and loud.
A one board unit burning 295 watts and doing 5.3 th is about 55.67 watts
I have a lot of testing. As I don't fully understand the firmware quirks.
I need to know what pools work.
Ie.
I want to get it working with solo.ckpool.org
I want to get it working with mmpool.org
I have it working fine with viabtc and slush.
That is pretty much T17 efficiency which is very impressive, those guys did a great work for sure.
It probably uses cgminer and almost all things pool related are the same so I wouldn't expect any issues like this, it will work on those pools without a doubt.
Took the image you posted above, I like how it shows the temp of each chip
I think the design can be improved, the chips I circled are located right behind the fan's motor, and they tend to get hotter than the rest, the design on the normal S9 board is better as they leave a few empty slots in the middle like a V shape, you might want to discuss that with the maker, you could also use a spacer to allow more cooling for those poor front chips, that will allow you to run fans at even lower RPM to save a tiny bit of power and get some noise reduction.