Topic: 1GH/s, 20w, $700 (was $500) — Butterflylabs, is it for real? (Part 2) - page 21. (Read 146909 times)

NO FAIR!!!

1BTC to the mod that moved this thread to off-topic. Wait, thats me! Everyone give me 1BTC!

1 BTC to the first person to produce pictures of their BFL Single with screenshots of it running.

1 BTC to the first person to produce a FPGA farm running in a freezer.

Cooling design delay   at this price they'll all be running in a freezer.

Says 4 to 6 weeks.  Looks like a scam to me. Really like the speeding train on the front page though. Looks so corporate.

mailto:[email protected] and report back here. 

When will start to ship a Singles?

Ok, so even if you give them the benefit of the doubt and they are a legit companyorganizationbunch of people and just happen to be really disorganized.. do you really want to be spending large amounts of money with them?  We won't even talk about things like warranty turn-around time.

Point taken. Allow me to rephrase: I dont know anyone that stupid . At least not personally .

everything is poddible. when you cant see it, it does not mean, that it dees not exist
or smth like that

trully, lOl LP

Good luck getting your molex in there.

Looks like a new heatsink. If they have any sense, the board is now mounted sideways, with the top and bottom fan working to together to blow air over the heatsink in the direction of the grooves. If the bottom fan is mounted to blow against the underside of the PCB, then, well, I cant imagine anyone being that stupid.

In both the original enclosure and the new enclosure, vents were only on the 2 sides (and top, obviously). The front has the power LED; the back has the USB and power connectors. I was assuming the side vents were for exhaust, but they may just as easily be intake (with the top fan blowing out) ...

The original fans were 80mm; the new enclosure is larger and has apparently moved to 92mm fans. The bottom fan in Simonk83's photo looks to be 92mm since it follows the screw holes of the top 92mm fan. They are NOT 120mm and they appear to be too large to be 80mm fans based on the new enclosure dimensions.

Yeah, I'm with D&T on this being a sub-optimal design. BFL seems to be trying to salvage the situation with their '4x power dissipation surprise', using whatever off-the-shelf parts they can. No one would purposefully design a product like in the photo. It wouldn't surprise me if they are already working on a 'Rev 3' redesign to address this, though obviously the early adopters would not reap the benefits.

110C but that is internal junction temp.  These type of chips tend to have poor heat transfer so the internal temp can be 20-30C higher than surface temp.  Still the cooling design seems to be a sub-optimal and my guess is the result of the company already buying hundreds of cases, fans, and other components for a 20W which will never exist (well outside of flawed simulations).

Someone correct me if I am wrong but I would imagine a high density pin heat sink on the two FPGA and then a larger fan mounted on the side blowing across both chips would be more effective.  You are getting a higher airflow, and it is better directed at the actual heat source.  The unitary airflow would also allow more even cooling of both chips.

So IMHO :
The bad news is they are salvaging their existing inventory of parts resulting in sub-optimal cooling.
The good news is is more evidence that they are just poorly run enterprise not a scam.
The super good news is for people who like to tinker one probably could come up w/ a custom cooling solution which is more effective.  

A side note:
The higher heat load and higher MH/chip makes watercooling interesting.  Putting a $50 waterblock on a 8W FPGA (Spartan-6) is kinda silly as even a tiny fan can keep temps at optimal.  Watercooling isn't going to improve thermals much, and since you are only getting 200MH/chip that adds a hefty $0.25 per MH in cooling gear.  A higher output chip, especially one running hotter makes water cooling more "interesting".

Honestly my impression of the product improves as my impression of the company declines. The reduced specs, delays, plausible sourcing (BFL drop that "blend of ASIC & FPGA" from your website it just makes you look stupid), and "bolt on fans" seems more inline with the type of enterprise which could source some last gen chips than one that would be making custom ASICs or current get sASICs.

So I may buy one just to fool around with the watercooling potential.  Of course they would need to start shipping some product first so likely I just have to wait another  .... (wait for it) .... 4-6 weeks.

That looks like an 80mm fan to me.

haha, I got the same impression

box reminds me of the I.T crowd where they are showing off the box thats the internet

Whats this fan doing in the bottom. it`s supposed to be closed box just with the fan upside and somme holes in the back and left and right side. strange....
those fan`s are120x120 ??