Topic: Alpha Technology Litecoin (Scrypt) ASIC Miner Order Batch 1 Now! - page 39. (Read 529056 times)

Mohammed 'The Bashful' Akram stubbed his cigarette out on it after taking a call from the Manchester PayPal fraud squad

~LOL~

Part of the speculation issue for this one board is we don't know when the photo was taken. It could've been a test board, it could've been taken before use, maybe it was a bum board, etc.


And that's why I was thinking they may have used too high of a temp on their hand technique, or held it for too long. The flux is burnt to a crisp and the area around the pads looks "warmed too much", but the traces aren't raised or bubbled which would indicate over-current.


Totally concur, that's why I believed it to be a situation of bad hand soldering, or something may have been sitting on that spot.


99.9% Rubbing alcohol gets it off in about 2 firm "polishing" swipes with thick automotive-grade paper wipes, when I've had to do it. It also has the tendency to remove the writing on top of many chips. In the photo closeup, several chips seem to have lost their writing as well, entirely, and some partially. Could be indicative of the cleaning, or simply lighting effect.

My other thought is, it also depends on the heatsink compound. I forget the name of the stuff I use, but it's not your normal stuff, and works better than the well-rated computer stuff. It has no byproduct after prolonged use. Also, it's possible during testing that they merely sat the heatsink on top of the chips, as you can do with KNC gear.

All speculative. Folks shouldn't be so focused on this one board though, whose true history we have no idea about. Fact is, it all sucks.

Has there been a massive spike in the network hash since Alpha got their chips?

Alpha aren't acting  like a company that has mined thousands of $$$ of coin over that last month. They seem to be getting more and more desperate, which leads me to think they are on their last legs and desperately need more cash. I don't think they have enough money to complete development and need the balances paid to move forward. We'll probably see a crappy prototype video some time early next month then Alpha will demand final payment. That's when it will get really interesting. My guess. If Alpha get enough money in final payments they will start mining themselves, ship the minimum amount of customer hardware, then shut up shop and disappear. No ones buying a batch 2 from these clowns and there are much more reliable chip vendors out there than these jokers.

Whatever happens DO NOT PAY THE BALANCE.  If you want a refund should get a move on and don't think just because you paid in BTC you cannot make a claim. Go to moneyclaim and get a judgement YOU WILL WIN. Make a personal claim against Mubasher as well as Alpha and send the bailiffs round to take his car if you have to. Don't wait until they have disappeared before taking action.

I'll repost some important info below:

You can file small claims court proceedings online here:
https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/web/mcol/welcome

Money claim online can be used by people living outside the UK but you will need a UK service address. Many people have had success with this one:
http://www.cityaddress.co.uk/index.html

You can contact the UK Citizen's Advice Bureau direct on 08454 040506 or fill out the form on their website. They will pass your complaint on to UK trading standards. If they receive enough complaints they may start a criminal investigation into Alpha. The form can be found here:
https://ssl.datamotion.com/form.aspx?co=3438&frm=citacomplainform&to=flare.fromforms

There is also actionfraud. But I doubt they do anything at this stage. It might be worth logging a complaint though.
http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/

Feel free to drop me a PM if you need any help or advice with your claim

Very doubtful that the board has been used much.

It looks like only 1 PCI-E power connector has been installed. The hand soldering is expected, because it is a through hole connector placed on the back of the board - a non-standard configuration. Normally, this type of board will be IR reflowed on the top and wave soldered on the bottom. This can't be done with a back-side connector in place, so the connector will have to be hand-soldered as the last step in assembly.

The discoloured areas are signal connectors - the PCB CAD files show that they are miles away from anything power related. Those are probably the coldest spots on the board, being well away from power circuits and from the ASICs. I cannot explain the discolouration.

The board is unlikely to be operable (at least at meaningful hash rate) without a large heatsink - there is no evidence of scratching on the heatsink mounting holes, which would be expected if a heatisnk had been installed and removed. There are no traces of heatsink compound left - so if the board had been used, it has been thoroughly solvent cleaned before photographing. Prolonged use at high temperatures also degrades heatsink compound, with a tendency to make it release silicone oil. Anyone who has serviced or rebuilt graphics cards in mining duty would have seen this. This silicone is very difficult to clean off, even with electronics solvents like IPA.

Around this time last year I was running a massive GPU ASIC farm. I had over 100 GPUs at my peak, which was 80Mh/s. I was bringing in about 8k-12k a month, for the first few months at least. I invested around 75K and at the end I was lucky to have recouped 85k, which was 9 months later, some time back in July. If I had played my cards right I could have done much much better, but it is what it is and I learned a lot. I'm not just saying this for no reason. It's an accurate observation from someone who has a lot of hands on experience with PCB boards.

I know without a doubt the pictures of the board that were provided was of a board that has seen significant use. It has already discolored half of the board and it may not even still function. Why don't they flip it over and show us the other side? Because if they do you'll see a big burn mark from where that board took a dump. My guess for why they showed us that board is because the rest are busy hashing away and they don't want to pull one out of production. Greedy bastards.

Are these guys (Alpha) still in business?

Agreed. No exim data huh ? Very suspicious.

You have obviously never mined Cryptos before. That card is heavily used. Anyone who doesn't think so is a fool.

On the images, they removed the exif data from the PCB picture, but it remains intact for their case photos. Nov 11th is when the case photos were supposedly taken: http://regex.info/exif.cgi?dummy=on&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Falpha-t.net%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F11%2FIMG_20141111_151328.jpg

Regarding the board, there's 2 spots for the pcie connectors. Only one of them is populated, the bottom-right. Top right may have been populated, but it's not likely--there's merely some solder on 1 of the traces, with 2 of them having just a smidge. The 3 areas with burn/fingerprint marks appear to be test points, or otherwise not primary power points.

If they're fingerprints, it's a very high coincidence for them to be sitting right over those pads. Instead it's possible that the reflow oven they used didn't put any solder there, and they used an iron at far too high of a temp to do so by hand. Or it's smudges, or it's something else, but those traces don't appear damaged so there'd be no point for the PCB to be burned there.

Further support for the high-temp hand-hack job is in the bottom-right pcie connector, look at the burnt flux. A clean, proper-temperature flow will not exhibit that.

I do think it's very likely this is a board they've used heavily over the past month--remember, they had at least one of these assembled at the beginning of October, and since then claim to have been trying to get everything running right. For analytical purposes, it should be noted that one board shouldn't be taken by default to represent their whole batch.

You guys(who disagree with the man pointing out that it is a used board) have obviously never used a soldering iron, or wiped off a board.  There are some idiots in the mining world. Someone on ebay was trying to sell a used miner board with a piece that was completely cut out of the board. WTF? The boards made today can have many layers for their traces. So they effectively ended the life of the board.(instead of just selling it burnt..which is (possibly)fixable by using a hot air rework wand and some new components.)
The case is all banged up. And this is how you guys were scammed in the first place with that weird electronics setup with old server boards.

This thing even at 180mh/s I dont think it will get above $1000 on eBay today...let alone what it will get when you receive it.

The soldering is obvious. Those ARE burn spots. And on top of that they still have two spots on that specific board filled with solder.

I have torn apart electronics my whole life, and have a ton of hours behind a soldering iron. So I am sure that is a used board. Used for what? I don't know..probably testing

Lol, guys... those dark spots in that picture do not suggest the board is used... far from it.  If anything, that looks like someone's dirty finger marks.

Not to mention the guy who circled stuff in red above can't seem to tell the difference between PCB discoloring (which it clearly is not) and lighting variance/poor image quality.

Seriously, you give Alpha too much credit if you think they're mining with a whole ton of assembled vipers right now.

And I suspect they showed us the best looking board they have. Which tells me they have a lot of used boards that are much worse shape than that one.

This board has seen heavy use, no doubt about it. Everything to the right and left of the red lines shows signs of age and heavy usage. The circles are burnt spots from where the board has been overheated.

This board is used, maybe even dead? It takes a long time for a PCB to discolor if it's running in the correct temperature range. Who knows, but that isn't new.

Don´t use the Word "refund" in the Mail to pass there Spam Filter 

I don't have an order with them; I wonder what would happen if I ask for someone else's refund money? Haha.

The offered me few time ago a partial refund, I accepted, but since it's a black hole.  I'm trying to get refund from others channels, but still, it's so bad from AT to rape us that bad.

Ha Ha....rich.  I haven't gotten mine yet.  Any word AT? 

I raised the issue of them needing to clarify what they actually meant by their claim in the latest announcement that they were processing refunds.

They deleted my question.

I agree with much of what you said, especially the quoted bit here--am a fan of Occam myself. We all have our theories, and there's aspects to mine I can't answer. I've never once believed them to be a scam or criminal masterminds, but they're trying to gamble with other folks' money; they definitely bit off more than they could handle. They should know by now they'll never be able to sell again to any current individuals, they're likely holding out hope to shake down some new trees in the future.

I believe they know this but have hope in their product. If they do provide a functional and 'bullet-proof' product, particularly one which is stable across multipools (unlike the big players, KNC, etc), then they could have renewed interest from new customers.

BFL messed up a lot of people several times over before finally tanking. Sometimes people just don't learn.

Never meant this in an argumentative way, just tossing it out there. Nothing else going on in the thread for at least 30 more days when they provide another update