Topic: Antminer L3 - 250mh - 400watt Scrypt miner coming soon - page 37. (Read 137455 times)

Longsnowsm, I just wanted to thank you for taking the time in the midst of all the challenges you've had to share your experiences and knowledge with the rest of us.

I was also considering selling my A4s to buy L3s, and it's probably only the tyranny of distance from a ready market for them that prevented me jumping on that train right about the time you did. I'm now pleased I didn't of course but take no pleasure in hearing about the problems you're having. After the A4 firmware debacle I'm feeling for you, and hope you manage to resolve your L3 failures in the most timely low cost manner possible.

Cheers 

Your hoarding of PIVX has seemingly paid off!  I'm mining on prohashing as well but need to rethink my coin allocation where I've been taking mainly BTC & sprinkling in some LTC and ETC.

Well the L3 with the issues crashed again hard and would not come back up.  The controller fault light stays on no matter what you do.  Resetting it, disconnecting all the boards, connecting one board at a time all end up with a fault light on.   So I experimented with the controller from another L3 and reconnected all the boards.  The miner comes up fine after swapping the controller. 

So it looks like a failed controller on the second L3.  Now to figure out what one of these costs to buy it or if I need to send this one back and have it swapped.  So more email off to Bitmain and Eastshore.  These people have got to just LOVE ME! 

The good news is that I am learning a bit about these miners, but bad news is that I am learning more than I wanted to know about the miners for all the wrong reasons...  I guess it just goes with the territory.

 

Wow, that miner was down HARD, I couldn't get it to come back up even after the reboot and reset of the controller.  I had to shut it down and take a guess at which board was causing the issue.  Again board 3.  Which is strange on this miner because board 2 is the one that throws some hardware errors.  I tried board 2 first and reset everything and no dice.  Reconnected it and went to board 3 and disconnected it and the miner came back up.  So it would appear something is going on with board 3 on this miner as well.  Even though I didn't see any hardware errors.  I may try shutting it down again and connect only board 3 and see what happens.

So I will let Eastshore know I will probably have a second board that needs to go back to Bitmain.  I will try some more testing to see if I can get a better idea of what is happening with that board.

That is good to know!  I may have to take you up on that offer.  Just arrived back from running errands and I have another miner now that is crashing hard and going to a fault light.  Just restarted it now. Of course when I am watching it nothing happens!  So I may need to send another miner hash board in it looks like. 

I will keep that in mind, both of mine have 1 board each generating a high amount of HW errors.

I know its a little late now but if you were interested I could have helped you with a return label, our pricing would have only been $40 to send this back.

As long as it is delivered to door, it doesn't really matter which carrier you use.
I just shipped (and already received it back fixed) Antminer R4, the whole miner unit to warranty repair in China, using common postal service Posti (Finland).
I paid for EMS delivery.
Final step of that journey: Hongkong Post delivered my package straight to the address.
This cost me 70 EUR.

Just another follow up on sending stuff back to Bitmain.   So I opened the repair ticket this morning for Bitmain.  They require you to have the shipper/tracking number for your return package to open the ticket.  Which is quite odd since you package things up before you go down to a shipper to pay your postage and get the tracking #.  So I printed out what I could and went to UPS.  I explained the situation and I was lucky to get in there before the rush because this took a little while to sort out.  Luckily the UPS store let me use their computer to login to Bitmain and process the ticket request with the tracking info while I was there.  So I didn't have to go back home with the tracking info create the ticket, print out the 2 copies, one for inside the box and one for outside of the box. 

So they saved me some time and frustration there.  So when it was all said and done the cheapest option to send 1 board back turned out to be just shy of $185!   

Thank goodness I didn't have to sent the entire miner.  I probably would have been looking at close to $400.  The bad part is Bitmain requires you to us DHL, Fedex, UPS and none of them are cheap.  This is why people use BitmainWarranty in Denver and eat the cost because when it is all said and done the shipping, the repair, and the return will end up being less than what it costs to ship back to China.  Sadly I reached out to BitmainWarranty and they don't do L3 board repair here in the US yet.  Not until those miners are sold to the US will they start to offer that service.

So now I will end up having to pay the repair and shipment back. Eastshore will reimburse me the cost of the board repair which I am told is $35.  But the shipping is killer.  Probably would have been about the same price to just order a new board at this rate.  I guess I will have to see what the total cost comes to and give that some thought about having a spare board here. 

So the board is in the mail.  I will keep you posted on how this proccess goes. 

I just wanted to add that both Bitmain and Eastshore have been nothing but polite, courteous, and willing to help.  Eastshore's technical department wanted the entire miner back so that they could then ship the entire miner to Bitmain.  However after providing them the info from Bitmain which stated that they did not require the entire miner Eastshore has been willing to weigh both options and decided to let me just send the board back. I think it will cost them less in the end to just reimburse me for the board repair so this makes it attractive to them as well. 

I don't want everyone to think that these companies have been bad to work with.  It is just the hassle of trying to sort all of this out and get everyone on the same page as far as the issue and the desired outcome.  So I think everyone is finally on the same page and this will help reduce some of the financial impact to me personally as I can keep the miner up and running while trying to get this defective board repaired.

Hopefully I can get this thing out in the mail tomorrow.  The Bitmain repair ticket and return process is a little convoluted.   

Titans or A4 might be better buy. One f*** up from Bitmain gear and you lose all gain from lower power draw.

Regarding the warranty and easthore:
Please note that eastshore acts as a reseller for Bitmain hardware. If they would allow you to disassemble (and officially void the warranty since the miners have a seal) eastshore may have problems to claim warranty against Bitmaintech.
This is different if Bitmain allows you to directly send you the board only. I do understand why they act like they do.

Hi,

Sorry to hear about your experience with east shore and bitmain. It ashame you have to send the whole unit back as if it was just a board, p&p would of been cheaper im guessing. I doubt I will buy form east shore.

Im strongly thinking of buying about 2.5/3 ghs worth of l3's. I've noticed they are a few sellers on alibaba. wanted to know if there is any recommended ones perhaps?

After back and forth email exchanges with Eastshore and Bitmain I think we have settled the issue of sending back the entire miner.  Bitmain says you can send just the board and not the whole miner.  I provided that info to Eastshore and they offered to cover the cost of the repair if I mail the board back to Bitmain.  Bitmain says the board repair cost is $35 plus shipping.  So clearly the shipping is going to cost far more than the repair.  Eastshore has offered to cover the cost of the repair.  I guess I will have to eat the cost of the shipping both ways.

So that is the latest scoop on the repair issue.  I will try to get this board in the mail tomorrow.  As always I will keep you guys posted.  I had another L3 decide to crash on me yesterday as it became quite warm here.  I didn't get to see what was happening before it went offline and started throwing a fault light.  I had to reboot, and reset the controller and then it came back online.  Cranked up the box fans to move some more air over it and just monitoring now.  So the Bitmain drama continues I guess! LOL

 

Founded a same price in allegro.pl and ebay.pl but hash very diffirent.Allegro 30 mh price 120 usd in ebay 1.2 mh 120 usd.If you interest to buy check me in.

still not released on official site no? :@

I tend to disagree, I've been watching this thread carefully and between Longsnowsm's well documented problems and the feedback from DeepInTheMines (a reseller) the L3's are about as reliable as all other Bitmain miners, i.e. not very, and the customer service is about as good.

I strongly believe this is a pure trade-off brought about by their repeated use of a serial DC design. It's very efficient, but somewhat temperamental, and if you're in China and have ready access to spares (i.e. you're Bitmain or a partner) this isn't a big deal. But if you're like me and somewhere remote from China and the reseller, I think you need to think this through very carefully.

I'm in a different position to many on this forum as I started garage mining some years ago, but due to moving 12,000 miles around the world from London to a small city in New Zealand (115k), I needed to find another career with a better work/life/kids balance, so I went all in with crytpo-mining.

My A4's are in a purpose built room in a 5000 sq/ft industrial building with 100A/400V power so noise and heat are not a problem for me, but because I'm remote, reliability is paramount. I also get power for about 0.075c USD so while I'd like better efficiency, it's not a make or break decision point for me.

And let me hint again, better efficiency is coming: Inno are currently testing new A4 code with Nicehash which is going to be +20-25% more MH/s (circa 315Mh/s - on pool). https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.18024660

Each to their own needs of course, but consider all the information at hand before leaping in.

To answer your question I mine on ProHashing; they paid 167% of mining LTC exclusively on Sunday or 0.00002696 BTC/MH/s
I'm currently being paid out daily in Monero, PIVXcoin, Syscoin, and GameCredits, and hoarding like a squirrel. 

I didn't put db meter next to L3, but it's barely louder than my GPU rig. Bitmain PSU is loud AF compared to PC PSU, once I changed that -
I can sleep next to it, try doing that with A4. Sure it's loud for 1 minute at startup, but it never gets that loud during mining.

The tradeoffs with Bitmain's products are well known.  This is why people are buying Avalon's and now other SHA256 miners are showing up.  They aren't as efficient, but Avalon has a track record of reliability.  I would have to second the observations on the Inno A4's.  They are pretty solid miners.  They still have some things that need ironed out, but hardware does not appear to be the issue.  

Looking at the L3+ the specs say almost 80db on startup, and it is going to run around 70db.  That puts it in the same category as the A4 as far as noise and that is pretty loud for home mining.  Reliablity issues from the S9/T9/R4 are clearly part of the L3 makeup as well.  

With the L3 and L3+ I would prefer the L3 for the lower power, smaller footprint, and much quieter.  But I have a hard time recommending Bitmain's products knowing problems exist.  

Possibly an interesting turn of events with Eastshore.  I am trying to work out the details now.  I will keep you guys posted.  

Actually I do not know why someone should prefer an A4 to a L3. I had both of them (A4 Batch 3), but A4 is not working stable on Multipools like Nicehash and requires more than 2,5x power than the L3.
The A4 is quite loud, while the L3 is working silently. Of course you can have a broken one, but this can also happen on the A4. If you get a broken one get in touch with your reseller.

Regarding the L3+ I am not sure if this is a good deal. It doubles the hashrate, but also doubles (even a bit more than that) the power usage.
Since the L3 is hashing quite silent I wonder how the L3+ would be (please post if you know about this). And of course it all depends on the price.