Topic: Antminer R4 - dead hash board? Shitty design, read before you send it back - page 3. (Read 12358 times)

What's the average time for Bitmain Hong Kong to turn around warranty claims?

My two R4's were delivered yesterday afternoon, well so the DHL tracking shows however I've heard nothing from Bitmain and the Repair ticket hasn't been updated.

I shipped a S9 autofreq board back and they told me I needed to send the entire S9 back. I did that, and set up a second ticket, and in the ticket asked them to put the board in the box.

You probably would want to ship the entire R4 back to them, else they might do the same thing to you as they did to me.

I had a good laugh on your story. Thanks! but yea, that really sucks if 20 degC is considered cold.... My S9 has been hashing stably and quietly (fans < 2k rpm) on my balcony while it's -25 degC.

Seems all their miners are crap. Got old S3 still running but their latest stuff just falls apart.
Which would be fine, rush stuff to customers. As long as they support it and replace it in a better manner.

Their current warranty... sucks

R4B1 with temperature sensitive board.  

When cold booted 1x board won't hash. ( 20 Degrees C. )
Led is dead off but as I observed it regained some life ( blinking ) after miner warm-up.
I was unable to recover the board from troubleshooting. ( cable swap, freq, reboot , P/S )

I decided to go radical and put the damn board in the oven for couple of minutes.
Now ... hashing full speed.

My R4 don't like winter ... what kind of heater is that  

As suspected, the hashboard that was reporting 55 asics has now died right on schedule... this time cause of death is short circuit.

With a 50% failure rate, makes me wonder why they feel a need to exercise such tight control over their hardware / software 

It seems to be just a bad design.  I believe there needs to be a sheet of aluminum or copper inserted between the hashing boards.  You can see the center area between the hashing boards heats up and the top and bottom heat sinks do not heat as much.  I am very sad.  I wish I would have just got an S9.

I got an R4 of the latest batch on Jan 13, 2017.  It ran for 3 days and one board quit hashing.  I am noticing there is a flaw in the cooling algorithm. Sometimes after a reboot it runs with both boards at 80 degrees and the fan fluctuates periodically.  Other times the fan runs slow and one board runs at 100.  There is definitely something wrong with the fan controller in my unit.  My basement room is humidity controlled and never gets above 68F.  I am so bummed out because I was so excited and spent $1200 to get it.  I also read the website many times and some pages tell you to ship back the board and other pages tell you after Sept 2016 to return the entire unit. I am waiting to see if I can ship the board since I already removed it.  It is pretty obvious by reading the kernel log which board is not hashing.  My guess is they know the defective boards exit and they want you to ship the entire unit in hopes that will make people reluctant and will just run the 50% hash rate and save them some repairs.  I plan to play like a good player but if they don't fix my board I am going to be quite vocal about it. After reading this forum they are not QC these boards very well so buyer beware.

I don't think you realize that the person who just told you to email them is the person who operates the place.  You should send the email.

I'm not worried yet, I wouldn't have sent it if I didn't have at least a little trust.

While it's been almost a month since the process started, they only received it on Jan 23rd. So they've only had it for two business weeks.

If I don't hear back by the end of next week, I'll send an e-mail requesting an update.

I'm not in a rush, I'd just like it to go smoothly so I can rely on them in the future if needed. It might not be cost effective or time effective, but I'll certainly give it a try. It's better than sitting on broken boards anyway.

Assuming that one comes back working for a reasonable price. It'll give me the numbers I need to calculate a ROI based on the repair costs and time. If they are favorable I have more boards to send.

@captinkid,

Denver turn around time does not take that long.  If  you are waiting for that long, please send email with your repair ticket number to [email protected] 

Something must be wrong... 

Something else to keep in mind is the 'shipping weight' is not necessarily the weight of the package. Package dimensions enter  into that and there are trip points for HxWxL size = a certain minimum shipping weight and each carrier has different trip points. The R4 is a fairly large box.

I am not discounting their failure on R4 because I have one defective board on 2 of my R4B6s purchased.

The shipping weight for one R4 unit should be 15lb as per my shipment back to Hong Kong for warranty. Have you researched other smaller shippers like one I know of is uszcn ( I use them regularly for other personal purpose)? These small guys can offer you $3~5/lb rate but it would take about 2 weeks to reach destination.

And I have not heard back from you: have you proactively engaged in a "friendly" (not furious) conversation with Bitmain support yet? I might be lucky but I got them to cover my round trip shipping for this warranty shipment.

EDIT:
one more thing to add, $300 is not unusual for retail rate. If you are able to find someone with business rate, you may get a largely discounted rate.

24 lbs
24" x 8.15" x 13"

from anywhere in USA to Hong Kong is more than 300$

I'm Livid - I hope someone decides to make this right with me and the 4 other people I know that ordered r4's and the failure rate is EXACTLY 50%!

Where do you ship from? $300 seems pretty crazy. Have you spoken to Bitmain support yet?

My 3 x T9's haven't missed a beat with a current up time of 11 days.

I told people when the T9 came out that this was the case but since I couldn't reveal my source for the information of course the cynics didn't believe me lol

Yes, you can clone the data from one good PIC to another, but it only solves some problems with the boards. If it's a genuine hardware fault you're out of luck unless you have the equipment and experience to diagnose it.

I saved 1 out of 3 failed boards by copying the pic data. The other two boards have hardware faults that that didn't fix. And no the PIC won't self heal if it's munged up badly enough, but manually copying the data did work once at least. And no additional harm done to the other two busted ones.

Using a pickit3 reading from a good board and writing to a bad board seems to fix the boards that don't show up or communicate at all with the control board. Beyond that it's not so easy. Although you have to remove the little worthless warranty sticker to get to the pic header, so don't expect to get a worthless warranty after you try to fix it yourself.

Also it might be cheaper to send things to bitmainwarranty.com instead of for the warranty in Hong Kong. Not only is the full service cheaper than shipping back to China, but the turnaround is supposedly faster. As a caution I have one S9 board that's been out to them for almost a month now with no reply, so I haven't yet had a successful transaction with them. I still don't know if I trust them, but I certainly can't justify shipping back for a warranty repair.

I am so furious with this R4 situation.  I ordered 2 R4's B6 and out of 2 I have 3/4 boards running.  I had my brother that works for a huge company that ships BOOKS worldwide get me a quote to send back the r4.  OVER 300$  now let us not forget down time.  They expect us to PAY for return shipping of the defective unit?  NEVER in my life have I dealt with a company that would expect you to pay 300$ for shipping a 24hr defective product back to china!  There has to be a better way.  I am reading the beginning of this thread again and again thinking I am missing something, but the only thing that comes to play is the fact that these machines take a long time to come up anyway.  Is there any truth to the fact that the unit could "self heal" by reprogramming it's own Pic chip?  It sounds a little far fetched to me.  However, being a team player, I will waste 2 hours AGAIN on my machine to see if there is any truth to that.  I also read that someone copied the pic from a working board and duplicated it to a non working board.  That is all fine an dandy, however I can't imagine Bitmain being that ignorant as to not copy protect the data on the pic.  I do have a pic programmer *being an old PlayStation 1 mod chip installer! LOL

If anyone has ANY insight in to this situation feel free to message me and discuss.  I also have a friend that has 3/6 bad R4 B5  This is FAR from acceptable.

Thanks for tolerating my RANT!

Boomin

in my case just hope that my 3 working blades continue to last.

every day they mine at  11.5  is worth it to me.

coin price is rising and while I may not roi in coin  I may roi in fiat.