Topic: Antminer R4 - dead hash board? Shitty design, read before you send it back - page 5. (Read 12358 times)

**ATTENTION ALL POTENTIAL BITMAIN WARRANTY CUSTOMERS**

Today I went to my local UPS store to ship out my Batch 4 R4 that needs repair and picked up my Batch 2 R4 that was shipped back on Friday (I have been out of town).

When I opened the box, I was shocked to see they shipped the miner back to me without the foam packing that goes on each end of the miner which was on there when I shipped to Denver. This means the R4 was not tightly packed and sliding around inside the box. In addition, I found one heat sink that had fallen off and one of the protective plastic sleeves for the hash board slots missing.

Seriously??? Crap product from China, slow repair service from Denver, and $225 later I still have a damaged miner. I do not even want to power it up out of fear of causing more damage.

Damn Phil, I never would've considered doing that vs a warranty repair, but that makes a lot of sense.  I am with you in re: to Bitmain, they have no respect for their customers.  If you're not buying 100+ units at a time, it's just not worth the risk of failed equipment.  I'm starting to feel like legitimate Group Buys hosted at DC's by purchasing shares (and paying out mining reward according to shares regardless of who's unit actually breaks down) might start making sense again, like an insurance policy against being the unlucky one with a failed unit taking out a huge chunk of your revenue stream.

Will Bitmain not accept the dead hashboard back to China for repair by itself? Last time I tried warrantying an S7 they specifically mentioned NOT to send the whole miner, only to send the dead boards and grossly under-declare value for them.  Doesn't really help you with the fan, but if I was you I would just source a furnace fan and duct it in instead of the type that ships with the R4. If it's covered under warranty it would be a shame not to try to get your value out of it.

thanks will start to look.

this is correct length  volts wrong

http://www.globalindustrial.com/p/hvac/blowers/crossflow/fasco-crossflow-blower-115-volts-2780-rpm


these are dc and may work I will need to read this page carefully
http://catalog.pelonistechnologies.com/category/dc-cross-flow-fans

this is close.

http://catalog.pelonistechnologies.com/item/dc-cross-flow-fans/dc-cross-flow-fan-jed-040a-series/jed-04035a12q

I may be able to trick the controller  using this above and this below


https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835132031


this is pwm and maybe will fool controller

maybe there is a supplier/part number on the r4 fan to cross reference?

Phil, what you want to search for is "tangential blower suppliers". That will pull up a ton of links, now as to finding one that runs off of 12vdc and has the needed PWM control... that will probably be the hard part.

this is the long barrel fan not a delta .  and it is working but sounds like shit

I know of no one selling the 20 inch tube fan

https://shop.bitmain.com/market.htm?name=antminer_r4_silent_bitcoin_miner_for_home
A Groundbreaking Custom-design Fan
The R4 will change the meaning of a fan for all bitcoin miners

Fans have long been the single biggest source of noise in any bitcoin miner. The R4’s design team found a simple but unique solution to this problem: to do away with the traditional noisy fan!
Inspired by the “fan” of a silent split air conditioner, we designed a fan that can make less than half the noise of the standard miner fan. What’s more is that its speed is automatically controlled to ensure it never creates more noise than is absolutely necessary.

http://image.bitmain.com/R4/overview/img-overview-fan2.png

That's the question, is it more cost effective to keep sending parts in for repair, or to spend that money buying better equipment with real support from elsewhere?

Can do a GPU rig that's 1/2 the raw income of Bitmain hardware, but it'll easy to fix and replace parts as needed, with a full 1 year warranty.

Maybe an Avalon rig too, not quite as good on paper as Bitmain, but if they have a lower failure rate it won't take much to make it worth it.

Bitmain has an initial productivity advantage, but it eats that away with failures and constant issues. Plus their warranty is essentially worthless, so there isn't much to recommend them.

One thing you might try is send the bad fan in with the other unit, and ask for a PAY repair on that part, or have them ship you a replacement fan. Anything other than shipping back an entire extra unit for a bad fan would be a big benefit.

I did a lot of math to figure out what to do in my case.  I have ¾ boards working.  I am doing 11.5 of 16th

Since 1 machine has a very noisy fan that will fail  I would need to send that in
Since the other machine has   1 dead board I would need to send that in.

So 2 units would be stupid expensive to ship to China.   Close to 300 plus lost hash  thats a no go.
Sending to bitmainwarranty  would be 70 to ship say 200 for repairs  say 270 plus lost hash.

They won't let me put the bad fan in the unit with the dead board which would save a lot.  I am pretty certain I should just mine until the gear dies more.  11.5 th will earn about .22 coins over the next 30 days.  or 200 usd.   so  add the 270 + 200 I am out 470  and I then would be up to 17th a month from today.
Since I am at 70% capacity at the moment losing 470 usd to go to 100% does not make much sense.
These are R4's  in safe mining places dry and  no dust not hot  with auto tuning. Letting me ship to bitmainwarranty won't be an option at the moment.

So I ordered an avalon 721 today. I paid 776  vs the 470 the repairs would cost.
I will get the unit in a week it will do 6.3th so 3 weeks would be about 100 so cost is 665 compared to 470

I get 6.3 th vs 4.5 th close to a push.   Don't forget the r4's could break more.

power cost is not a factor for me with the solar array

I am done with bitmain for a while.

bmminer crashes when the bad r4 board is connected, it segfaults somewhere during the board testing process and just sits there.

It fails immediately after this step:
Chain[J7] chip[12] get middle temp offset=-3 typeID=55

Was hoping I could get the 45 good chips to run, maybe if I knew the memory addresses it was failing on I could avoid them, but it's difficult to tell. I'm surprised they didn't engineer it to use whatever good chips are available, instead of failing the entire chain. But I suppose Bitmain isn't known for robust designs.

Oh well, sometimes you wish for the good old days with single asic USB chips, easy enough to diagnose anyway.

It's at least reading more than the dead S9 board was, so hopefully it'll be a quick fix when I send it it.

 

This particular R4 stopped hashing on one board after a day or so. I unplugged that specific board and let it continue hashing at 4th/s until I got confirmation from Bitmain Warranty that they would repair. I could have shipped to China under warranty but instead I opted for paying Denver to repair.

$200 included return shipping, I paid original shipping to Denver ($35+/-)

Yes 23 days loss time once shipped back to Denver. Not very pleased with this which exactly why I will probably not buy anymore New Bitmain products directly from China. Used equipment that is verified to work is all I am willing to risk buying and there is still potential for problems. Repairs equal lots of down time waiting for slow Bitmain Warranty.

Yoshi, I know you are reading this. You should hire more help. Also, information on what was repaired would be nice to know.

So it was a non warranty repair and you paid 200 for a board plus shipping.

And 23 days time lost correct?

Yeah I purchased awesomeminer last week, it's a great front end for a mining farm!
Saves so much bother.....

I shipped to Bitmain Warranty (Denver) a Batch 2 R4 for repair on January 4, arrived at their location on January 9, and arrived back to me on January 27.

I have not tested yet to confirm it works properly now (need to pick up from UPS)

Repair cost with return shipping $200. This is the same rate I paid for s9 repairs

I plan on shipping my INOP Batch 4 R4 to Denver on Monday

Has anyone spoken to Yoshi about fixing R4 boards yet?  I would much rather send to Colorado than China thru customs again.  In the early days they were one in the same - what happened?  They sent me power supplies and hash boards to s4 under warranty.  

I have tried to call MANY times just voicemail.  But I know that He travels to China alot.

Boomin

Bitmain R4 bring the Miner back home!  YEAH TO CHINA FOR FUCKING REPAIR!

took it from my friends office two of three pcie cables were loose.  He won't admit it but I think he knocked  the cables loose.

I am running some tests but I am not sure if it is  the more common issue of not find asics  masked with a few loose power cables.

Still hopeful.

Realized I don't have any pre autotune firmware for the R4, so that idea is out! Can't find any of the old firmwares online so I'll probably have to leave it on autotune.

Have one board running in the R4 now anyway, the other one is having some severe issues so it's likely something in the hardware. I rebuilt it's firmware but it didn't fix it.

Oh well, another failure.

 

Maybe PSU is failing under full load?

That's very odd indeed.

Not sure what the f mine is doing???

I can get either board to work at 4th, but not both boards at 8 th.

I will play with this some more.

Had my second R4 board fail today. Was working fine for three months, and just suddenly quit on me.

This one only reads 45 asics on one of the boards now, might try the firmware read / write trick that worked on some of the S9 boards. Although I'll have to pull the data from a pre autotune board to get it working back on the pre autotune firmware.

I already have an S9 hash board out to BitmainWarranty, once that comes back I'll consider sending this one in if I haven't fixed it by then.