Topic: Antminer S3+ is junk and no support from BITMAIN - page 2. (Read 3064 times)

@Codemeister,

Please PM us, lets figure out why it took 20 days...   

Usually if you are located in USA, Report of RMA to parts exchange can be done as fast as the next day, average 2-4 business days on new products.  

Shipping time to return, 1-2 business days later, the replacement goes out.  (If the item received was defective)

Well, I had a broken controller board which has been swapped for a working one. It took about 20 days in total to send and receive. The miner is working perfectly again!

Thanks BitmainWarranty! 

Well that is certainly good news. I will add that to my thread. I hope this continues.

These peeps made good!  I am 100% happy, my issues rectified and I have been "made whole" in EVERY way.  SALUTE!   

Contact BitmainSupport to arrange the new controller board.

I do really like bitmain, they are one of the better asic manufacturers out there. That being said, their return/rma process and procedure is awful and it's nearly impossible to get support. I had a unit that showed up with a capacitor that was broken off, when I went back to them for a replacement, they told me to press hard on the chips. I even had pictures showing the damaged component on the board with big red arrows pointing at it.  I finally gave up after a month of emailing back and forth. So, I would forget about trying to get anything fixed or returned to them. Junk it and buy another and chalk it up to the cost of mining.

Bicknellski,

What I'm looking at when dealing with a support team (be that from Dell, SP-tech, IBM, SAP, HP, BITMAIN) is for a generic procedure which can be recorded and it's results evaluated. The saying "we're learning from our mistakes" is more to the point than ever. Unfortunately you can't have production in numbers and no failures. Especially when the units you build rely on the performance of numerous vendors you can't actually control.

That being said, a good support team is respectful with the customer buying their products, follows rigid rules in solving issues (scripted questionnaires, recording results, opinions and product failures case by case, escalation when necessary) so that they improve their response time, do not argue and or embarrass the customer and builds a body of knowledge in the process to support their products. It might seem funny, but the rules are implemented mostly due to the fact that someone is interested to measure and improve their performance and professionalism as well as to cut the overall support costs, as much as possible.

I won't go through my history in dealing with the support teams from F500 companies, however recently, I finalized an RMA process with SP-Tech. Let me tell you that those people are really interested in learning what went wrong with the units they sold and why that happened, they try to establish failure patterns and everything gets recorded in their systems. They're courteous and serviceable even outside the business hours, even late at night (due to the time difference Israel / North America). If you have their support contacts (Mike & Sonya) in your skype client .. you can see they're taking turns and are available most of the day time. When you talk with them you can feel that they're proud of being there and their success is SPT's success.

Missing emails at support@ is not an big issue, mostly because of the sheer number of messages going in and out. Eventually you get your turn. No one said it's next day support. But they try. When I have something important to deal with, I learnt to be persistent and/or contact them through every public channel available (skype, email, forum, enlarged team). In the end, someone answers and puts me on the right track. Even then, they seem happy they could help and do not let me drop until I'm satisfied with their answers. There's no difference between their support quality and Dell support, provided by Unisys .. in either case, I'm not feeling sorry for myself when I try to speak with them because of a miner/server issue.

You seem to be attacking me without many of the facts here and its rather weird. The BitmainWarranty IS Bitmain, and is in charge of the US returns centre. The only way to use that centre and not the CN centre is to contact them directly as advised. The customer has already stated he has an email string with Bitmain and so there is something that can very easily be transferred over.

You have also ignored that I diagnosed the problems with the miners prior to making the referral, as they are previously known issues. Both boards were physically fine but had a bugged firmware on, before one of them was bricked due to a failed flash. The bricked board needs RMA'ing to BitmainWarranty as advised and the other just needs 1024 firmware putting on as advised.

Anything else? Or can we get back to actually helping this person now....

@shoemakerbruce,

Something must went really wrong here and apology...

Would you please check your PM.  Sent you a contact info.  Lets resolve this.

Unfortunately you do not understand what a "scripted response" is. Let me explain.

1st level support is usually tasked to solve common issues, like "is it plugged in?", "let's upgrade firmware to the last stable version" .. etc .. The questions to be asked a customer seeking support are to be followed in a certain manner (i.e. scripted), so that based on the customer answers, if (s)he can't fix it, level one support escalates the issue to the right people. Therefore, Level 1 support follows a predetermined "script" to figure out the issue .. You don't need a lot of training for Level one support .. it just needs to be organized.

Now, it worries me a little, if the hired support behaves like in the post above, instructing a customer who paid a decent sum for a miner, to ship the miner or the boards / miners for replacement to another (official or not) forum user without proper customer identification, RMA #, incident analysis and documentation. BITAMAIN does not learn anything about the issue this way and considering everyone "legit" .. incurs costs without any possibility of fixing the same problems for other customers. That's basic support personnel training .. I hope for your sake that BITMAIN does not ask for customer reviews on the offered support when they close the tickets .. (if there are any support tickets) ..

You say I'm not helping.  I hope I do. If not the customer here, maybe other customers following .. If no one told you yet ..make sure you understand you're BITMAIN's employee. "your" beta is BITMAIN's beta. In the event you actually fixed some bugs, by saying literally that "1024 breaks the reset button" you are not doing BITMAIN any favors. I personally won't be considering thinking to buy any BITMAIN units with such support. It might be better than it was before .. but not good enough for the average North American in the 21st century.    

Agreed, anything but the beta firmware I posted past 1024 should be avoided. 1024 also breaks the reset button, my beta one fixes it.

If I am a scripted account, then my writer deserves a Turing Award.

Are you running the November S3 firmware version? I experienced a similar issue running the November firmware, but after switching to the 10-24 firmware my S3s have been rock solid.

The November firmware release contains a bug that causes S3s to slow down significantly after hashing for a few hours. It looks like Bitmain has removed the November S3 firmware from their website due to this issue.

It may have felt a lot like your emails to Bitmain since Dogie is a paid employee of bitmain to help english speaking customers. Supposedly. Most of his responses are simple scripted 1 liners. 

There is one already pop out.

Calm down guys. What dogie want to say is the second controller is unstable, maybe from firmware. You can try another firmware that available on bitmain site.

Note for updating firmware:
1. Do not use wifi connection, use direct connection pc to miner.
2. Do not close the web page until the process finish.
3. Do not poweroff the controller during process.
4. Do not unplug the utp cable during process

I read every word, and unlike your post I am contributing to sorting the problem....

ANYWAY, if you're in the US send them to BitmainWarranty and he will swap them out. The bricked controller does sound bricked, but your hashing issue is more than likely firmware based. What version are they running?

Good luck on finding support for your malfunctioning S3s!

Merry Christmas,
Adam