Topic: ANTMINER S4 Discussion and Support Thread - page 34. (Read 301481 times)

@sloopy,

Next time, please purchase hardware directly from the manufacture.  

BITMAIN is not responsible for customers purchasing the used miner from a third party.  (Our techs may be able to assist you to guide you to resolve some technical difficulties you may be experiencing, however, if the part is broken/dead/damaged, parts will not be given out for free.

For a full service, please ONLY purchase Antminer Product directly from http://www.bitmaintech.com


Thank you

That's precisely what just happened to me.  Bitmain's response to me: "find a PSU in your local market".

I chose to sell my S4s instead and I have no intent of ever spending another penny on Bitmain.  90 day warranty on a PSU is horrid. 

BUYER BEWARE.

M

One of my S4 died today and won't power back on.

I'm taking it apart tomorrow to see what is going on but assume the PSU fried...

It is past the 90 day warranty barely, so what are my options?

This has been my exact sentiment, up until they kept on, and kept on telling me things which never came true, and then I gave up on them turning it around. All mining companies are for profit, but you can be for profit without screwing people over.

I sincerely hope they do turn things around Prelude. It would be great for the community, but as you said SPtech did and do true customer service. It isn't some magic trick, or even that hard to do. Simply take care of people and don't gouge them, don't lie in their face over and over, and don't, truly DO NOT tell them you will do something and not do it. That is a straight out lie. Mistakes are one thing. Miscalculating something happens. Mistakes truly happen, but stand up like a MAN and take care of it. BITSTAIN have so many opportunities to make things right yet they continue to spit in the face of their customers, IE Yoshi telling us he will do something and never doing it.

I think the BITMAIN Warranty account is shared between multiple people. I know there are good people working at BITSTAIN, and there are people who truly care about helping. There will come a time in this company when they release another miner which has major issues. They can continue the same old same old, OR, they can realize there are better ways. I know us home miners are a very small part of any mining companies business, but we are also the ones who will test, give great feedback, spread good word, post about how amazing someone is, and give the type of good karma you need for people to hear.

I echo the same sentiment, Bitmain be a company people talk about the right way and if people have issues, people point out obvious flaws, etc be humble enough to recognize those things and show progress to correct them.
I would be personally ashamed if I was responsible for the January firmware for the S3. It is crap on hashing rates and no Vcore control. The S4 you fix some of the hashrate but again destroy the ability to underclock. The S5s peopel are receiving now are reporting various different versions of firmware, but I do not own one of them so will not claim it for a fact. But, I do own the others, and have owned many S4s which I dropped at almost nothing because I felt bad for someone else dealing with them.

Customer service begins with honesty. If you cannot be honest and maintain communication with your customers you may make millions of dollars but eventually things always catch up. You can only do so much for so long before more people decide to come out and tell their story.

If every n00b to bitcoin read this entire thread they would never buy a product you sell from the sheer audacity you have taken in ripping people with pricing on the S5, ripping people witht he PSUs, Fans, and firmware on S4s, and the constant lack of attention to any past product. They will realize you are a sell it and forget it company. Just like Yoshi saying he will check on something or get back with someone and engineering is looking into it. You can only hear those things so many times before you are fed up.

If BITSTAIN decides they really want to provide customer service I can point you to several companies to model after.
But, I fear the first comment we saw in that last post is the only thing BITSTAIN cares about:
"BITMAIN is a FOR-PROFIT Company!"
That is the only thing that matters to BITSTAIN, and what they've yet to realize is the best profit is being mature enough to understand you are making money while making happy customers.
and it isn't even that hard to do. I do it everyday. You listen, and realize most customers simply want what they paid for, a functioning product without the games.

Sorry for the consecutive posts, but I'm on my mobile.. Posting is a pain in the ass right now.

As for the unlocked firmware that smit1237 was kind enough to look into for me, and find a solution to... It will be posted by the author when he is ready to do so. Encourage him to release it quickly by donating to smit1237's BTC address in his signature. Don't be a cheap asshole and wait for it to be public, anyone can afford a dollar or two to thank him for doing what BITMAIN has so far refused to do. Donating to him for the time he puts into these custom firmwares can only benefit yourself as he will be more willing to put work into future releases.

His BTC address is: 19NvsvA9UzFLNaWp7rWuNTEG1v7PCYc86j

I'm the only one running the firmware right now since he doesn't own an S4, and I can confirm that it works perfectly and the voltage control is now re-enabled. J7 remains uncontrollable, that is an issue with the S4's controller. If the drivers were open source, I strongly suspect smit would be able to fix J7.

Please do right by him, show that you appreciate the work he has put into making our S4s work better than the sorry broken state they are currently in.

Nothing wrong with being for profit, but if a company continually shits on their customers for short term profits, they will be long term fucked. It catches up to any company. BITMAIN used to be the king of ASIC manufactures, what happened? That crown firmly sits on Spondoolies head now. It's not impossible to reclaim it from them, and I hope BITMAIN will try to. Competition is needed and healthy. If Spondoolies comes out with hardware priced similarly to BITMAIN next gen, BITMAIN will be in for a world of pain just because of the reputation SP has built for themselves by being honest with their customers and supporting their products. When they say something, they follow through. On the other hand, we have BITMAIN lying to customers and removing capabilities from their miners to protect a poor choice in PSUs. Hell, BITMAIN promised all batch 1 S4 owners who had a PSU die a 10 day mining loss compensation. I never received it, even after asking Yoshi multiple times for it. All I ever got out of that from him is, and I quote, "let me look into it" several times. I doubt I'll ever see that 0.35BTC or so I was promised. SP would have paid me it plus interest I'm sure, if they were late with them compensation.

Come on BITMAIN, become a good guy again.

Thanks. I really appreciated both of your posts on the subject, seems like most people aren't willing to speak out. People need to see that I'm not just a sole "angry person on the internet blowing something out of proportion lunatic complaining about these issues" so to speak..

I really don't mean to dig into BITMAIN, I want them to be better. It wouldn't take much to turn their company around. The hardware (let's ignore PSUs....) is alright. The effort to provide good customer support through agents like BitmainWarranty is good. You have to respect the fact that they mostly sell hardware from stock, often shipped earlier than promised. The only real issue is their software/firmware. People like smit could be contracted to help if they don't have the talent in house, or if they are unwilling to spend time and money on improving the hardware once it's out the door. I'm not going to accuse BITMAIN of outright lying to us through BitmainWarranty about the voltage lock-down since their internal communication seems really horrible. A case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand does? Who knows. What is clear, is the issue is out there now. I think (hope?) we've made enough noise for BITMAIN to notice and take action. Their reputation has taken a hit, but it is never too late to make things right.

Bitmain, it would be a great idea for you to send this man an S4 to tinker with. He has already solved many problems with it, much quicker than you have. If smit is interested, he could contribute to improving your firmware. You know as well as we all do that that is where you need the most help. Send the man an S3+, S4, S4+, S5, and everything else you release in the future. Give him access to your closed source drivers after he signs a NDA if needed. It would cost you peanuts, and your community of buyers will be very thankful for it when we get the software support we need. It goes without saying that you should be sending CK and Kano one of each miner also to help with development. CK helped the S4 very much with his custom 4.6.1 cgminer.

I was planning on running two of them per the IBM 2880 server PSU, should work out just fine.  I may slightly underclock during the summer depending on heat in the data center.

BITMAIN is a FOR-PROFIT Company!  

But the point is, the username BitmainWarranty will catch the slack if your request or communications via China goes no where or cultural differences causing misunderstanding in communications.

Issues we hear from the international community be addressed but we are not the fix-all-group.  Some we may not be able to make you happy...


Currently servicing in English, Spanish, Serbian, Russian, Ukraine and  Filipino languages. (Other than English, availability time varies during the day but these languages are supported natively via [email protected].)

Telephone calls in above language can be requested via [email protected] or if someone is available, the call be transfer to the support staff who speaks the language.

Awesome post Prelude.

Thank you for your time and money spent to this point. Whether S4 users get anything from it or they don't, you have made this particular issue clear enough. You included the appropriate details so everyone can understand and no one can deny or question the facts. That is hard to do in a short summary, but you did it well.

You are the man PRELUDE ! you know i cant speak well thanks again


I think you cant look anything, because you are very busy with the make a profit on us.


thanks Smith, i want to learn and make that shit better on my freetimes   ( i start reading angstrom-manual.pdf )

At least we may sound like just a lip service, but we will look into this.

But 1380W is from the wall (AC side), and PSU 1400W is DC side. According to 80+ Gold specification if full 100% load, then efficiency is 88%. It means that 1400W from DC side corresponds to about 1590W from AC side.
(if 230V)

To be clear: I'm saw this device only from software side, didn't saw or touched in real life, so my thoughts about psu based on other owners replies(here and our local forum). I try to make my best to improve firmware, but i don't have control board to experiment with. I don't want my miners to be idle while i'm messing with bootloader.

The DPS2000bb worked with the S4 for me, and worked well.  
I used it the 2nd and 3rd time the power supply died in one particular unit.

The current firmware was needed to help with a hashrate issue, but removed the ability to underclock which was working prior to the firmware change.
BITSTAIN changed it because they claimed people were burning up the power supplies by overclocking - according to a previous post. I was not told why they removed it from anyone at BITSTAIN, I just know they did.
Regarding the hash board pulling too much voltage feel free to read back through this thread and you will see it proven, without a doubt. BITSTAIN even admitted it on the phone, but I do not remember if they did in this thread.

If you doubt what anyone who is complaining are saying, feel free to do your own research, but as you see from smit1237's response, the firmware is indeed "broken". I quoted him as you seem to trust his response over us people who are complaining. I am confident you have good reasons to do so, but I only took the time to post my grief because of sincere issues to warn people what they are up against.

BITSTAIN replace hundreds if not more of these power supplies and maybe some people were overclocking them and causing failures. I assure you I did not and all of my S4s were ran at stock until the warranty expired. At which point I again connected a DPS2000bb and did overclock it and it has been running fine overclocked until I recently dropped it back out of the cost of overclocking and I was finished proving to myself the issues which remained are firmware related.

If you research this issue on your own you will find power supplies and fans have failed repeatedly under warranty. It is through the work of miners replacing the fans and power supplies if you purchase an S4 and do not have issues with it.
It also depends on what you consider an issue. Even after the fan and PSU replacement the firmware problem still speaks volumes.

I certainly have nothing to gain by spending my time to post my experience with the S4.  After one particular failure when I told BITSTAIN the PSU failed yet again and it was hashing away on a DPS2000bb they offered to send me a DPS2000bb. I politely declined and thanked them for their time. I then ordered more from sidehack with his break out board. He and Novac run a business with class and genuine customer support.

Keep in mind the original S4s had PCIe connectors on the hashboards and then they were changed to lugs for which you need ring terminals. After the second or third failure I was working on the phone and via e-mail with someone there and they asked how I had the unit running. When I told them I went to Lowes and bought some ring terminals and put them on the end of 12 ga wire and screwed them to the board they acted like they didn't believe me for some reason so I took pictures and e-mailed them. Maybe they are used to dealing with sheeple so much they assume we all are and will not help ourselves, but I am at the mercy of no man and I will learn, experiment, and figure out the how. I shouldn't have to do so when a unit is under warranty as that particular unit was for 4 power supply failures in less than 9 weeks. I tried to tell them the problem, but they already knew which is why they kept replacing the power supplies. They knew they had a bad design and they know today they have an issue with one board pulling too much voltage. The cheap 1400 watt power supply should have never been used, and they admitted it then began shipping a "batch 2" power supply. Their own words are documented in this thread regarding that issue, but then they were told by a forum member about the board pulling too much voltage and I assume they decided that issue would cost them too much and replacing power supplies for the ones who cared enough to pursue a proper warranty claim.

I have pictures and documentation of everything I went through with dates and times. I only want to help people who have been or will be burned. If you do purchase the 20 miners and have issues feel free to PM or e-mail me for help if needed. After all of the experience I have with these units now I can replace the cables going to the hashboards pretty quick, I know the symptoms of I think most if not all power supply and fan related failures.

I am not some guy on the internet who complains for the fun of it. I am actually in the middle of building a new miner rack, but when I saw the posts from others I consider to be good folks under stress regarding the same issues I have been through I spent the time to write a reply. I hope to help people and if there is some coin needed to help have new firmware written I am happy to throw some in the pot.

I want to also voice my own experiences and offer miners who have bought these things and are having issues my help if they want it. I also mentioned the people at BITSTAIN who have been helpful. I have not seen anyone complaining in this thread about a non-existant issue as I personally have experienced these things for myself. It may take a couple of hours, but I read every word when I started having my problems. I wish I'd done that before I made my first purchase, but I learned from that mistake and am much better at making informed decisions regarding a mining product now.

If you purchase any S4 units with stock equipment just do yourself a favor and get spare fans and power supplies. Don't buy extra stock parts, get your own better parts for less money. It will save you money and heartache down the road.
I think there are some people who did not have any issues or complaints with the S4. Unfortunately those people either do not care about the hashing issue with the last version of firmware, or the inability to down clock the units correctly with this version.

One final thought is I do not think anyone would have spent the time and money to have custom firmware made to correct a non existent issue. It is a matter of if that issue is important to you, but to me, under-clocking these units is a must. Especially in the coming months.
 
Good luck with your purchase Digitalmocking. I sincerely hope you do not have the issues most of us have been through.
I seriously hope it all works out for you and you do not have any issues.

Firmware is really broken, and best way to fix it - complete rework. But voltage can be fixed. I don't even see them(S4), but weak point is psu no doubt. If you can swap them to dps-2000bb this would be a great upgrade. If you plan to underclock them, the original psu is fine, but i'm not sure how reliable it is

Smit, I'm curious, you're really knowledgable with the bitmain products, is there anything to this s4 firmware stuff, or is it just angry people on the internet blowing something out of proportion.

The reason I ask is I have a chance to purchase around 20 S4s from a mining operation that's lost their lease, but if the products are truly bugged and draw more power than is safe for them to be reliable, I'm not sure its worth it even at the low price.

Cyper_BLC, Sorry but this is really hard to explain if you don't know linux, if you want i can make  modifications upon your request. I really don't want to offend you.