Topic: Antminer S5 + Laser cutter mods... - page 2. (Read 6285 times)

I already tried all that. I tinker with fixing watches and I had some of those semi-soft, malleable mats that a watch maker would work on. I sat a couple miners on it and since it was semi-soft it filled up any small cracks or holes. Temps stayed the same, didn't matter. I have also tried closing off the entire bottom and top with some thin aluminum I had. Sealed just about everywhere, and there was no difference.

NOTE: When the miners all had stock fans, doing the seal up did have a small affect when ambient temps increased a little. So I can't say it doesn't work at all, but when using two of the Noctura ippc 3000 fans no matter what I did the temps were always the same regardless of what I did. I have a feeling the stock fan just blows loud and all over the place and the Noctura fans are very directional and don't need such a setup. When watching TV in just the next room, even with the door open I don't hear anything. If I had the blasters (stock fans) on them I would always hear that hum/whine. I'm sticking with my expensive Noctura's. Never saw such good performing fans. I also bought two of those Sythe fans from Amazon and even though they are 38mm thick, they couldn't keep up with the Noctura's.

I have lots of fans. I have 10 or 15 brand new STOCK S5 fans that I received from Bitmain a while ago, plus another 6 STOCK S5 fans that I used for about 2 weeks. If anyone in the US interested in S5 STOCK fans, let me know.

try a pad under the miner

 http://www.amazon.com/Silicone-Baking-Mat-Non-stick-Measurements/dp/B00CVQENUO/ref=pd_sim_79_4?

your miners base vibrates a bit and leaks air.  the pad above will lower sound and seal the miner to the table.

this forces air to go out the pull fan and some extra air goes up at the controller passing over the heat sensor.

put a little heat sink on the heat sensor .   I was able to get my s-5's to do freq 412  with decent errors  and decent sound. 

I used the silverstone  141 as a pull and a delta 120 x 38 as a push.

some where I posted a thread  on my results. around Jan or Feb.

Just throwing another picture out. These are some of my miners. I have also purchased about 20 different fans and tried MANY different setups to keep these guys cool. Surrounding the miner, like putting a case around it did nothing. Temps stayed the same. The stock fans were a little too loud so I'm using 2 Noctura Industrial 3000's in a push/pull with no extra boxes or ducts. Temps keep stable and consistent at 57-60. I do have air conditioning, so of course that is a huge factor in temps. The air conditioning would be powered on regardless if the miners were there or not, so it is no extra expense for me. Although I do have to say around 3pm EST USA if the temps outside hit 95+ the room does heat up and temps will climb to a max of 63 (only with door closed), soon as I open the room door the heat just shoots out of the room into the rest of the house, which is also air conditioned and I would imagine the extra heat is expelled by the AC system. I can keep the room door closed %100 of the time, but I do not like 63c. I did think of just ducting the heat right out the window, but not good figuring out such a complicated duct system with the 6 miners in that room. How to expel the individual heat flow from 6 miners out the window would be something interesting to see work. I wish I could come up with something but haven't figured it out. So things will stay the way they are for now, they are working good and temps in check. If no air conditioning in the house, the miners would probably have blown up by now.

Temp sensor on the S5. Hard to find.

Not mine, from a photo I grabbed a while ago.

I bought these a while back but haven't used them yet. They also have thermal paste on there already sealed by like a sticker you need peel off. Press it on the chip and you are done! Remember, the thinnest layer of any thermal paste/grease is best for dissipating heat. That's why these are great, since the thermal "stuff" on these already is paper thin.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/100pcs-Aluminum-Computer-VGA-Card-Xbox360-DDR-RAM-Memory-Cooling-Cooler-Heatsink-/121331886647?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c3ff1aa37

Around what cost do you have in acrylic to make 1 kit?    Looks very nice just wondering cost of this vs pla plastic type.

And keep up the cool looking mods.  Really does look great.

Hey Vorta, in regards to why not printing the back of the case - I use the metal front and back as well as heat sinks for the screw mount points.  Otherwise with acrylic the only thing I've found to work is captured screws, but they can be a PIA to work with.

With your temps, what I've seen in fiddling around - and I generally don't let it go as high as yours, is that the hotter it gets, the less the ambient room temp seems to affect it.  Meaning if it's 35c in the room, and the miner is at 75, the room could go to 45c and the miner might only increase by a couple degrees.  It seems like airflow affects the miners temps more than ambient air temp, but I haven't really looked into it seriously.

innerchaos, the sides are critical - if it were open, then there would be no point to this mod.  Don't forget I'm enclosing the top and bottom - look closely at the pictures, it goes all the way across and overlaps the sides.

E, definitely true - the emissiveness is what dictates it, and things like aluminum (heat sink) are notoriously bad - the coated part of the PCB normally are what I focus on.  I've never used any kind of paint or coating (but I know you can use it) - typically I just use electrical tape, as that is what I was originally shown as a really good general purpose solution.

Yes, definitely! And bare metal is among the worst affected materials -- it reads _much_ cooler than actual. You can coat it with black spray paint or spray-on boron nitride to bring the surface emissivity closer to what the imager assumes. Or, if you have an imager with adjustable emissivity assumption, set it to 0.02 or so and look only at the gold plated surfaces.

For those that dont have access to a laser cutter it can be done with regular tools.
 I am pretty handy with acrylic using a table saw with a plastic cutting blade and a router and also plastic cutting drill bits. ( I have built lots of fish tanks and sumps and various parts even dispaly cabinets and PC cases ). all of them look like you could have bought them in the store.. I certainly cant etch the bitcoin symbol but the rest of it is easy enough.

I thought about doing this.. but I am currently running mine in a vertical stand versus the horizontal placement.

do the Sides really add anything to the cooling process... that the original sides did not already provide.. yes I know the original sides were very thin plastic but if it just for air flow does it matter.

I am not sure if your laser cutter friend will crank these out for free or not.. but I have so much acrylic laying around. I can make a template and crank out 100 of these with just the scrap I have from previous jobs.

I use google sketchup for all my design projects what do you use ??

I've been buying a bunch of used S5's lately, and once I get and test them, I'm converting them over to my case - and this is a prime example of why I prefer pull vs push fans (warning, graphic imagery):



With pull, you always have buildup behind the fan, which works as basically insulation... That's not to say that pull isn't without it's issues, you basically have buildup where the air comes into the case.  The difference is that with pull its usually very easy to see and clean up - whereas pull is just sort of lurking behind the scenes.

Anyway, I'm in the process of converting most if not all of my machines to the 2mm version, and we'll see what kind of difference that makes overall in airflow with my boxes.  Unfortunately I've also up in forced air at the same time, so I can't really compare apples to apples, but I think the ability to focus the exhaust air in one basic direction is going to be great.

From an aesthetics standpoint, I actually think that laser cut Lexan looks cool - I've done it a couple times, but nothing large.

The problem with Lexan is that it outgasses some nasty stuff that ends up damaging the laser - that's why most places won't laser cut it - only places with rocking air extraction (and while I do have outdoor power venting, I do not have air extraction). In all of my temperature tracking on both the PSU's and the miners, I don't think I've seen them exceed 200f at the point of heat generation.  Now, that is right at the bottom temp that acrylic will start to soften but the melt point is north of 300f, so it shouldn't be an issue.  Plus even at the screw to heat sink points (at the bottom of the case), and where I would expect to see the highest direct temps, about the max I'm seeing is 115f.  The big advantage is the airflow does a good job of keeping the acrylic cool...

If you have any other material suggestions, let me know!  I was more concerned about the temperature issues on the PSU's, as the definitely hit higher temps - and I was looking for a thin material I could use as a buffer layer, but hadn't found anything that was super cost effective yet.

Very very nice!
Only thing I would suggest changing is that for fire safety, use polycarbonate (Lexan) vs acrylic. Acrylic does not self-extinguish whereas polycarb does.
Only problem though is esthetics as polycarb gives a bit bubbly & brown edge when laser cut.

That really nice. I did try yesterday to put the S3 cover on a S5 and was surprise to realise that this doesnt work since the fan plug are on the top and block the cover and because the hole are not at the same place. 

The nice thing about acrylic is that it's in pretty much every color, so instead of clear, it could be black or whatever else - it really doesn't matter.  Opaque black would look very much like the older miner...  I'm with you on taste - and I'm not saying I made some piece of art, I'm just saying I prefer this look over the flimsy black plastic sides - they make an otherwise solid device feel a bit cheap IMO.

As far as heat sinks, I ordered some up, but I'm going to experiment with where I place them as the thermal image shows heat dispersion that's different than I would have expected.

And that idea of hacking a fan for a duct - I saw that also, and actually bought these to test it out:

http://amzn.to/1HxzCoi

It's pretty much the cheapest 120mm on Amazon (basically $4 each prime)... I can't speak to the quality of the fans, but the enclosure works well.  I didn't see much difference between my cut spacers and these, so I just stuck with the ones I made - but if you want a quick and easy way to do them yourself, this way definitely works.

I don't want to say about aesthetics, it's a matter of taste, but this mod is good for cooling. 

Why don't you stick a little radiators to those S5s on which this is possible, like on this:

There was previous S5 fan noise thread quite a while back. One member mentioned that he used a dead 120mm fan as a "spacer" between the regular S5 fan and the metal plate of the S5. . He cut out the motor, blades, motor support, and just retained the 120mm shroud of the fan. He noticed a reduction in noise just using the stock fan. While it looked almost like two fans stacked at the one end, it supposedly worked well at reducing the noise.

This was essentially the spacer mentioned above, and about 25mm "thick". I think the idea is that the air flow is a bit more "organized" by the time it actually hits the heatsink. That's my simplistic understanding.

Vorta mentioned the ducting benefit on his thread, and I was familiar with it from the PC modding side of things - but basically if you put some clean flowing air between the fan and the device, you can get better efficiency.  For example, currently there are the two pillars (from the head sinks) that split the intake into effectively 3 parts - when the fan is pushing or pulling air against this, it's less effective because it's so close - less opportunity to allow adjacent air to flow around it.  This isn't technically the most accurate way to describe it, but it gets the idea across - so by adding a clean space for the air to move through, it can more easily move around those obstacles would undo turbulence.   In practical terms, if you just throw even one of my 5.6mm spacers inbetween the stock fan and the case, you'll see about a 2c drop in indicated temperature.  But once again I have to stress, the indicated temperature isn't worth a whole lot, but it is interesting.

The reason I did it was more because my pull fan would hit the screws on the back of the case, so I wanted some spacing.  I believe what I've read is that around 1 inch (for case fans) is ideal length, anything more doesn't buy you anything - but I was surprised to see such a small space made such a big difference.

As far as selling parts, when it's all said and done, if there's enough interest than I probably will... For small guys, it's a super easy mod to do, totally reversible so you can undo it if you don't like it, and it makes for a much more house-friendly S5.  For the bigger boys, I think the ducted solution will be awesome, as my hope is to eliminate the need for any fans at all on the S5's, and instead have a plenum and single large fan.  I've seen similar configurations before in manufacturing, and I spoke to an HVAC designer I know and he confirmed that it should be doable.  Greater reliability, and massive noise reduction - plus depending on how large a deployment you're doing, it probably could even save a couple amps when it's all said and done. 

One other maintenance plus of this design over the push design is that the heat sinks are exposed on the front, and if you've ever taken a fan off of an S5 that's been running for a while, all kinds of junk builds up behind the fan - and this really affects the cooling.  With the pull design, that's not something you need to worry about because it's obvious when buildup happens.

Can you talk a little bit about the advantages of this?  Will you be selling parts to do these mods?