Topic: Antminer S5 power suply (Read 12597 times)

Honestly look into hosting somewhere with much cheaper electricity.  Solar is just to expensive for the gear since with mining you use a lot of watts.

If you send it to a place with low electricity price you will make more profit.  The solar is a long term investment.

I'm not sure where OP is located, but in Ontario the subsidized tariff for selling rooftop PV-energy back to the supplier is $0.384/kWh (US$0.30).  If you are going to build solar, you are better off selling it to the utility and buying it back at market rate...

And yes, server PSU's are superior to ATX in all regards to bitcoin mining except the ability to install them in a PC afterwards.

Intel's DPS-1200TBA Platinum with a Gigampz breakout board for $113 w/shipping is the best deal out there right now.  It's a server grade PSU at substantially less money than any similarly specked ATX PSU out there.  They will probably sell out fast though they only have a limited number of them.

http://www.gigampz.com

I have a number of PSU from EVGA and have done some testing with powering 2 S5 Antminers from on PSU.  I found that the 80 Plus Gold EVGA 1300 Watt SuperNova does an excellent job powering two miners with fans on front and back of both.  Also the 1300 watt is fairly quiet and does not seem heat up too much.  I have found that the 1600 watt 80 Plus Platinum is a bit overkill and could probably power 3 Antminer S5's, but seems to get excessively hot just powering two.  While the EVGA 1600 watt 80 Plus Titanium runs two Antminer S5's and stays super cool and in ecco mode doesn't even need to power up the fan to stay cool.  What I found very interesting was that the older generation EVGA NEX 1500 Classified watt rated at 80 Plus Gold gave me about 15% to 20% more hashing performance.  The NEX Classified did run a little hotter than the Supernova 1300 watt but not as hot as the 1600 watt Platinum.  Also the dip switches allow you to power up without sticking a paperclip in the mb cable (something that always made me a little uneasy).  Also you can change it to single rails from 8 independent ones and with 220v overclock the psu to 1650 watts.  I don't know if the 20% boost in hashing power makes up for the slight inefficiency in power conversion but for me i always like to see faster hash rates.  Has anyone else seen other PSUs that seem to provide you a boost in hash rates?   

No. Forget Chieftec.  You  need some single rail PSU.

I like the Rosewill 1300W 80 Plus Gold (92% efficiency) for $179. It has 8 PCI-E cables so you could run 2 S5 on this one PSU. I like the screw on modular cables too and comes with a 7 year warranty. I'm running 2 underclocked SP20s and getting very good efficiency at 90+% load.

 http://amzn.com/B0057JFOKU

Quite correct and power supply efficiency is not typically linear, and most will have their best efficiency way under 100%. If you intend to run at 100% or near, a server based or something with a long warranty would be ideal.

Definitely go with the 850C should be fine. It would be better to have four full cables, but the S5 is relatively low draw anyway and the connector is the weakest point of the system. Go for the higher efficiency single rail supply.

Also, I don't speak Russian, but this seems to indicate that one rail on the CB series feeds the PCIe plugs and the other feeds the MB and EPS plug. The 850CB is 40A/rail, but depending on the overcurrent protection on each rail you might need to butcher cables if you want the extra margin on top of 480W DC.

Thanks for the reply.
I already bought Corsair CX750M for each, its cheap but I will go for the gold next time.

I don't know for some reason one of them gets tripped even at 350 frequency (May be it was heat). Now testing with updated firmware.

No, any other PSUs of corresponding power capabilities are too expensive (because of falling of RUB/USD ratio...) or are available only for order with delivery date 14th Jan and later, but I need a PSU today. )

Anyway most (if not all) PSU manufacturers "use" third-party platforms, so in a certain sense many of PSUs are "similar". Sure you already know it.

My experience of using Chieftec APS-1000CB in the rig with two R9290 is positive, it's working under load for about 1 year. So it looks that I haven't very wide choice, especially now...

OK, I've ordered that PSU with 4 separate PCI-E cables. It's safer I gues.  

Are you limited to what you can get at a decent cost there? I ask this because of information I read from a review that Chieftec does not manufacture the power supplies and they refer to this as a medium grade unit at best. I found some pictures of the circuit board and some of the capacitors look like they want to blow just sitting there. You don't want the power supply to takeout the miners so if you could find something a little better I would go that route. To answer your question though, the cables look adequate to handle the load but I could not find the specification of the wire gauge to verify this.

Now I am choosing between Chieftec GPM-850C (850 W, 80+ Gold, single 12V rail, but only 2 PCI-E power cables with 2 connectors each, totally 4, just what we need for S5) and Chieftec APS-850CB (same 850 W, 80+ Bronze, 2 12V rails, but it has 4 (!) separate PCI-E power cables). Both has the same price. I would like to combine them and buy a PSU with 850 W, 80+ Gold, Single 12V rail and 4 separate PCI-E power cables. For same price... But we are living in non-ideal world...

So the question is: will it be OK to use Chieftec GPM-850C with S5, keeping in mind that it has 2 PCI-E cables instead of 4?.. Cables looks solid, but...

Sometimes you can find the Rosewill 750W gold PSUs on sale at Newegg at around $50.

Agreed.  and with luck sometimes as cheap as 150 usd.

This is the PSU I buy for most of my miners.  I haven't had any issues and would recommend.

http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-SuperNOVA-1300G2-ATX12V-120-G2-1300-XR/dp/B00COIZTZM

And don't forget a typical charge efficiency for batteries is about 2/3 - so you have to pump 150Ah in to get 100Ah out. Also, where are you shopping to find a 1000W PSU costing $300? I could get you 4-5KW for that.

Solar power is, in general, a good idea. But unless your 12V batteries are exactly 12V (which seems unlikely) you don't want to run an S5 directly off the battery voltage. And solar becomes less and less of a good idea in North America this time of year, when the shortest day of the year was just a few weeks ago. You'd be seeing fractional exposure for a fraction of the day, meaning you'd be living off batteries for probably 18 of the day's 24 hours. So during the good-sunlight hours your panels will have to push 600W to the miner, and an additional 600W*3*1.5=2.7KW to the batteries to charge them up enough to run a 600W load for the rest of the day. Now you're looking at a pretty substantial investment in equipment. Or you could pick up a 1200W server PSU and wiring for $100 and run two S5 off of it.

It would take a while for me to offset the cost of the solar when I pay $0.10/kw. 350W 24/7 only costs me $300/year.

You would be lucky to run a max underclocked SP20 that would pull 350W at the wall and hash 800GH/s, on 4 - 240W solar panels.

Right, I would think that if you need say 480W you would need at least 4 - 240W Panels to collect 960W during the sun hours to allow for the 480W needed at night assuming 12 hours sun / 12 hours night. And even if you have that much sun light, those panels only run 90+% efficiency for 4-5 hours of the day around high noon.

I say you will need more than 4 panels...4 will only run the S5 miner during sunshine...if you want to charge batteries you will need more to do that for night time mining.