Hi Everyone.
So normally I wouldn't rant about support topics, But I have 2 major issues I have been trying to resolve over the last few days with no joy.
Now I will start by saying bitmain have normally been really good and solve issues quickly, but I don't seem to be getting anything resolved at the moment so any advice would be much appreciated.
The first issue I have is that my latest S7 that is currently sat in customs has an invoice attached saying the value of the 1x S7 is $30,000 and they want £5000 for the VAT.
Now as far as im aware the S7 I ordered should be valued at $1650 but it seems that there has been some sort of admin error on bitmains side, I did receive an email from bitmain stating that we needed to pay our VAT or the machine would be sent back to them, I advised them of the issue and they sent over the correct invoice to me, but Fedex have request an explanation from bitmain and a copy of the invoice directly from them, so far fedex has not received a response and neither have I.
The next issue im having is with one of our current S7 machine from batch 5 has an issue, I checked all my machines the other day and noticed a very strong electrical burning smell and noticed 2x hashing boards had gone down.
I assume they have died but cannot check as there is a warranty sticker over the machine that I do not want to touch without the permission from bitmain, So far I have emailed info@ sent a message through zendesk and also messaged zendesk when live support was available and have so far received no response.
I feel a little ignored and for the first time in 2 years im annoyed at the way Bitmain is dealing with my issues, we have easily spent well over $30,000 with them, not much compared to some bigger miners but enough to think they would as least help.
Like I said I have been more than happy with Bitmain products and there support in the past, but feel very ignored at the moment, and any advice would be greatly appreciated.
The thing that really bothers me about the S7 is the new Bitmain warranty policy stating that if anything burns on the board, there is no warranty.
It's likely that they wanted to avoid replacing boards overclocked/modded, but it also prevent honest users like you, who either got bad luck, or falling heatsinks (engineering failure) for example, to get warranty.
I hope they will reconsider it, at least for the defects caused by falling heatsinks.
If I'm not mistaken, on a batch 5, there shouldn't be any buck converters, unlike the 135 chips units.
So the most likely dead components are an asic, a capacitor, or one of the small LDOs creating the communication voltages (usually 1.8v).
You can start by shaking the unit to check if you hear a something like a heatsink that went loose.
If that's the case, you can remove one fan without losing the warranty to confirm.
You can try to negociate with them if it's a heatsink issue because there is no way they can take you as responsible for it.
Other burnt parts can be caused either by a user overclocking the unit to death, or simply by one bad component in a batch, so it's a bit harder.
If they are totally out of warranty, I'd be interested to grab one board shipped to France for experimenting.
Even though Bitmain's policy states no warranty for burned boards, Bitmain replaced 2 of my burned boards from B1 for free including shipping both ways. I didn't open the miner on my own, I emailed them that two of the boards don't hash. They asked me to open the miner and check the boards. I found loose heatsinks and burn marks. Turnaround time was less than a week after I mailed the boards.
