Topic: Avalon 8 official specs released - page 10. (Read 30297 times)

Any improvements?

i been running the new controller and firmware on my units since the release yesterday, no issues so far

Anyone tested it yet?. I don't want to be the first canary in the coal mine, so to speak.

AvalonMiner 841 specs have now been officially released.  

There is plenty of information available in these websites and in the datasheet.

Link 1: https://canaan.io/product/avalonminer-841/
Link 2: https://canaan.io/841-released/
Link 3: https://canaan.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/841-datasheet.pdf

what is the recommended power off procedure for the AvalonMiners? I had to recently move some and I just pulled the Ethernet, wait until it spooled down and unplugged them.

Also Canaan released new firmware and controller software today for the 821.

Good information from Canaan - thank you for contacting them (just gave you one of my few merit points I have to give ).  I just changed the temp target to 80 - the fan seems to be still tolerable and keeping the steady chip temp at 70 with this setting.
I agree that when they have a working undervolt that could be a better options.

Further to the above, I had provided my findings to Canaan and received this email in response.

e.g. there is an option to set a -2 to 1 voltage offset, this worked with the 741s, but with the 821, that option is there in the web interface, but the command that is actually used to start the miner,
*always* forces the 0 offset and ignores the value set in the web UI.
>> This option is for A741, sorry for we didn't delete this function from A821's firmware.

There is one other around the min fan speed, it defaults to 100%, what probably makes more sense is to set to that 50 by default.  The outlet temperature is set to 70, where as on the 741 it was 90, because of this with the default min fan set to 100%, the fans run at 100%  speed whether they need to or not.
>> We locked the fan speed in the A821 firmware since its chips cannot take high temperature.


Again, I wouldn't change that 70 on the temp... the fans shouldn't be a problem and it appears the undervolt will be coming out soon

I'm more than a little leary of setting the temp to 90.  Most chips today are rated for -20 to 80C, with a few exceptions that go to 105C (rare exceptions).  And because *specifically* the developers at Canaan, changed the 90 which the 741's use to 70 in the code.

I did see that overriding the voltage-level-offset made a difference, haven't tried the other, but for now, I'm going to leave mine running at a max temp of 70 and just work on keeping the inlet temp down.

As promised, here is a screenshot showing the new settings.  it is really working well now and is as quiet as the 741s.   

https://i.imgur.com/4cF1ZTO.jpg

Tried changing the frequency and so far, it doesn't work well with any setting other than 650.  I tried 600, 625. 636, and 675.  For each one I lt it try to hash for about 30 minutes and each time the overall hash rate barely got above 2TH.  Setting it back to 650 and it went back to about 11TH immediately.

My guess is that the chips on the 821 are pretty much set to only work right at the 650 frequency.  Of course, I could be doing something wrong so maybe someone else will have success.

So it looks like one setting that does work well is the "--avalon8-voltage-level".  I set mine to -1 (range is supposed to be -15 to +15) and it is running cooler by 10 degrees and the fan is staying around 65-70% with a hash rate about 9-10TH. (Plus, it is much quieter now.)  I also changed the target temp to 90 which makes the fan run more like the 741s.  I'll let it run overnight and take a screenshot tomorrow.  It will be interesting to see if there are power use differences when HagssFin retests.

Here is what I put in More Options:  "--avalon8-voltage-level-offset -2 --avalon8-temp 90 --avalon8-voltage-level -1"

Are you guys tweaking frequency as well or just voltage?

to get to the Avalon8 version of cgminer, make sure you select the avalon 8 branch in git.

The shutdown temp on both that 741 and 821 is 105 in their respective versions of cgminer (you can see the 7's version by selecting the avalon7 branch in git)

I found that the min fan value was picked up from the configuration screen, by default it was 100%, but if you changed that to 50%, you would get the 50-100 range in to the process listing of startup options.  I had tried the -x values, but didn't even think to look at those being overriden.

Sounds good -  I used to tune the hell out of my Jupiters and looking forward to tuning these since being able to predictably change heat/power/hash/noise comes in handy

So far it is running around 86% fan speed (it was 100% before) with chip temp at 67 C.  The hash rate is staying between 10.5 -10.8TH - with the offset of 0, it was 11.2-11.5TH.
Overall it is much quieter but I will probably keep working with it tomorrow to see that new fan ramping point can be adjusted and may the shutdown temp set to the standard 99.

Screenshot after one hour with offset of -2  (sorry I don't have a before screenshot - if I have time I'll try to set it back tomorrow and let it run for an hour to directly compare):
https://i.imgur.com/WRCu5Gf.jpg

What results did you get?

After setting up my A821 today, I made some interesting discoveries that I think explain what is going on with the voltage offset tests in HagssFin review and with what others found with the fan % and temp cutoff.  Several values are hard coded into the cgminer startup command and do not have some of the settings that are in the screen.  For example, the voltage offset is always set to 0 and even if you enter -2 in the miner configuration, it will not get passed to the cgminer startup.  The same holds true for the fan range (hard coded to 50-100) and the frequency.

You should be able to see this by going to the Processes screen and looking toward the bottom for the cgminer startup command.  You should be able to see what is hard coded and then entering things like voltage offset doesn't get entered here.

To get around this specifically for voltage offset, I put the following in "More Options" similar to what akadamson suggested:  --avalon8-voltage-level-offset -2

Here is a image of the Process showing te hard coded voltage offset as well as the override on more options - note I also had my offset int he CGMiner Config screen set to -2 but that did not do anything...
https://imgur.com/IhP3kSL

For those who don't know or are new to this, the command line options can be found here (just look for the avalon7 options and maybe the options for avalon8 will be similar):  https://github.com/Canaan-Creative/cgminer/blob/master/README

That's what I figured but wanted to make sure.  Rather not get to the data center and find out the miners can't mine because they needed IP addresses as well.  They are essentially mindless dummies that can't do anything without that raspberri pi or equivalent controller, unlike the antminers which operate independently.  This makes is much easier.    

Thank you all for the help.   MINE ON!

Correct. 1 rasp pi will control up to 20 miners and any settings changes to the controller are applied to all miners connected to it.

So no matter how it's hooked up, the Avalon's are essentially "one" device combined together through the raspberri pi?  When you change one pool setting, you change it on all of them that are hooked up to this raspberri pi?   That makes more sense and makes it so much easier to manage.


Thanks

The raspberry pi has a ethernet network adapter, not the miner itself. You just set the ip on the controller.