Topic: {BFL} Here's a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOK at your Monarch! - page 6. (Read 46654 times)

Ok, thoughts:

1) Clean off the areas the water got on (it's water and propolyne glycol) with 95% isopropyl alcohol (good rubbing alcohol, at the CVS). Use a paper towel soaked with it, then q tip. That will clean off the stuff, don't knock off those little heat sinks.

2) The screws that hold on the water block to the copper plate are *under* the copper plate, so you would have to take it off the chip to tighten the right screws. When you take it off you will see them, tighten them down and make sure they are snug, but not insanely tight (or you will strip them).

When you take the block off the board and chips, you will have to clean off and re-apply the heat sink compound.

I like Artic silver 5, the grey stuff. Clean the old stuff off the sink and the chip with a paper towel with alcohol again. Do not get it on the sides of the chip, wipe it so it comes right off the chip itself. Then follow the instructions in the AS 5 thing to put new stuff on. A thin coat is all one needs, I put a thin trace on the chip, then clean my finger with isopropyl and use my finger to spread it on the chip evenly. Once again don't go over the sides of the chip but get to the edges.

Then I put a thin smudge on the heat sink plate itself and put it back on. Put the screws in loosely at first, the put them back on and tighten them in a 4 cross pattern (1,3,2,4,1,3,2,4) a little each time. Remember if you tighten down one side all the way then the other, it could crack the chip edge. Finger tight, enough so that with your fingers gently squeezing the screwdriver you snug the screws down.

Then the three or two outside screws, they provide structural stability which is nice.

Now time to fire up. Start up the unit and keep your dry finger on the back behind each chip. If it gets hot to the touch shut down *IMMEDIATELY* and purge. If it runs hashing for 5 minutes and is not hot to the touch (100 degrees is about what I would say is getting hot) then you probably do not need to purge.

If you need to purge:

Well, you have to pull one of the hoses from the radiator, then fill it with the pumps running. Bit complex. What I did was replace a hose from the pumps to the radiator. Put both the radiator and the hose in a bucket, immerse them and start up. Stuff will come out of one of them and be sucked in the other. Lift the one that it's coming out out of the water and run it until there are no bubbles. Then put both back in the bucket while it's running and complete the connection. That way you have no air going into the system and it will work.

Fun, but do-able. Make sense?

C

Okay so I'm sure that its leaking. Hoping fighting screws stops it. Any suggestions on getting in running again. Need to figure how to add more water, purge air. But what about getting powers to the board.  There are dried spots next to water block where water once was. But nothing looks damaged. Don't really know what I'm looking at but connections look good nothing burnt. Would there be a safety feature where no water no workie.

I'll see what I can do. In two weeks. (Joshspeak intended). I just configured the cgminer with the --enable-bflsc flag to enable support for BFL stuff before compiling. Absolutely no special tricks to get it running.

I got to see my full mining stats with the stock cgminer "miner.php" web api output. 685GH, temp 57 C, HWE 3.4% and diminishing... It looks great! I have no idea where it's pulling the extra GH/s compared to before but I don't care.

Cool!

Nice!

Maybe you would be so kind as to update that cgminer for the RasPi at the Raspberry tutorial for Technobit, BFL and Antminer: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/cant-get-a-technobit-hex16-on-a-raspberry-with-raspbian-debian-to-work-410488 

No leaks so far but I'll keep my fingers crossed. After a day's "burn-in" and a reboot the Molly started running 630 GH. HWE went down to 3.0%, heat went up 7 degrees and power draw went up ~40W:



To get the Monarch away from leeching off my PC I compiled cgminer 4.6.1 for my raspberry pi / raspbian. It's showing 685 GH/s avg now!

Too bad I'm a complete noob what comes to linux cgminer and I haven't RTFM'd at all yet so I don't know how to monitor temps/hwe, etc. but at least I got it running. Yay!

Good analogy! Perhaps, the same principle is in place here considering the amount of heat produced.

It's possible. When I removed the heat block to take a look underneath I snugged it down, ran it for 24 hours, then snugged again in a criss-cross pattern while it was running and warm. Just checked now, torque is the same so it didn't change. They do have additional screws holding the heat plate to the board, so the support is not all around the chips. Which is good.

When I was working on boosting people's jallies I would snug down the heat sink to the plate to finger-tight torque, let it run for a day, then snug it down to the final amount. Either the thermal compound spreads a bit or the threads expand a little. You can't crank down hard at first, because that will crack the chips. Just finger tight is what's needed, like a watch.

This is not totally uncommon, when I swapped an engine head on my old 944S Porsche I had to torque it down to the first spec, run it for a bit, then re-torque to the final values. After that it never changes.

Is it possible that over time the heat may have expanded the material that the screws are set in? I recall when new homes were being built in the 80's/90's, drywall screws were popping through the mud affixing the sheets due to the green lumber drying over time. It's that that I envision the screw holes becoming larger due to heat, thus allowing the screws to slowly working their way out due to the constant, albeit slight, vibration.

Duly hope the above helps, guys. At least something to consider.

Hm. Hm hm hm hm hm. Let me think about this one: That's all sorts of good data. So not too hot around it, they didn't boil the coolant, loose screws. 80c temps on the FETs (not bad) and water as soon as you turned it on for one of them.

The reason I'm thinking about the screws is because when I picked up my Monarch that fell off the sill this morning I noticed the screws that held on the fan and the front of the plate to the standoffs were loose. Snugged them back down, no biggie, but they were all snug when I got it. Maybe a bit of vibration over time wiggled them loose, the back of the board is on the plate with self locking bolts, so those are not going anywhere.

So the little tiny screws that held the sink to the board on the back were loose? How loose, not *super tight* loose, or *easy to screw and unscrew* loose? I'll check mine later on when I get back there.

C

Okay i started with 3 600 evga bronze, ended up melting pcie wires on all three. Returned them and got 2 rosewill 700 capestones and a rosewill 650 hive. I have 2x 700 and 1 x 525 and 1x475 monarchs. The rosewill 700 psu were running the 700s fine until the liquid started coming out around the waterblocks the 525 the same way. The 475 monarch i really never got to run only hooked it up when the 700 quit and before it really started hashing i noticed alot of liquid on the sled. so i stopped it.  I have a 700 that was working fine, cut if off wanted to inspect the two that were messed up. the screws on the back side of the board that are holding the waterblock were real loose. I think that is why they were leaking. But the psu work fine until attached to the card. Shit even running the fan only they work fine, as soon as the pcie cables are add it will not come on.  When i get home from work im going to mix and match all psus to monarchs but i dont think its the psu.  When they were working they ran 80c and the 525 was usually around 55-60c. Ive got them in my garage because of the heat so its probally about 75-80 f there. http://i.imgur.com/P669rKH.jpg. excuse the mess made a room on the other side of the wall and at the time i hadnt finshed. Im running them in that box. with a desk fan pointing down on them and the window fan on the top in acting as an exaust pulling the heat out of the box. Filters to catch dust, dirt on the front. Ive emailed the reciever and bfl and sent rma but i dont know if anything will come of that.  

If it's anything like the 65nm gear, the cores could be failing selftest when it's started hot and get disabled. Try running the cooling separately and turning off the card, let the cooling run a minute, and then turn the card back on to see if it pops right back up to 700GH/s.

+++++1 Return and get a FULL Refund!

Hm. Let's see if I can help. Questions:

Do they mine? Are the copper thingies on them getting hot to the touch? How about the back of the chips, there are two cut-outs in that bottom heat plate. Is it hot to your (DRY) finger's touch? Do you have them in that metal harness thing? What kind of power supply, and are the pumps plugged into the board (there are two, one on each block)

I'm wondering if when they leak they are creating cavities in the water flow, which would cause air pockets and bubbles to form. When you're cooling with water, an air bubble will *not* conduct heat. Heat goes up, resistance goes down, power supply goes crowbar.

What's the temperature in the room they are in?

My little Ebay Monarch here is mining at 700gh, but when I power it off then on it runs at 500 or so gh. Letting it sit for an hour to cool completely brings it back to 690-699 or so, which is odd but nice. I also have pretty good hearing, and when it is going to hash slower I can hear a high pitched "whine" from the FETs or the inductors. Just had to power it off this morning because it crashed,literally fell off the power supply and window sill. Note: Slight vibrations can do that. Oops. :-)

I'm running it on a good quality Corsair 500. The corsair is warm, and more importantly the two plugs going into the Monarch are warm. Given that the Corsair uses very good quality cables, and I have had crap-ola power supplies with much thinner cables, I would say that a less-than-good power supply could fail despite it's rating. Thin wires would heat up, drop voltage, increase current till the supply goes boom (did this with a 500 watt cheap-ass supply and a 32gh jally. Oops.)

However it does dump a fair amount of heat out of the radiator, way more than my 30gh turbo jallies ever did so the water cooling is more important.

would love to emailed receiver days ago never heard back from him.

+1 best answer.

Return for refund. You could at least expect one now in a reasonable time frame.

Send them back and demand a refund.  Even a partial recovery from the receiver would be a win compared to running that junk.

Dustbin

I have at least two that are leaking. The biggest problem is now they are shutting off the PSU once connected. Any ideas.

For the moment, and while BFL is in this state of State imposed "stupid", I have a standing offer to review and fix any broken Monarch based on the stuff I have done with mine (700gh bought on Ebay). Charge is nothing other than shipping, donate money to your local soup kitchen. My reputation is what it is. :-)

As for the leakage, I have used similar water blocks on my Jallies. If they should leak at the joints or hoses this can be fixed pretty easily but you need to purge the lines of all air before you close the loop. No biggie.

C