While it's quite possible that all the Bitmain gear has enough PCIe connectors to never draw more than 150W through a 6-pin connector, that's not universal. My experience is that the power supply is usually a better long term investment than the actual ASIC mining hardware. It seems short-sighted to use 18AWG wire instead of 16AWG wire. Of course maybe this will just be an opportunity for somebody else to produce a "kit" that upgrades the Bitmain power supply to replace the 18AWG wires.
Bitmain should reconsider this choice, or offer a "heavy duty" version with 16AWG for a $5 more (IMHO).
I run S3s with only two connectors all the time and they pull 360w or so, so that's 180w per cable right there. There's a ton of people that do the same thing as me...
The cables that I'm selling with my kits are 16 gauge for this reason and because of what sidehack posted above.
I'll be the first to admit that I have a bit of a conflict of interest seeing as I'm selling mining PSUs myself, but between the pennies scrimped to save on 18 vs 16 gauge cabling, and the QC woes posted just earlier, I have to wonder just how well made these kits are compared to what I or other members here such as sidehack and j4abberwock are selling...
well I saw the photos of metal shavings in the psu. I left that alone only because the 15 s-1's and 20 s-3's I got had 1 bad cap. most likely it was knocked off when it was packed the s-1's had very tight static bags which I think knocked off a few caps.
Either when packing the s-1's or pulling the s-1's out.
So for quality control on s-1's or s-3's 34/35 worked out of the box. and of the working 34 every worked and when I sold them every buyer said they got working gear.
But back to 18 gauge wire. I ran 23 gpus in 10 pc's from sept 2012 to june 2013. all in my garage pulled 5kwatts or more pretty steady. long term running 24/7/365 is hard on gear. wires get soft. shit burns fans fail etc.
my garage is 22 by 24 about 500 square foot concrete slab 5 inches thick. the entire slab got warm around 40 day into non stop mining say oct 30 2012. stayed warm the whole winter and when I sold off all the gear and switched to ASIC MINER usb sticks in June of 2013 the slab still felt warm for about a month.
Point is 18 gauge wire is "stupid cheap" or the polite way "penny wise pound foolish"
I would love to see some first adapters give a good long review on these . attach it to the sp20 and see at what point the wires melt my guess is 1400gh would take a while to be an issue but 1500gh to 1600gh and problems will happen.