ebay guys name was dringdahl0320
I left him a real nice review haha
He had a whole rack of what was suppose to be s3+'s
After i seen i had issues i looked closer at the image and he had the exhaust from some miners blowing into the intakes of others probably the ones (s3's) he sent me.
Fortunately my case fell under the buyer protection as they were sold to me as S3+'s and he sent me S3's otherwise i would of been stuck with them.
in addition once i sent them back he did the refund via echeck which caused like a 10 day delay in getting my money back. And we all know what delays in the mining business mean.
Fortunately i found a guy selling brand new S5's for like $425 I made him a best offer of $380 and he agreed. Should be in my rack this week.
brand spanking new from his last presale batch 4 - full bitmain 90day minus shipping time warranty
so in the end I came out right on track with better power efficency
now what to do with the other powersupply , i bought 2 when i ordered those damn S3's.
Looks like I will be ordering another S5 haha
Been watching the s3+'s and there were many this week that sold for around $100 so kind of glad he tried to scam me and i got to send them back as i gave him $380 for 2 with shipping figured in.
at any rate hope you didnt get the ones i had they are damn near paper weights. They would only run at 218mhz without X's popping up and even at 218 they had crazy hw Rates if i would of bben stuck with them i was going to tear them down and reapply the thermal paste, known issue with early batch S3's plus looking at the images the way he had them lined up they were probably cooked. But from what i read alot of the earlier S3's had slopy thermal paste so bad it was all over the chip connections causing chips to short, and then some post i read some chips were missing thermal paste all together, which would cuse that asic to overheat and X out. Alot and I mean alot of the early S3's from what i read had thermal paste oozing out of the heatsink holes and peole were having lots of issues with chips malfuntioning because of it. all my S3's are batch 8 and up through the S3+'s my last one i bought , they released the C1 1 week later. I finally bought a C1 and they released the S5 4 days later, but likie the S3's never buy the first batch
My C1 is batch 2, and my S5 i got coming is batch 4
Now My c1 its a pain in the butt it hashes all over the place up and down like a roller coaster, check the C1 discussion thread nice images of my graph up and down up and down haha. Then sometimes when i reboot it a entire board will X out. I have to do a PSU reboot to fix that. But i still got 60 days warranty on that but i swear it keeps doing it and its going back. I am not impressed by its stability, and its a batch 2 from what i hear the C1 batch 1 had some issues. This may be a C1 firmware issue but I am keeping a very close eye on it and its warranty date
Now just crossing my fingers that my S5 being Batch 4 is issue free
so in summary if you bought those S3's from that guy and cant send them back, try tearing them down and reapplying the thermal paste.
Good Luck