Topic: Butterfly Labs - Bitforce Single and Mini Rig Box - page 5. (Read 186898 times)

Well I'm in the middle of upgrading my desktop (where I also have my 1xBFL and my 2xIcarius) so I moved them to my kids PC
... windows ...

Yes this BFL has been acting bizarre for over a week now.

I made some changes to cgminer to fix a possible hang if something went wrong with the BFL
(bug which I found coz things did go wrong with my BFL)

Thus on one morning when I found it had been dead for 3 hours, I powered it off, switched the software and to my surprise the BFL went back to mining full speed for almost 2 days.
Of course it's clearly some stupidity in the throttling hardware, since it was running 10C higher and not throttling for almost 2 days until it went back to half hash rate.

Anyway, since it's now connected to a windows box I tried easyminer and it firstly failed (the BFL showed up then disappeared from the screen)
I tried cgminer again and it was still happy to mine at half speed
Anyway, went back into easyminer and this time it didn't disappear ...
Ran a short test and it said all tests failed ... odd since it was still able to mine happily at half speed
(which I tested again after with cgminer and it was again mining at ~half speed)

Then I tried putting the 800 bitstream in it.
cgminer seemed happy to hash at a lower speed and a lower temp of course (~35°C) and was running both FPGA fine - total ~792MH/s

... and then I thought, what the heck I'll try the fastest bitstream
... and it's now running fine at ~870MH/s for over 90minutes ... 48.70°C

So back to what I said when I first got it - the throttling hardware in these things suck badly.
If only they had left that to software to deal with it properly instead of the crap they put in them to deal with it so poorly ...
Lets see how long this thing lasts at 870MH/s ...

Sorry for the delay on pics and video.  My wife went into labor the day after I got my mini-rigs and things have been pretty crazy (eg. no sleep) since then.  We've been blessed with a beautiful baby daughter, though! 

Quick answers to questions I've seen floating around:

• The Mini-Rig is about as loud as your average Dell rack-mounted server, such as a PowerEdge 2970.  In a data center with 3 PowerEdge servers, I was unable to tell when I ran a single Mini-Rig.
• According to my Kill-a-Watt, one Mini-Rig uses about 1140 watts when mining on a 120v circuit.
• I get about 50.8 GH/s out of my two Mini-Rigs combined, but I've read on the forums that some people get 52GH/s out of two of them.

Video (sorry, some of it's out of focus):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66KHMmbnQ_Y

Pics:
http://imgur.com/a/Uanjr

One of the USB-to-Serial adapters seems to have failed, causing an FPGA to go offline, so I'll probably be getting back into one of the mini-rigs this weekend, just in case there are any additional video/picture requests.

Edit: The "USB-to-Serial adapter" is actually built into the card...Not sure how I missed that.  If I can't get it working again, I'll have to send in the failed card for warranty replacement.

Well thus far I have yet to receive said email, as for "lower screw" you are going to have to be more specific. As for a RMA, how would I go about that if it comes to that?

No one has ever posted here about a dead unit other than ngzhang, so presumably they have RMA stock sitting on the shelf in case of issues.

My BFL half died early this week - but since I can still get one of the FPGA's to hash I'd not risk sending it back due to my total lack of belief in such a statement ...

Do you actually fix them, or just send someone else's RMA'd BFL?

Then of course there was BFL-Engineers comment 2 weeks ago saying there would be new firmware more than a week ago ...
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1011661

Yeah it's clear you guys pull date's out of your ass ...

Anyone here RMA'd and got any proof that his statement is true or false?

(Sending shiz from half way across the world is slow and costly enough without having weeks or months to wait added ...)

I believe your question was responded to via customer support email yesterday...  along with the appropriate remedy.  To recap, the board's stability depends on the lower screw to hold it in place.  If it came loose in shipping, please re-insert it and turn the screw until it catches on the standoff inside.  This will arrest the movement of the board and stabilize the USB receptacle.

Alternatively, you can send the unit back for RMA.  Wait time is nil on RMA's.  We stand by our product and apologize for the inconvenience.

Everything's better naked.

Just take off the case and mine without it. My bottom fan died after about one month of usage . At first I was pissed about the quality and that I had to fix it but the show must go on. I like them better naked...

Got my Single the other week, wondering if they even look at these things before they ship, there is a screw falling out of the top of the case, looks like its because a bolt is missing, and its causing the fan to hang down inside. The usb and power are so misaligned I cant actually plug it in to see if it even works. I've sent two emails which they have failed to respond to, and I have now opened a PayPal case. If they are going to warranty against manufacturing defects for 6 months, they could at least honour that when its fresh out of the box.

Long story short, I cant honestly recommend purchasing from BFL.

Sounds good, going from a spreadsheet to a system with a database will certainly do wonders for any business. It was a Bitcoin order and shall I just re-submit in a few days? Perhaps by then you will have completed the switch.

RJK, sorry you had trouble getting an address change for delivery.  We're switching into a CRM system to handle the volume more gracefully.  Depending on the state of your account, some address changes are easier to adjust than others.  In the case of PayPal, shipping anywhere other than the original verified address is frowned upon (by PayPal).  In non PayPal cases, we can/do change the address.  However, if it's not yet converted into our newer system then an address change might introduce some risk of confusion.  I don't know who you are to look you up, but I expect this is what happened with your address change request.  The CSR was just being overly careful.

These are necessary growing pains and not a sign of indifference to our customers.  Thanks for your patience.

Are you sure.. that's not a curling iron? ;p

Derp, that's not a soldering iron, it's a hot-air SMD rework system.

That assumes that there are more than 2 people at BFL: Sonny and the old lady who builds everything with a soldering iron ...

Only bitcoinica has the excuse of different countries and timezones.  BFL staff sit next to each other.

Left hand, meet right. Right, this is left. Oh look, some feet too! Do we have a brain?

Internal communication seems to be about as good as bitcoinica et al. I only got my response to the office@ address after CCing sonny.

I just now got a reply back from my June 29th email requesting a change of address.  Alicia from BFL confirmed that they would change the shipping address.

 

You never stop taking orders. You hire more workers to keep up with the demand. I cant imagine they aren't making buckets of money everyday with how excited people are over their products. Imagine how much more $ they would be making if customers didn't need to have thousands of dollars sitting idle on their orders before being able to mine with their products. If I only had to wait 2 weeks instead of 8-10, I would have quite a few more of their products.

I got a response saying they are too busy to make a change to my order's shipping address. I really wish I could be a fly on the wall there to see what's actually going on; if you are really getting so many orders per day that you can't help out customers that have already ordered... well I think any sane business owner would halt sales until the problem is fixed. The volume of orders for an entire month should be enough to make estimates and targets for production far into the future.

You're right.. It's nobody answering emails.

What "I would do" and what "bfl would do" are two very different things.