I have just about HAD IT with these stupid CoinTerrible machines!!! I'm about to rip out all my hair trying to figure out how to fix these stupid things...
I finally received the LiquidPro Thermal Compound that I bought off of Amazon a while ago. So, I figured that I would first apply it to the chips on the TerraMiner that I had the dead board in to see if I could get it working. So, I very thoroughly removed all of the old thermal compound off of the chips with the Arctic Clean Thermal Compound Remover and the Thermal Surface Purifier and then used a whole syringe of Liquid Pro on each board (half of it went to each cluster of 4 chips, or what CoinTerra calls a "core"). I spread it around evenly and put the liquid cooling heat sinks back on. I started it back up and - basically no hashing! The cores were getting so hot that it was instantly shutting down and the board would barely hash anything. At most I got maybe 15-20 GH/s out of it. I also could not get the dead board to start back up again.
So, I took it all apart again. I cleaned all of the LiquidPro off of the chips and heatsinks. I completely disassembled the liquid cooling system and drained it out, removed the copper heatsinks from the liquid cooling blocks, cleaned out all the fins and removed the little plastic/rubber coolant diverter from each cooling block. I bought some reinforced clear 1/4" tubing and some radiator clamps to replace the black plastic tubing that I had to cut off to drain the cooling system and refilled the radiators with PC liquid cooling coolant (which was basically just pure water made through reverse osmosis, but it has something added to it to make it glow under UV light, which I don't have a black light anyways, so...) I then decided to try this other thermal compound that I bought since I didn't seem to have any luck with the LiquidPro last time. I had bought some tubes of GELID Solutions GC-Extreme Thermal Compound (
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002P5W4RU/) at the same time that I bought the LiquidPro, so I had a backup just in case. So, I decided to slather some of that all over (and around) the chips and then re-install the liquid cooling blocks on the chips.
Well, at first I was having a hell of a time nursing it along trying to get it to work. I think part of the problem was trying to get enough coolant in the system so that the pumps would circulate it properly. I had to shut it down a couple of times and carefully try to remove the top hose and add some more coolant into the system. Thankfully, I had the clear tubing now so I could see the coolant level and if it was flowing at all, which it didn't really look like was the case. However, I could see that it looked like it was trying to suck the coolant through the hose - so I could tell from this that the way it was designed from the factory was that it pulled coolant from the TOP of the radiator into the cooling block and then discharged it into the bottom of the radiator. This seemed very odd to me, since that is backwards from how it works in a car's cooling system. In your car's engine, the water pump sucks coolant from the lower radiator hose and pumps it through your engine and then discharges it through the thermostat and the upper radiator hose back into the radiator. So, I figured there wasn't enough coolant in the radiator for the pump to suck it in (at least through the very top hose - the bottom hose seemed to be getting some coolant through it at least). So, I decided to "re-engineer" the system and flipped the radiator upside-down so that the pumps would suck coolant from the bottom and discharge it into the top of the radiator. Plus, then you had gravity working on your side to help push the coolant through the system if the intake was on the bottom of the radiator. The pumps still have their work cut out for them though to try to pump the coolant up the hoses back into the radiator. However, this did seem to help as I could now see more coolant trying to flow through the hoses at least and I did manage to get it to start hashing again.
The next problem though was that it seemed like I was ONLY getting one core to work after all of this. (Plus I never got the dead board to start working again, so I just disconnected it and I'm only running it on the one "good" board for now...) When the board starts up, I can see all 8 green LED lights light up, but then only the right 4 turn off in sequence and the left 4 stay on for a few seconds longer. Then all the lights turn off and when the Miner 2 light turns on, only the right 4 LEDs start lighting up in a sweeping pattern, but the left 4 stay off. This means that only half the board is working. In the status page when I remote into the machine, I get normal temperatures from Core 1, but Core 2 has temperatures in the 20-30 degrees Celsius range, meaning it is not turning on at all. Plus, for the pump speeds, I get a high number of about 3,092 RPM and an average of 1,546 RPM, but I get a low reading of 0 RPM. I figured that meant one of my pumps was dead. The connector on the pump has 3 pins, so I figure one must be to either regulate the speed or to report back to the board what speed the pump is operating at. I used a voltmeter to test the voltages at the plugs and I was getting 12 VDC through each plug to the pump motor for the power, but on the signal wire for one pump I was getting about 5 VDC and the other one I was only getting about 2-3 VDC. So, I took a new 80mm computer case fan that I had lying around and cut the plug off of it and put the 3 wires into the plug for the pump that didn't seem to be working so that the wires were piggybacked into the plug. Now, I have an extra fan in the case and when I boot it up I'm getting the other core to turn on and start hashing. I'm getting 7 out of 8 LED lights to turn on now and start sweeping, and in the status page I now have a low pump speed of 1,454 RPMs. This means that the cheap case fan I put in there is only capable of probably 1,500 RPMs max, which is much lower than the cooling pumps are supposed to be running at. So, something must be wrong with the signal wire on the one pump as I can tell the pump is working as it is moving coolant through the hoses, so it is getting 12 VDC and the pump is turning on, but it is not telling the board that it is running or what speed it is running at, so the board shuts off the power to those cores to help protect them.
Well, meanwhile as I was messing around with this one miner, my other TerraMiner, which had previously been the "good" miner that was cooperating, started to die on me. Oddly enough, the one board in it is still working at peak capacity and I'm getting 810-812 GH/s out of it with no problems! However, just as with the other TerraMiner, the board closest to the power supplies has slowly started to die (CTA1 or Miner 1). It WAS working at 810-812 GH/s when I first bought it as well (1,620 GH/s total output from both boards), but now it was slowly decreasing to 600, then 500, then 400, then 300, etc. and then finally I was barely able to get 30-50 GH/s out of it! So, I decided to take this machine apart as well and try to fix the one board in it that wasn't working anymore. I know I hadn't had much luck with the LiquidPro before, but I still had 2 syringes of it left, so I figured I would give it a shot on this board to see if it would work at all. So, I pulled the cooling blocks off, removed all the old thermal compound, and used two whole syringes on just the two cores (8 chips total). I thought maybe the last time it didn't work because I had used too little of the LiquidPro on the chips, so this time I put it on as thick as I could and I even applied it to the copper heat sink as well as to the top of the chips. I then installed the cooling blocks back over the chips and powered it back up. But I was having the EXACT same problem - no hashing due to too high of temperatures!
What the hell gives? I thought this LiquidPro was supposed to be THE BOMB stuff to use and it would cool off my chips so they would be ice cold... I wasn't getting this AT ALL! In fact, it seemed to make my chips run even hotter! According to the status page, I was seeing
average temps in the 110-115 degrees Celsius range with high temps peaking at around 125-135 degrees Celsius! Granted, it would only run like that for a few seconds before shutting down. When the board did try to hash, it would only end up running at like 9-15 GH/s at most for a few minutes, then it would shut down and go to 0 GH/s again for a while. Then it would start going through a bunch of CTA's on that board - it would start out as CTA1 and then go through CTA2, CTA3, CTA4, etc., etc... The most I saw it run through was all the way up to CTA32 in about 4-6 hours before I caught it and restarted the system again to try to see if it would stabilize. But, I just couldn't get it to work right and I kept having problems with the chips overheating.
Well, then this morning I found that the board completely died on me now! I wasn't getting it to come up at all and it now has the same fate as the second board in my other miner that I can't get to start up. I tried restarting the miner about half a dozen times this morning and it just kept coming up with only CTA0 mining at 810 GH/s and the CTA1 board would not show up at all anymore. I had been thinking of cleaning the LiquidPro off of the chips and trying some Noctua thermal compound out on it as I just ordered a few tubes of that off Amazon to see if that stuff would work any better, but now it seems like it would be a waste of money if this CTA1 board has stopped being recognized altogether now by the control board for whatever reason. I could redo the thermal compound on it all I like, but somehow I doubt that the board will start up and begin hashing again now after the way it has been acting.
I am just so frustrated and fed up with these stupid things!!! I am about ready to go all Office Space on them with a sledgehammer for all the headaches they have caused me! I just don't get why the LiquidPro ended up being a TOTAL waste of time and money and did NOTHING at all to help cool my chips off. The GELID thermal compound did a MUCH better job than the LiquidPro, although even that isn't perfect. I am now only getting about 335-375 GH/s at most out of the one TerraMiner that I completely rebuilt at power stepping 9, which is a hell of a lot better than I WAS getting out of it, but it is still nowhere near 800 GH/s, which is where it SHOULD be if the board was running at peak capacity. I suppose at this point I could just combine the two boards that I have working right now into one case and consolidate them into one working machine and then either junk or try to sell the other components to someone with more time and patience than I have to see if they can get them to start working at all or not. I am just very disappointed and frankly disgruntled with these machines that for all the time, effort, and money I have put into these just to STILL have them not working right! I have wasted about $90 just in thermal compound alone on these stupid CoinTerrible machines only to still have them overheat and not mine properly. I have had it with these things!!! I just don't understand what is wrong with them and why all the supposed "fixes" to get them working again have failed miserably! I think these things just don't like me...
