Topic: Cointerra Hardware Support **Unofficial - page 5. (Read 56948 times)
Im likely grabbing one of these locally, but might not be able to run it until BTC goes >$300USD.
can they be underclocked for better efficiency and lower noise? I havent been able to find much information about this, but it sounds like there is some sort of power stepping option that might help bring the unit close to 1TH/1kW?
can they be underclocked for better efficiency and lower noise? I havent been able to find much information about this, but it sounds like there is some sort of power stepping option that might help bring the unit close to 1TH/1kW?
I'll have to see what my electric bill will be this month... Not really looking forward to it running two of these CoinTerra machines, lol... But the one miner that is being a huge pain and that I had one of the boards die in it I am currently running at Power Stepping 7 and, due in part to using crappy Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound on the chips, it is only running at around 230-270 GH/s on one board. No clue what the power consumption at the wall is though. Is there any way to measure it, really? If it is still using anywhere close to 1,000 Watts though, then I'll be pissed that I'm only getting that little out of it for how many Watts of power it is consuming! lol... I can't run it over power stepping level 7 though or else it keeps stopping mining after a few hours due to overheating. (It also ironically enough mines at a much lower GH/s rate than if I try to use a higher power stepping level, like 8 or 9.)
My other miner WAS running at a full 1.6 TH/s on power stepping 9 at I'm sure 2,200 Watts of power. However, it has lately been only mustering around 1,250-1,300 GH/s at power stepping 9, but I have no clue if it is using less power when doing so or if it is still drinking down all 2,200 watts and only giving me about 75-80% of the rated output from the ASIC chips in it due to heat issues. I tried throttling it back to power stepping level 8 to see if the chips would run cooler and MAYBE I would get better performance out of it, but decreasing it only one power stepping level dropped my mining power to around 950-1,100 GH/s, which seemed too low for my liking, so I cranked it back up to 9. If I fix the overheating issues with both of my miners and get them running right, I wish I could crank the power stepping level up to 10 and try to get more out of this machine since CoinTerra originally boasted that it was supposed to produce 2 TH/s, not 1.6 TH/s. If I can get the chips running a lot cooler though, is it possible to max out the machine any more or is it already as maxed out as it is going to get from the factory?
Also, klondike_bar, I have the original manual for these things as a PDF document before CoinTerra went bankrupt and their website went bye-bye. I could E-mail it it you if you'd like. Not sure how much help it will be, but it does have the specifications of it and it explains the settings in the Web UI and how to set it up.
(BTW - I'm also still waiting for my Liquid Pro to show up... Probably Monday. I was hoping UPS would have delivered it on Saturday, but unfortunately no such luck! So much for 2 day shipping, Amazon!)
Im likely grabbing one of these locally, but might not be able to run it until BTC goes >$300USD.
can they be underclocked for better efficiency and lower noise? I havent been able to find much information about this, but it sounds like there is some sort of power stepping option that might help bring the unit close to 1TH/1kW?
can they be underclocked for better efficiency and lower noise? I havent been able to find much information about this, but it sounds like there is some sort of power stepping option that might help bring the unit close to 1TH/1kW?
@Cefalu
There is a guy on ebay who has some spare parts for these at reasonable prices. His ebay user is express_computer. Last I heard he had a complete set of working radiators and pumps.
I would swap the pumps around on your units first to make sure the problem follows the pump otherwise you may have a board issue or controller problem. If it follows the pump though you can just swap the unit and you're back off to the races.
You can also use regular water cooling equipment. I believe I read the dimensions of the water block screws match that of an Intel LGA1156. Most store bought water cooling setups will have a bracket to match that. You will probably need to come up with your own replacement screws though as the length required may be different. I recommend spring loaded screws. That way you get nice even pressure and that takes most of the guess work out of it. Also if you have custom loop water cooling equipment laying around those water blocks generally fit without much fuss. I started setting mine up that way before I sold but it was going to be so expensive I gave it up.
Incidentally the machines I sold are running great for the guy. He's happy and I'm happy they're gone. I get a little OCD when I can't make things work right so they had to go.
There is a guy on ebay who has some spare parts for these at reasonable prices. His ebay user is express_computer. Last I heard he had a complete set of working radiators and pumps.
I would swap the pumps around on your units first to make sure the problem follows the pump otherwise you may have a board issue or controller problem. If it follows the pump though you can just swap the unit and you're back off to the races.
You can also use regular water cooling equipment. I believe I read the dimensions of the water block screws match that of an Intel LGA1156. Most store bought water cooling setups will have a bracket to match that. You will probably need to come up with your own replacement screws though as the length required may be different. I recommend spring loaded screws. That way you get nice even pressure and that takes most of the guess work out of it. Also if you have custom loop water cooling equipment laying around those water blocks generally fit without much fuss. I started setting mine up that way before I sold but it was going to be so expensive I gave it up.
Incidentally the machines I sold are running great for the guy. He's happy and I'm happy they're gone. I get a little OCD when I can't make things work right so they had to go.
So my board closest to the power supplies was keeping my miner dead.
I unplugged the USB to it and the beaglebone and other board came up fine.
The bad board was lighting up the larsen LED's from 37-40, then it hit 41 and
they all went out. repeat.
Never did 42-44 light up.
So disconnected the front pump, reattached the USB and rebooted - everything
came up but the front set of chips.
I tore it down, opened the bad pump and it looked great inside, clear water with
a hint of anti-freeze, non-swollen silicon and no debris. I put it back together,
tapped it all around with a metal tool and have had no luck with it.
The other set of chips on the board and the other board are cranking along fine.
I unplugged the USB to it and the beaglebone and other board came up fine.
The bad board was lighting up the larsen LED's from 37-40, then it hit 41 and
they all went out. repeat.
Never did 42-44 light up.
So disconnected the front pump, reattached the USB and rebooted - everything
came up but the front set of chips.
I tore it down, opened the bad pump and it looked great inside, clear water with
a hint of anti-freeze, non-swollen silicon and no debris. I put it back together,
tapped it all around with a metal tool and have had no luck with it.
The other set of chips on the board and the other board are cranking along fine.
I have been running 2 TerraMiner IV's for a year now, Feb batch which showed up March 13th.
One of them always ran great until about last month, pretty sure its a pump, some smacking brought it back to life but it looks to have gotten worse.
The other one had 2 great boards for the first month, then one of them always gave problems.
Tonight that problematic one has croaked, only half the larsen scanner lights up, but its probly a pump issue as well.
Had to disconnect the bad board in order to get the good one up an running, also had to leave both supplies plugged in.
Out of my 8 cooling blocks I have replaced 2 of the shitloads of factory-applied thermal paste with a small amount of decent stuff.
They ran pretty much the same as before for me, possibly a little cooler.
Tomorrow I'll try carman336's theory of abundance and pump cleanout to see if I can get the dead one up again.
The only difference I may have from most here is that I run them both from a 240VAC Tripplite PDU and have had pretty great luck with flawless power so far.
I still get anywhere from around 0.02 - 0.05 BTC/24hours from them and, between power and internets, they cost about USD $320/month to run.
I look at it as a dollar-cost-averaging investment over time plus doing my part toward helping the network.
Great work carman336, hope those S4's are working out.
One of them always ran great until about last month, pretty sure its a pump, some smacking brought it back to life but it looks to have gotten worse.
The other one had 2 great boards for the first month, then one of them always gave problems.
Tonight that problematic one has croaked, only half the larsen scanner lights up, but its probly a pump issue as well.
Had to disconnect the bad board in order to get the good one up an running, also had to leave both supplies plugged in.
Out of my 8 cooling blocks I have replaced 2 of the shitloads of factory-applied thermal paste with a small amount of decent stuff.
They ran pretty much the same as before for me, possibly a little cooler.
Tomorrow I'll try carman336's theory of abundance and pump cleanout to see if I can get the dead one up again.
The only difference I may have from most here is that I run them both from a 240VAC Tripplite PDU and have had pretty great luck with flawless power so far.
I still get anywhere from around 0.02 - 0.05 BTC/24hours from them and, between power and internets, they cost about USD $320/month to run.
I look at it as a dollar-cost-averaging investment over time plus doing my part toward helping the network.
Great work carman336, hope those S4's are working out.
Hmmm... So, basically:
"It's Liquid Pro... Or NOTHIN'!"
http://www.amazon.com/Coollaboratory-Liquid-Thermal-Interface-Material/dp/B001PE5XAC/
Of course, like others on here have already expressed, I am a bit wary of it just because it is liquid metal and it is conductive, so it has the potential to short out your entire board if you get a tiny drop in the wrong spot. So, I'm assuming if you use the Liquid Pro, it ONLY goes directly on the top of the chip and you don't "fill in" the areas around it like it was suggested that you should do with the paste. Of course, what if you used a mixture of the two (or is that just overkill)? You could use the Liquid Pro stuff directly on the chip itself, then fill in around the chip with something like the Gelid paste for maximum heat transfer to the cooling block. Sure, it will cost more $$$ in thermal compound (probably close to $50-$60 when it is all said and done), but if it works and gets your machines hashing at peak performance and you don't have to keep screwing around with them or restarting them constantly, I'd say it is definitely worth it.
Even my "good TerraMiner" now is having heat issues and it has been throttling back CTA1 on me, so now my hashing power is only around 1,500-1,545 GH/s on that machine. I have tried restarting it a half dozen times over the past 2 days to see if I could get it to restore its former 1,620+ GH/s hash rate with no success as of yet. I have even unplugged it and shut it down for a couple of hours, then plugged it back in and restarted it to see if it would work better once it had cooled down a bit and I was still only getting 1,300-1,400 GH/s for the first few hours, then it VERY slowly creeped back up to 1,545 GH/s overnight. CTA0 is fine, I'm getting the full 812 GH/s out of that board, but for some reason CTA1 won't go over 733 GH/s no matter what it seems. The worst part is, the temperatures for that board aren't even all that bad that the machine should be throttling it back that badly. My average temperatures for the cores on CTA1 are 94-96 degrees Celsius, with highs in the 102-110 degree range. Not exactly COOL, but not all that out of the ordinary either. The odd part though is the huge temperature difference between CTA0 and CTA1. The cores on CTA0 are only running at 63-69 degrees Celsius with highs in the 75-82 degrees. The weirdest part though is that the hash rate reported by my mining pool for the "good TerraMiner" is 1.62 TH/s, even though the TerraMiner itself is reporting that it is only mining at 1.54 TH/s. That seems odd to me. Which should I be more inclined to believe - the miner itself or the mining pool statistics?
"It's Liquid Pro... Or NOTHIN'!"
http://www.amazon.com/Coollaboratory-Liquid-Thermal-Interface-Material/dp/B001PE5XAC/
Of course, like others on here have already expressed, I am a bit wary of it just because it is liquid metal and it is conductive, so it has the potential to short out your entire board if you get a tiny drop in the wrong spot. So, I'm assuming if you use the Liquid Pro, it ONLY goes directly on the top of the chip and you don't "fill in" the areas around it like it was suggested that you should do with the paste. Of course, what if you used a mixture of the two (or is that just overkill)? You could use the Liquid Pro stuff directly on the chip itself, then fill in around the chip with something like the Gelid paste for maximum heat transfer to the cooling block. Sure, it will cost more $$$ in thermal compound (probably close to $50-$60 when it is all said and done), but if it works and gets your machines hashing at peak performance and you don't have to keep screwing around with them or restarting them constantly, I'd say it is definitely worth it.
Even my "good TerraMiner" now is having heat issues and it has been throttling back CTA1 on me, so now my hashing power is only around 1,500-1,545 GH/s on that machine. I have tried restarting it a half dozen times over the past 2 days to see if I could get it to restore its former 1,620+ GH/s hash rate with no success as of yet. I have even unplugged it and shut it down for a couple of hours, then plugged it back in and restarted it to see if it would work better once it had cooled down a bit and I was still only getting 1,300-1,400 GH/s for the first few hours, then it VERY slowly creeped back up to 1,545 GH/s overnight. CTA0 is fine, I'm getting the full 812 GH/s out of that board, but for some reason CTA1 won't go over 733 GH/s no matter what it seems. The worst part is, the temperatures for that board aren't even all that bad that the machine should be throttling it back that badly. My average temperatures for the cores on CTA1 are 94-96 degrees Celsius, with highs in the 102-110 degree range. Not exactly COOL, but not all that out of the ordinary either. The odd part though is the huge temperature difference between CTA0 and CTA1. The cores on CTA0 are only running at 63-69 degrees Celsius with highs in the 75-82 degrees. The weirdest part though is that the hash rate reported by my mining pool for the "good TerraMiner" is 1.62 TH/s, even though the TerraMiner itself is reporting that it is only mining at 1.54 TH/s. That seems odd to me. Which should I be more inclined to believe - the miner itself or the mining pool statistics?
What about this stuff?
http://www.amazon.com/Coollaboratory-Liquid-MetalPad-1x-CPU/dp/B001CXO4TC/
Has anyone tried using this instead of the Liquid Pro or Liquid Ultra? It seems like it might be a bit easier to use than the Liquid Pro and be less susceptible to accidentally shorting out your board during the application process. However, the one downside appears to be that the Liquid MetalPad has to "burn in" before it will be effective. I think the CoinTerra chips will get hot enough to achieve this burn in temperature, but does that mean you have to operate the miner at reduced power stepping levels until this is burned in and then it will work fine and you can step it back up to 9?
Otherwise, I guess I am back to trying out the Liquid Pro on my chips to achieve maximum cooling efficiency. Also, how far will one syringe last? Can I do an entire CoinTerra machine with one syringe or will I need more than that? 2? 4? (One per group of 4 individual chips?)
I also found this that seems good, although still not as good as the Liquid Pro:
http://www.amazon.com/Gelid-Solutions-GC-Extreme-Compound-TC-GC-03-A/dp/B002P5W4RU/
It at least has a higher Thermal Conductivity than the Arctic Silver 5 it seems. (The Arctic Silver 5 is around 6.5 - 7.5 W/mK [depending on the site, it seems... Also, according to a study by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, they say that it is only 0.94 W/mK!] and the Gelid compound is 8.5 W/mK.)
earlier in this thread some talked about using the pads and I believe the consensus was that it was not as effective as using the syringe.
As far as how many syringes per machine, I have not tried it out yet and am waiting for more input from this thread. Should I forge ahead I will also post my experiences here.
What about this stuff?
http://www.amazon.com/Coollaboratory-Liquid-MetalPad-1x-CPU/dp/B001CXO4TC/
Has anyone tried using this instead of the Liquid Pro or Liquid Ultra? It seems like it might be a bit easier to use than the Liquid Pro and be less susceptible to accidentally shorting out your board during the application process. However, the one downside appears to be that the Liquid MetalPad has to "burn in" before it will be effective. I think the CoinTerra chips will get hot enough to achieve this burn in temperature, but does that mean you have to operate the miner at reduced power stepping levels until this is burned in and then it will work fine and you can step it back up to 9?
Otherwise, I guess I am back to trying out the Liquid Pro on my chips to achieve maximum cooling efficiency. Also, how far will one syringe last? Can I do an entire CoinTerra machine with one syringe or will I need more than that? 2? 4? (One per group of 4 individual chips?)
I also found this that seems good, although still not as good as the Liquid Pro:
http://www.amazon.com/Gelid-Solutions-GC-Extreme-Compound-TC-GC-03-A/dp/B002P5W4RU/
It at least has a higher Thermal Conductivity than the Arctic Silver 5 it seems. (The Arctic Silver 5 is around 6.5 - 7.5 W/mK [depending on the site, it seems... Also, according to a study by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, they say that it is only 0.94 W/mK!] and the Gelid compound is 8.5 W/mK.)
@ carman336-
(as well as anyone else on this board w/ Liquid Pro Ultra expertise):
Can I 'carefully' try "pasting everything inside of the spacer ring" using the Liquid Pro Ultra? Or would this be dangerous b/c of the L.P.U's electrical conductivity?
(as well as anyone else on this board w/ Liquid Pro Ultra expertise):
Can I 'carefully' try "pasting everything inside of the spacer ring" using the Liquid Pro Ultra? Or would this be dangerous b/c of the L.P.U's electrical conductivity?
@FuryFever
If you have a board not powering on please read back a page to my post about shorted boards. If it's not coming on your probably have a short that you will need to 'blow out' before you can start the rest of the board. It's strange though that you have 2 green lights on the power supply so that board may actually be cooked.
Arctic silver thermal compound sucks. The burn-in period is 200 hours so it's really not good for a 100% continuous utilization application. If you are going to use an ordinary non-conductive thermal compound I recommend Noctua nt-h1. Also use TONS of it when applying. You want to fill all the air pockets in the spacer ring and lastly wiggle the water block down to make sure you get any bubbles out. Each of those steps should yield about 10-15C decrease in temps which combined will leave you with a decent working miner.
If you have more questions let me know. I'll try to help.
Lastly antminer is the way to go. I got my terraminers running well and sold them to buy 2 antminer S4s.
If you have a board not powering on please read back a page to my post about shorted boards. If it's not coming on your probably have a short that you will need to 'blow out' before you can start the rest of the board. It's strange though that you have 2 green lights on the power supply so that board may actually be cooked.
Arctic silver thermal compound sucks. The burn-in period is 200 hours so it's really not good for a 100% continuous utilization application. If you are going to use an ordinary non-conductive thermal compound I recommend Noctua nt-h1. Also use TONS of it when applying. You want to fill all the air pockets in the spacer ring and lastly wiggle the water block down to make sure you get any bubbles out. Each of those steps should yield about 10-15C decrease in temps which combined will leave you with a decent working miner.
If you have more questions let me know. I'll try to help.
Lastly antminer is the way to go. I got my terraminers running well and sold them to buy 2 antminer S4s.
Anyone have issues with hashing boards randomly disappearing and reappearing? Tried replacing the USB hub and cables with no change.
Sometimes, changing pool automatically or pools which don't give enough work for miners.
Anyone have issues with hashing boards randomly disappearing and reappearing? Tried replacing the USB hub and cables with no change.
Hello all! I've seen some recent activity here, so I am hoping that people are still trying to fix these stupid things even though CoinTerra has now officially filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and is no longer in business... 
I recently bought two TerraMiner IV's on eBay back in December (before CoinTerra went bust completely). I thought I got a decent price on them to try my hand at mining, despite the fact that the price of BitCoin has plummeted recently and everyone is saying that there is no money to be made mining anymore already. (At least I feel good that I didn't pay close to $10,000 for one of these CoinTerras a year or so ago only to find that I won't be able to make my money back on it or anything...) But anyways...
The first TerraMiner I bought is working BEAUTIFULLY, I must say, and has been hashing away at around 1,618 - 1,622 GH/s since I plugged it in. I did notice that one of the core temperatures on the CTA1 board is running a bit higher than the rest, but it is still averaging below 100 degrees Celsius and the hashing power is only occasionally throttled back by 2-4 GH/s as a result.
However, the second TerraMiner I bought has been nothing but a headache! When I first plugged it in, it started out mining okay at around 1,450-1,465 GH/s with slightly elevated temperatures compared with the first miner. I could not get it to run at the full 1,600 GH/s like the first miner though, even at power stepping level 9. I ran it for about a week and I checked it daily only to find my hashing rate constantly slipping from 1,400 to 1,300 to 1,200, to finally under 800 GH/s COMBINED for both boards! (about 400GH/s for each CTA board). So, I shut it down and ordered some new thermal compound to see if re-doing the thermal compound on the water cooling blocks would make any difference. I had read enough posts online that these CoinTerras had problems with the stock thermal compound, so I figured it was a cheap fix. I bought these supplies on Amazon.com for the job:
http://www.amazon.com/ArctiClean-60ml-Kit-30ml/dp/B0007TOR08/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425059487&sr=8-1&keywords=thermal+compound+remover
http://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Silver-Thermal-Compound-Grams/dp/B000OGX5AM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425059575&sr=8-1&keywords=Arctic+Silver+5
(I know, after I already purchased the Arctic Silver compound, I read this thread and found people were having much better luck with the Liquid Pro product, but I had already ordered this paste and figured I'd give it a try first.)
I carefully removed all of the water blocks, cleaned off all traces of the old thermal compound CoinTerra used off of both the chips and the heat sink, then applied a nice, even layer of thermal compound to the top of each chip and re-installed the water cooling blocks. I then powered up the TerraMiner, hoping to see some much improved results. However, the opposite has actually happened and I think I totally destroyed my TerraMiner somehow!
When I first plugged it in, the CTR1 light turned orange, then went off, then turned green (as per normal), then both Miner1 and Miner2 lights turned on and started blinking. I remoted into the machine and found both boards (CTA0 and CTA1) were recognized, but the hashing rate was WAY down - only about 50-100 GH/s per board! What is more is my chip temperatures were all over the board! I had temps from -45 degrees Celsius all the way up to 120 degrees Celsius. They would fluctuate wildly on both boards and it seems that the miner would keep resetting as my GH/s would slowly climb, then go back down. Eventually, I was getting only about 5-10 GH/s out of each board and it would keep resetting to 0 GH/s periodically, I'm assuming from overheating? (Or at least the board THOUGHT the chips were overheating...)
Then I started losing CTA's... First CTA1 disappeared completely, only to be replaced by CTA2 shortly thereafter. Then that disappeared and CTA3 showed up instead. This kept going on for about a half an hour or so until I ended up with CTA0 and CTA6 running in the web interface. Then, finally CTA6 disappeared completely and now I am only running on one board ONLY (CTA0). WTF???
I finally powered it down (maybe a bit too late now, I'm thinking?) and cracked the case open again. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary, nothing looked burned and I didn't smell anything burning either. For the heck of it, I pulled all 4 water cooling blocks again to check my thermal paste. I had a good coating on all the chips (I could not see any of the writing on the chips) and I had a good coating on the water block as well, meaning I had a good connection between the heat sink and the top of the chips. (I only applied the thermal compound to the tops of the chips, so anything on the heat sinks was deposited by direct contact with the chips.) I had some thermal compound left over in the syringe though, so I added an extra drop to each chip, spread it around, and re-installed the water cooling blocks. I tried starting up the TerraMiner again and found out that only one board was still working. I now only get CTA0 to show up in the web interface and it is only hashing at 200-250 GH/s at best. If I power step it to 9, it will slowly try to run up to over 300 GH/s, but it shuts down after an hour or so, I'm assuming due to overheating. I have been running it somewhat stabiley (?) now at power stepping level 7, which is as high as I can go before the miner will reset periodically due to overheating. I have run it for about 6 hours now like this and the highest hashing rate I can get out of the one board is about 275 GH/s. That is not even HALF of what one of these boards is rated for!
I also tried removing the cover and watching it boot up since I lost the CTA1 board. The CTR1 light lights up normally, but then I only get the Miner2 light to come on. On the boards themselves, during boot up the board farthest away from the power supplies (to the left looking from the front of the machine) seems to power on okay and I get the KITT sweeping LEDs on the board changing from orange to green. I also see all of the blue LEDs on the "Beaglebone" board (why they call it that, I have no idea and it frankly sounds ridiculous to me, but whatever...) mounted below the first miner board. I would think this board is the CTA0 board, but for some reason it is indicated as Miner2 by the LED lights on the front of the machine. Weird... Anyways, the other board closest to the power supplies (to the right looking from the front of the machine) does not seem to power on anymore for some reason. There are no KITT sweeping LEDs lit up on the board. I also noticed that the right most front and rear fans no longer run at all. When I first apply power to the bottom power supply, I can see these fans turn on for about a second but then they immediately shut off. I checked for power at the big power connectors going to the boards and I have 12 VDC going to BOTH boards, but for some reason only ONE is working. What gives? Did I fry a board somehow? I have 2 green LEDs on both power supplies above where they plug in and I have tried swapping the power supplies as well just to see if it made any difference and it does not.
Is there any way to fix this machine and get CTA1 back online? What made it go offline in the first place? Why is the one CTA0 board only running at a fraction of its potential hashing power? I wouldn't be quite as upset as I am now if I could get at least HALF of this machine running at 800 GH/s or so and then just run one board and one power supply in this thing. I would ideally like to figure out how to get both boards up and running again, if possible. The only thing I haven't tried yet is a factory reset, but I would kind of be surprised if that actually worked. From reading the manual, it appears this only resets the password and the CGMiner configuration to defaults, or could be used if you "brick" the machine trying to install a firmware update. I also tried pushing the small black reset button looking things on the back of each board to see if that would do anything, but it doesn't.
I'm unsure which "build" my machine is or when it was actually built. It looks like the firmware version is 0.7.56 from the web interface and the board (CTA) version is 0.5.39 (from 07-21-2014). Here are screenshots of all I am getting now from this TerraMiner's web interface: (Please click on the links as I am unable to post images for some reason...)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/199ogg5y4p9myq5/CoinTerra_TMIV_01_02-27-2015_03a.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7hve36fx869jo78/CoinTerra_TMIV_01_02-27-2015_03b.jpg?dl=0
Also, on my mining pool, I noticed that the difficulty for this miner is only 301, where as the other TerraMiner is using 1.39k for the difficulty. Not really sure what difference this makes, but I'm assuming a higher difficulty will mine more BitCoin in the long run? To me it is just another sign that something is very wrong with this miner...
(On a side note, I also bought an AntMiner S2 shortly after messing around with this TerraMiner since I was losing hashrate from having this miner down for so long. The AntMiner has been plugging away for over two weeks now with absolutely NO problems and is running about 10-20 degrees Celsius cooler than the CoinTerra's. It is a ROCK-SOLID machine and has been hashing at over 1 TH/s in stock configuration. I read some forums about overclocking them with good results, so I decided to try it out myself. I have been running it for over a week overclocked at 215 MHz with only the stock power supply and I have been consistently getting about 1.09 - 1.12 TH's with it and the temperatures are still nice and cool! Over a long time, the average hash rate has dropped to only about 1.09 TH/s, but that's still pretty good off of the stock 1,000 Watt power supply! (Much better return than I'm getting from my TerraMiners at any rate!) Sadly, "Made in America" USED to mean something, but evidently not anymore! CoinTerra is a perfect example of how our country is sliding downhill. It could have been a perfect example of American exceptionalism leading the way in BitCoin mining, but instead they put out a shit product that took way too long to build, didn't meet the expectations their own company put forward (only 1.6 TH/s instead of the quoted 2 TH/s), and their customer support was garbage from the sounds of it. No wonder this company went from promising start-up to broke in under a year and a half! Meanwhile, BitMain is a Chinese company and they put out a cheap, reliable, and economical to run miner and have had no problems keeping up with demand and shipping their products on time. Their miners also will run flawlessly at much higher than rated hashing speeds with no appreciable increase in chip temperatures. No wonder the Chinese are going to end up taking over the world! lol...)
I recently bought two TerraMiner IV's on eBay back in December (before CoinTerra went bust completely). I thought I got a decent price on them to try my hand at mining, despite the fact that the price of BitCoin has plummeted recently and everyone is saying that there is no money to be made mining anymore already. (At least I feel good that I didn't pay close to $10,000 for one of these CoinTerras a year or so ago only to find that I won't be able to make my money back on it or anything...) But anyways...
The first TerraMiner I bought is working BEAUTIFULLY, I must say, and has been hashing away at around 1,618 - 1,622 GH/s since I plugged it in. I did notice that one of the core temperatures on the CTA1 board is running a bit higher than the rest, but it is still averaging below 100 degrees Celsius and the hashing power is only occasionally throttled back by 2-4 GH/s as a result.
However, the second TerraMiner I bought has been nothing but a headache! When I first plugged it in, it started out mining okay at around 1,450-1,465 GH/s with slightly elevated temperatures compared with the first miner. I could not get it to run at the full 1,600 GH/s like the first miner though, even at power stepping level 9. I ran it for about a week and I checked it daily only to find my hashing rate constantly slipping from 1,400 to 1,300 to 1,200, to finally under 800 GH/s COMBINED for both boards! (about 400GH/s for each CTA board). So, I shut it down and ordered some new thermal compound to see if re-doing the thermal compound on the water cooling blocks would make any difference. I had read enough posts online that these CoinTerras had problems with the stock thermal compound, so I figured it was a cheap fix. I bought these supplies on Amazon.com for the job:
http://www.amazon.com/ArctiClean-60ml-Kit-30ml/dp/B0007TOR08/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425059487&sr=8-1&keywords=thermal+compound+remover
http://www.amazon.com/Arctic-Silver-Thermal-Compound-Grams/dp/B000OGX5AM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425059575&sr=8-1&keywords=Arctic+Silver+5
(I know, after I already purchased the Arctic Silver compound, I read this thread and found people were having much better luck with the Liquid Pro product, but I had already ordered this paste and figured I'd give it a try first.)
I carefully removed all of the water blocks, cleaned off all traces of the old thermal compound CoinTerra used off of both the chips and the heat sink, then applied a nice, even layer of thermal compound to the top of each chip and re-installed the water cooling blocks. I then powered up the TerraMiner, hoping to see some much improved results. However, the opposite has actually happened and I think I totally destroyed my TerraMiner somehow!
When I first plugged it in, the CTR1 light turned orange, then went off, then turned green (as per normal), then both Miner1 and Miner2 lights turned on and started blinking. I remoted into the machine and found both boards (CTA0 and CTA1) were recognized, but the hashing rate was WAY down - only about 50-100 GH/s per board! What is more is my chip temperatures were all over the board! I had temps from -45 degrees Celsius all the way up to 120 degrees Celsius. They would fluctuate wildly on both boards and it seems that the miner would keep resetting as my GH/s would slowly climb, then go back down. Eventually, I was getting only about 5-10 GH/s out of each board and it would keep resetting to 0 GH/s periodically, I'm assuming from overheating? (Or at least the board THOUGHT the chips were overheating...)
Then I started losing CTA's... First CTA1 disappeared completely, only to be replaced by CTA2 shortly thereafter. Then that disappeared and CTA3 showed up instead. This kept going on for about a half an hour or so until I ended up with CTA0 and CTA6 running in the web interface. Then, finally CTA6 disappeared completely and now I am only running on one board ONLY (CTA0). WTF???
I finally powered it down (maybe a bit too late now, I'm thinking?) and cracked the case open again. I didn't see anything out of the ordinary, nothing looked burned and I didn't smell anything burning either. For the heck of it, I pulled all 4 water cooling blocks again to check my thermal paste. I had a good coating on all the chips (I could not see any of the writing on the chips) and I had a good coating on the water block as well, meaning I had a good connection between the heat sink and the top of the chips. (I only applied the thermal compound to the tops of the chips, so anything on the heat sinks was deposited by direct contact with the chips.) I had some thermal compound left over in the syringe though, so I added an extra drop to each chip, spread it around, and re-installed the water cooling blocks. I tried starting up the TerraMiner again and found out that only one board was still working. I now only get CTA0 to show up in the web interface and it is only hashing at 200-250 GH/s at best. If I power step it to 9, it will slowly try to run up to over 300 GH/s, but it shuts down after an hour or so, I'm assuming due to overheating. I have been running it somewhat stabiley (?) now at power stepping level 7, which is as high as I can go before the miner will reset periodically due to overheating. I have run it for about 6 hours now like this and the highest hashing rate I can get out of the one board is about 275 GH/s. That is not even HALF of what one of these boards is rated for!
I also tried removing the cover and watching it boot up since I lost the CTA1 board. The CTR1 light lights up normally, but then I only get the Miner2 light to come on. On the boards themselves, during boot up the board farthest away from the power supplies (to the left looking from the front of the machine) seems to power on okay and I get the KITT sweeping LEDs on the board changing from orange to green. I also see all of the blue LEDs on the "Beaglebone" board (why they call it that, I have no idea and it frankly sounds ridiculous to me, but whatever...) mounted below the first miner board. I would think this board is the CTA0 board, but for some reason it is indicated as Miner2 by the LED lights on the front of the machine. Weird... Anyways, the other board closest to the power supplies (to the right looking from the front of the machine) does not seem to power on anymore for some reason. There are no KITT sweeping LEDs lit up on the board. I also noticed that the right most front and rear fans no longer run at all. When I first apply power to the bottom power supply, I can see these fans turn on for about a second but then they immediately shut off. I checked for power at the big power connectors going to the boards and I have 12 VDC going to BOTH boards, but for some reason only ONE is working. What gives? Did I fry a board somehow? I have 2 green LEDs on both power supplies above where they plug in and I have tried swapping the power supplies as well just to see if it made any difference and it does not.
Is there any way to fix this machine and get CTA1 back online? What made it go offline in the first place? Why is the one CTA0 board only running at a fraction of its potential hashing power? I wouldn't be quite as upset as I am now if I could get at least HALF of this machine running at 800 GH/s or so and then just run one board and one power supply in this thing. I would ideally like to figure out how to get both boards up and running again, if possible. The only thing I haven't tried yet is a factory reset, but I would kind of be surprised if that actually worked. From reading the manual, it appears this only resets the password and the CGMiner configuration to defaults, or could be used if you "brick" the machine trying to install a firmware update. I also tried pushing the small black reset button looking things on the back of each board to see if that would do anything, but it doesn't.
I'm unsure which "build" my machine is or when it was actually built. It looks like the firmware version is 0.7.56 from the web interface and the board (CTA) version is 0.5.39 (from 07-21-2014). Here are screenshots of all I am getting now from this TerraMiner's web interface: (Please click on the links as I am unable to post images for some reason...)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/199ogg5y4p9myq5/CoinTerra_TMIV_01_02-27-2015_03a.jpg?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7hve36fx869jo78/CoinTerra_TMIV_01_02-27-2015_03b.jpg?dl=0
Also, on my mining pool, I noticed that the difficulty for this miner is only 301, where as the other TerraMiner is using 1.39k for the difficulty. Not really sure what difference this makes, but I'm assuming a higher difficulty will mine more BitCoin in the long run? To me it is just another sign that something is very wrong with this miner...
(On a side note, I also bought an AntMiner S2 shortly after messing around with this TerraMiner since I was losing hashrate from having this miner down for so long. The AntMiner has been plugging away for over two weeks now with absolutely NO problems and is running about 10-20 degrees Celsius cooler than the CoinTerra's. It is a ROCK-SOLID machine and has been hashing at over 1 TH/s in stock configuration. I read some forums about overclocking them with good results, so I decided to try it out myself. I have been running it for over a week overclocked at 215 MHz with only the stock power supply and I have been consistently getting about 1.09 - 1.12 TH's with it and the temperatures are still nice and cool! Over a long time, the average hash rate has dropped to only about 1.09 TH/s, but that's still pretty good off of the stock 1,000 Watt power supply! (Much better return than I'm getting from my TerraMiners at any rate!) Sadly, "Made in America" USED to mean something, but evidently not anymore! CoinTerra is a perfect example of how our country is sliding downhill. It could have been a perfect example of American exceptionalism leading the way in BitCoin mining, but instead they put out a shit product that took way too long to build, didn't meet the expectations their own company put forward (only 1.6 TH/s instead of the quoted 2 TH/s), and their customer support was garbage from the sounds of it. No wonder this company went from promising start-up to broke in under a year and a half! Meanwhile, BitMain is a Chinese company and they put out a cheap, reliable, and economical to run miner and have had no problems keeping up with demand and shipping their products on time. Their miners also will run flawlessly at much higher than rated hashing speeds with no appreciable increase in chip temperatures. No wonder the Chinese are going to end up taking over the world! lol...)
Does anyone know where to buy the replacement rubber seal that is inside the water cooled heatsink?
Upon further investigation it appears that pasting everything inside of the spacer ring has the potential to increase cooling performance. The air that is normally trapped inside the ring acts as an insulator. Thermal paste heat transfer is somewhere between 200 and 400 times better than air so it stands to reason that you would want to minimize the amount of air trapped by the water block. Tomorrow I will attempt to fill all air gaps and also wiggle the water block down rather than pushing it straight down. This should squeeze more of the paste out from the top of the chips while still allowing me to fill in the surrounding areas.
Fingers crossed. More updates to follow.
Fingers crossed. More updates to follow.
Another update on the cooling situation. If you read my post from last night you will know that LiquidPro worked on one machine but not the other. I was very particular about how I applied it and I'm confident I was getting good contact where it was needed. The strange thing is on the machine that it worked well on I actually only coated one chip. Despite that fact, BOTH chips were significantly cooler after running the equipment and both are STILL running cool. (This furthers my suspicion of how accurate the temp sensors actually are) Keep in mind I only touched one chip/heatsink. No arguments from me though. I'll take it. Until I get a rework station and replace the bad mosfets I am happy with how this machine is running.
Now for the bane of my existence machine. I attempted LiquidPro and was not happy with the results at all. At best it yielded no improvement and at worst it ran hotter than before. So I put it back together with the Noctua and it ran pretty much back where it was. On the hot side but still under 100C and still running reliably.
This afternoon a thought occurred to me. Every video I have seen of the paste being redone on these machines shows a TON of thermal paste on the chip from the factory. So far I was just using little gobs on each core like I would for a GPU or CPU. I decided to apply the paste at the volume that I saw in the videos. I figure there are still many of these machines out there that are still operating at good temps in factory form so there must be something to it. I applied so much paste that it covered the sides and even the channels between the chips. I still don't think I used as much as the factory but it was easily 3X what I was using before. I turned on the machine and immediately noticed about a 15C improvement. One of the chips is approaching about 20C improvement after running for a couple hours.
I believe this tells me that the top surface of the chip is not the only area that needs thermal conductivity and adding heat transfer to the sides and channels between does yield additional cooling benefits. Basically I believe anything that has the potential to draw heat away from the chips and increase the surface area contacted by the heatsink will yield positive results. I am going to run the unit like this for 24 hours and if the results are still encouraging I may apply more paste between the chips and to the spacer ring around them. I will post my results if/when I perform the test.
Now for the bane of my existence machine. I attempted LiquidPro and was not happy with the results at all. At best it yielded no improvement and at worst it ran hotter than before. So I put it back together with the Noctua and it ran pretty much back where it was. On the hot side but still under 100C and still running reliably.
This afternoon a thought occurred to me. Every video I have seen of the paste being redone on these machines shows a TON of thermal paste on the chip from the factory. So far I was just using little gobs on each core like I would for a GPU or CPU. I decided to apply the paste at the volume that I saw in the videos. I figure there are still many of these machines out there that are still operating at good temps in factory form so there must be something to it. I applied so much paste that it covered the sides and even the channels between the chips. I still don't think I used as much as the factory but it was easily 3X what I was using before. I turned on the machine and immediately noticed about a 15C improvement. One of the chips is approaching about 20C improvement after running for a couple hours.
I believe this tells me that the top surface of the chip is not the only area that needs thermal conductivity and adding heat transfer to the sides and channels between does yield additional cooling benefits. Basically I believe anything that has the potential to draw heat away from the chips and increase the surface area contacted by the heatsink will yield positive results. I am going to run the unit like this for 24 hours and if the results are still encouraging I may apply more paste between the chips and to the spacer ring around them. I will post my results if/when I perform the test.
You can ssh into your box and with top find cgminer and crond processes. kill them both. make sure you are in opt directory then run cgminer. you will be able to see temp & core setting changes that cgminer does.
I tried this but I don't see any stats on the temps. Is there something special I need to do? All I see is the hash rate and accepted/rejected.
I got liquidpro last night and tried it out. It worked great on one of the machines. I'm able to operate at full power and good temps. The other machine it didn't help at all. I may try to reapply or grind down the spacer more. I'm guessing the spacer is still holding me too far away. Its back on the noctua for now.
Do any of you know where I can get firmware and what is a good version? I would like to rule that out as a possibility for the strange behavior of the one miner.
Do any of you know where I can get firmware and what is a good version? I would like to rule that out as a possibility for the strange behavior of the one miner.
You can ssh into your box and with top find cgminer and crond processes. kill them both. make sure you are in opt directory then run cgminer. you will be able to see temp & core setting changes that cgminer does.
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