Another unhappy Falcon owner here. Rather than writing out a block of text I'll hit the important points quickly, both good and bad.
- Exceeds the original 27Mh rating, seems to average around 28Mh.
- Case looks nice.
- Packaging has inadequate shipping protection. Parts of the case were bent on mine and the screws that hold the boards on were loose. One of the fan cables was disconnected.
- Draws ~1115W consistently on a Raidmax 1000W 80 Plus Gold PSU. Coin diff has no impact on power use for me.
- Power connectors are not wired correctly and will short if you use the extra PCIe pins.
- Case fans blow air out the back (negative pressure) rather than sucking it in. This is opposite of the PSU and may cause cooling issues for the PSU.
- I won't list all the issues with the ZenController since they've been discussed elsewhere. Needless to say it feels like a prototype, not even alpha stage.
- Case is a few mm taller than 4U. This may make it unsuitable for rack mounting but I can't be sure as I haven't tested it yet.
To top it off sometime yesterday afternoon it stopped mining entirely. Sometimes it comes up as sick, sometimes it thinks it's hashing but doesn't output any results. Unfortunately I had to host it somewhere else due to power use and don't have physical access to it yet to diagnose. Hopefully I can get my hands on it today or tomorrow.
I'm kinda happy with my falcon, at least I'm on par to getting ROI as I originally scheduled @80-120 days, but only due to btc price coming up.
getting sick means its getting too hot. my falcon case is slightly warm, psu cables are warmer. chips are hot, but is to be expected. Who's got an IR temperature gun?
''exceeds the original 27Mh rating, seems to average around 28Mh.'' yes it does. WU is 28k also. I tried zeus's cgminer also. Actually is slightly more erratic. Underclocking seems to save power. I use 290 for ltcclk when i'm not monitoring falcon like when I'm sleeping.
"Case fans blow air out the back (negative pressure) rather than sucking it in. This is opposite of the PSU and may cause cooling issues for the PSU." You have to put the psu air intake at the 3"x 4" hole which A: there's not enough room to fit my psu like that and B: would cause psu to suffocate since hole is not same size as my fan intake on my psu and C:if installing the psu as was intended, the way case is designed, its blows hot air from the psu out the center hole to the two holes with the heatsinks so the heatsinks will not get fresh cool air, thus running hotter. If you have your psu in the case... get it out. don't put it on top of the miner either. entire miner needs to breathe.
"Draws ~1115W consistently on a Raidmax 1000W 80 Plus Gold PSU. Coin diff has no impact on power use for me." yep. only underclocking reduces power. keep forgetting to take power use readings when falcon is idle and not mining. really curious.
''Power connectors are not wired correctly and will short if you use the extra PCIe pins'' If I remember correctly, the 2 wires are only reversed so... I wonder what would happen if we reversed the two wires. If they aren't reversed and only one wire is incorrect, can't we just cut it and tape it like what ppl did for 5-chip Gseed fans? I'm not 100% sure on this,
so I recommend only GAW try ANY of this. But using the extra 2 wires would bring down power use somewhat, due to higher efficiency because of heat loss. Usage difference might be negligable, but would divide 225 incoming dc watts per 8-pin pcie cable set by 1 or 2 more, all depending if the wires are supposed to neutral or hot.