I believe you've seen the molex to barrel adapter that takes 5 minutes to make. It's a lot safer power if you have the PSU for it. Yellow 12V line to the inside shielded wire, and the two center grounds on the molex to the outside braided ground. I wired up 4 of these just to get my miners up while waiting on cablez. Not that he took long, 2 days maybe on his end and an amazing looking product!!
Yes, but I am just too damn lame to order a molex socket from somewhere. So what I have been doing is picking up old D type connectors from Radio crap, wiring those to power whips from these crap supplies, then plugging them into my power supplies. Problem is I have two of the 20gh class systems using the one string of D subs, so I finally gave up and clipped the cable on the supply so I could use one of the SATA lines. (They are all on the same rail, but one should still balance the wires since those have resistance as well)
So in the end you're going to hit 8 chips right? Have we thought about cooling the FTDI chip with a simple sink? If you need any help with water cooling let me know, I love the stuff. I didn't go that route because of ROI. Just be super careful if you drill into the water block not to permeate the chamber. Don't mix metals between sinks and radiators ETC. ionization will happen and slowly deteriorate everything. It's usually suggested to run the system for hours to leak test. The thermal conductivity of water exceeds air something like 10x so this makes me giddy. Air vs water let my processor go from 4.0 Ghz to 5.2 Ghz in the end it is usually efficient enough that the next hindrance is hardware related as there should be plenty of overhead for heat.
Well, I have 4 chips coming, two old style chips in the box, and three chips that need to be reballed (one old and two new). The problem now with the old style chips is that fitting them on a board could be tough; since they are tall the newer chips all have to have heat pads on them to even up. What I might do is try putting the first reballed tall one on the "danger board" (the one that some poor guy nuked to try and put chips on it) and if that works put the three on that board and call it "done" (5 of the chip pads are seriously damaged. Sad.)
The problem with the FTDI IMO is not that it generates heat, but since it's on the ground plane it has to deal with the plane's heat load from the FETs and chips. Add to that the genius idea of blowing 50-60c air right on it (with the fans down) and you have a recipe for fail. My next cooler is going to be the corsair big one, I'm thinking of just strapping it to the bottom of the board so it can pull the heat off the bottom. In theory I should be able to get away with only a little AL sink on the top, which will have to be the bottom since I bet you can't run a water block upside down.
The corsair and 120 that I am using now are sealed units, so corrosion inhibitors are probably in there. What I really *should* do is take them outside, then immerse the radiator in a 5 gallon bucket of water in the shed with a garden pump circulating the water to the 60 gallon rain barrel outside. Even better would be to immerse the radiator straight into the barrel, but in either case if the water froze solid I'd lose cooling power. Hm.... That is crazy actually...
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