Topic: Hacking a BFL Jalapeno to 32GH and beyond....(???) - page 3. (Read 54329 times)

Makes sense. I didn't think of USB being a limiter until you mentioned it. All of my OC experience has been on the main rig it's self. ASIC hardware is very new to me. As for the heat. I had to close off the heat vent to this room my hardware is in. =P

Probably not too far. The key in all of this is power: Once you start boosting the clock the power use in the chip starts going up geometrically. Reason being it takes more power to switch the transistors on and off as the power you're switching goes up.

USB devices have a limited amount of power avail anyway, so that's the first limiter. It's also why companies like Cointerra get in a jam: Their chip underperforms, so they boost the clock. Which puts out a *LOT* more heat but more importantly requires the 1 volt supply to switch a lot more current.

This causes the FETs to pull more power from their switching device, which is usually just a chip instead of an inverter/power driver. The switching device shorts, puts all gates closed, and all hell breaks loose as all the FETs go BOOM.

Likewise once summer hits I'm going to be clocking all my ASICs *down* to minimum speeds. They will use a lot less power, and generate little to no heat so I can run them outside. I'll lose some hashing, but I don't need the heat. Then in the fall if it's economical I'll clock them up again.

How far do you think you could push a Nanofury USB ASIC?

Excellent work.   
Once I get this one paid for I will save up and have you do the 2nd one.
It's great how much you can squeeze out of these little beasts.

Quick update: Just finished doing two more jalapeno upgrades, one was a 5gh unit and the other was an older style 7.5gh unit.

The first unit got 4 chips and went to 22gh without issues. Errors are below .5%, which helps to minimize heat issues. Also when I flashed it I found that a speed of 5 produced the best results, going to 6 or 7 caused one of the original chips to drop down to 6 engines. Going to 5 brought up 14, so even with the reduced clock speed it still performed better. And the heat load is *greatly* reduced. Result is a 6 chip unit hashing in the 50's temp wise with a stock heat sink and fan.

The second unit (manebjorn's) had two of the original taller chips, and hashed at a good 7.8gh after a code flash. The user thought the unit was broken, but it turned out to just be a dud power supply. Took it to 5 chips, and it's now hashing at a solid 20gh with stock heat sink, fan, at 50c. Which is excellent. I did put a grille on top of the fan to keep the blades from breaking, but aside from that it's totally stock.

Current success rate on these chip installs is 100%, the trick seems to be putting chips on one at a time. I could probably try placing two chips then heating, but I'm always concerned the chip will shift, so I have to do a cool down/test between each chip add.

Chris

Very cool.
I use their parent company as vendor for some computer parts when I was still doing tech work.  They offer some great discounts you would nver see if you are not a business.
I agree on supporting the use of BTC.
With your electric bill it might not be so free.  LOL

I just spoke with Len the chips will be shipped to you in the next day or two.

Tiger Direct, and it's not the best possible price (I could have gotten it for $10 less at Amazon) but:

a) I want to support people accepting bitcoin
b) I want to generate more commerce activity in bitcoin
c) It's free money, costs me nothing!

:-) Actually the 12 cents will come out of an upgrade profits, so technically my business is becoming self-sustaining.

C

Sweet!  Where are you getting them at that price??
I need to get a new one.

Well, 12 bitcents will get a nice new Corsair delivered by Friday. We shall see how it looks :-)

That is a good thing.  I hope to get enough gh/s to have a little bit of BTC to play with eventually.
I'm getting there.

Actually I think this is my first failure, not bad. I'll order a 750 watt Corsair from Tiger and pay with some bitpennies. This stuff can support itself.

I just keep adding. stuff. My electricity bill is going to be fearsome.

C

Nothing like getting up to dead mining hardware.   

Interesting. Woke up this morning to find that my 31gh jalapeno was down. Checked the power supply (it's a $20 cheap-o from Ebay) and sure enough it had failed.

Moral: Don't buy $20 cheap-o power supplies. Oh well, I guess I will wire up a PCIx molex plug to a jalapeno cable and run this off a BFL single power supply for awhile. They suck, but my 500 watt corsairs are running 430 and 480 watts at the moment.

Note, for a quick fix I shut down my 26gh 7 chip unit and plugged the 8 chip unit into it's supply. Letting the $20 cheap-o supply cool down seems to have allowed it to restart, and I plugged the 7 chip unit in. Died again as of 15 mins ago, so I guess it's crap.

C

Thank you for the kind words. I'm glad everything is hashing away, and I have a few more to work on this weekend.

Never dull.

That is great news.  I am saving my BTC to have him upgrade my 5gh/s Jalapeno as well.
Now I am even more chomping at the bit to do so.
 
Thanks for sharing.

I'm using my first post on this forum to thank LightFoot for the great job he has done on this topic and for the work he did on my Jally.

I am one of the customers he mentioned in his post that he worked on this week.   In fact, I think the pictures are of my upgraded Jally.

I originally ordered my Jally in July as a 5Gh unit.   I almost gave up hope when it finally arrived early in December.  I was pleasantly surprised to see it hashed at 7+ Gh/sec. 

But, in the short time I've had it, its bitcoin mining rate has dropped from almost $4 USD/day to maybe $1/day.   Some of that drop was because the exchange rate was very high when I started and has settled, but most of the drop is because of the difficult rate increasing around 30% per week.    It was clear that I needed to upgrade soon before the killer 300GH and 600GH machines hit the streets in February or more likely March or later.

In following this topic for a few weeks, I decided that upgrading my Jally from its original 2 chips to 5 would be the best compromise between cost and complexity.  Going more than 5 sounded like I'd have additional cooling costs initially and ongoing.   The major change the 5 chips makes is needing an upgraded power supply.   Since my original one blew up after the 1st week and I had upgraded to a PC Power supply, I was ready.  So, I purchased 3 chips from EBay.

But, I wasn't certain I wanted to risk ruining my only miner and I couldn't afford to purchase a spare one to upgrade.   I noticed that LightFoot indicated that he would be willing to upgrade other people's Jallys.   So, early last week I sent him a PM asking for information, timing, and costs.   He responded quickly and I felt the price was reasonsable.   It happened to match almost exactly the amount of bitcoins I had successfully mined since December.   I decided it was a good sign and boxed my Jally up on Wednesday night a week ago and sent it to LightFoot USPS Priority 2 day.   Had my coins transferred to my wallet from Eligius and Eclipse and when everything was there, I sent him the coins on Thursday.

He let me know when the Jally arrived, kept me updated with messages and even pictures throughout the process, and was patient enough to answer my million questions.   Most of the time it takes is shipping, the next largest is testing/burnin before and after.  He was very careful and didn't do all the chips at once.  He tested between additions.

He sent the Jally back to me on Wednesday and it arrived today.  It has been running for almost two hours and is hashing away at 18.3Gh.   I think it will make it eventually to 19Gh.

One pleasant surprise for me is that the hardware error rate is much lower.   I was averaging 4%+ because one of the two original chips had an error rate of maybe around 8% and the other was under 1%.   I would see a new error at least every minute, so was wasting some of the hash rate on errors.

Now, I've only had 16 hardware errors total in the last two hours and the rate is .07%.   I believe this is because LightFoot does a better job than BFL does in installing the heatsinks and perhaps because the soldering of the new chips may have reheated and improved the connections and surface contact of the original chips.   I don't know if LightFoot has experienced this in his other upgrades, but I'm sure happy it happened on mine.

All-in-all it was a very pleasant experience and well worth it.   The hardest part was not being able to mine effectively for a little over a week (I had a couple antminers going to help keep away my withdrawal symptoms during that period).

Thank you LightFoot...   

Bill

That looks like a much better power supply, and if it has a ground then the caps can reference that instead of neutral. Should prevent the problems the 2 prong one has.

Very interesting. Thanks for posting that!

Those are generic laptop AC Adapters.
I used to order tons of those for the last company worked for.
Our mobile users were rough on their laptops.

Here is the newer larger PSU next to the old one.
looks like its still made by the same company though so it's probably shit.
12v 10 amp. The wires do look thicker coming out of it and it has a 90 degree connector on the end.

yeah sure, will do tonight when i get home.