Topic: How to Overclock Your Autotune Antminer S9 (Read 2823 times)

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Hi there. As soon as I see it, this custom firmware thing is quite complicated. I read in several places that everywhere, unfortunately, put the dev fee down. Can I still download a modified software that does not include the dev fee? I just want to modify the TH \ s. Thanks again for your response.

Laci

Ok, that was helpful, thanks!

So you think its not some kind of incompatibility that causes the hashboards to just overheat.

From my findings, and i work full time with these machines.. i found that the FF firmware, the fans seem to run a little slower, roughly say on autoFreq at 78+ the fans run at 5800/6000 where on the FF650 the fans seem to run at approx 4600rpm.. hence quieter, but that bit hotter..so the autoFreq i feel is for a cooler ambient temperature, i am in a location where my ambiant is the same as yours, i am on autofreq now, but when the season changes il load up FF650 and bring the freq up to sat 725/750.. get that bit more hash power but keeping the units cool at the same time, but in this heat that we have currently in the uk i am staying on autofreq.
hope that helps. J

Ambient is between 20 and 30°C depending on daytime. No Aircondition.
Are all the fixed frequency models running hotter?

if you listen to how the miner revs up, the fans run much slower on the FF650 firmware, but on stock 650FF 105 temp seems very high to me.. if you were operating at 15TH then i would say 105 is expected, but that is high for stock setings, whats your ambient room starting temp?.. do you have a cool air flow into the miners?

Ok, but I dont understand: Why should the miner be 105°C hot with stock 650 MHz on fixes frequency firmware and on autotune on 650 MHz only 85°C?

If them temps are showing over 100 they are correct.. if they are showing 80/82 ish they are incorrect.

Ok, but what temperatures are reported? Mine went over 100° with the newer batches and i was a bit scared. Or are the readings wrong?

yes they will work on fixed freq.. i have many of them but i do prefer auto tune unless you live in a cold place

Can anyone confirm, that there are autotune miners from the newer batches, that are not able to work with the fixed frequency firmware? As I said, they report high temperatures, even at stock frequencies.
Or is there a way to overclock them? I did not find anything.

I didn't notice it yet if there is different power draw from any firmware but I think it is depends on frequency if your miner set to higher freq it should consume more power than lower frequency.


I don't know if there is some images with different Voltages but you can try the other firmware from bitmain here https://service.bitmain.com/support/download

Have you realized that the autotune november version is more power efficient than the fixed version one?

For the same amount of hash rate, power drawn of fixed frequency version is higher.

I believe the autotune and the new 14TH versions reduce the PIC voltage to the absolute minimum necessary level to improve performance. And sometimes some ASIC chips fail to communicate and drop from the chain.

Is there any other Antminer images built to test with differente PIC voltages?

Regards.

Yes, I know that. But as I said, some miners of older batches work fine and stay below 90° even with 725 MHz. Some miners rise at stock 650MHz over 100°. So I suppose that the guide does not work for all hardware versions of S9.

If your miner running at 16 TH/s your miner will increase its temperature above 80 degrees I advice you to reduce the frequency but expect for hash rate drop, check this guide https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/how-to-overclock-your-autotune-antminer-s9-3239820

I already tried a factory reset after flashing. Unfortunately this did not fix the high temperatures.
I dont know how the other people manage it or if they also face this problem.

I don't know what exactly the filename of november batch firmware but someone said this filename Antminer-S9-all-201711171757-autofreq-user-Update2UBI-NF.tar.gz) is the november batch firmware and I already tried this firmware the temp is lower than the other firmware but I experienced weird issue it detects a bad chip then turn the frequency fixed to 400 reflashing and restoring to default factory settings solved this issue so if you going to try this firmware and experience some issue you reflashing and restoring them to factory default may solve the issue.

Also, what I notice about this firmware the hashrate is lower than the firmware you run on your two miners.

Why does it only detect temps up to 82°? Is it only the specific firmware with the specific miners? Because not all behave the same.
Also: Why does the temperature go over 100° on stock settings from the fixed firmware?

edit:
seems fine to me:

Because if you go into the kernel log it says only detect temp upto 82.. that means it could be at 110 and its only detecting up to 82

Yeah, I know that. But given the limited usage time of the miners, you should squeeze out any hash as long as they are profitable.

There is the November firmware which should be the recent: Antminer-S9-all-201711171757-autofreq-user-Update2UBI-NF.tar.gz
And I am usind this one from may for the two miners that run 16TH: Antminer-S9-all-201705031838-650M-user-Update2UBI-NF.tar.gz

Are there any else?

I heard that someone say that downgrading to november firmware can fix some issue like wrong temp reading and other miner firmware issues.

The bad thing on overclocking miner without proper air circulation or cooling device your miner can exceeds higher temp that can lead to higher temp protection and also, chips or the hashing  board may burn and damage.

Did you try this method https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/solution-for-antminer-s9-fans-speed-up-down-every-20-seconds-2690140
you can modify the fan speed of autotune firmware then set it to higher speed it may help to cool down the miner.

Wait til wintertime and heat the house with your miner. Save some money on the heating bill.

Hints. Saved money is earned money.  (Snake in the wild..)

I found out that the two S9 14TH that were ordered on 24th of march are able to run at 85° @ 16,1 TH.
The four S9 that were ordered on 5th of april are not working properly with the fixed frequecy firmware.
Can anybody confirm?

The two overcloced seem fine. Why do you suspect that the readings are wrong?

I dont know about your temp readings but i overclocked all of my S9's and ran the for a week clocked at 15 Th, what i do know is that the temp readings of 82 that i had were 100% false, they must have been closer to 100 or more.. so i thought i want to keep them running for longevity so i put them back also to Autotune.. i am in the UK and when the ambient temp drops like winter time then il re flash them and clock them up
hope that helps

Umm, guys?
I just started to try to overclock my S9s from different batches.
On one 14TH model from march or so I applied the fixed frequency firmware and ramped the frequency now up to 750 MHz so far. No significant HW errors, hashrate is over 16.2 TH at 85°C chip temperature.
Are the chips really capable to do so much more?

Interesting: Tried a second S9 from the same batch. On the fixed frequency firmware temps go up to 105° C on default 650 MHz. Flashing back the autotune
Edit: 3 of 4 S9 14TH get over 100° after flashing fixed freq. firmware. Any idea why? One even showed 132°. I dont know if that is correct at all.
I did not wait and stopped the miner by deleting the pools and flashed the autotune FW again.

Ok after runnung these all day playing with the frequency.. I have settled on setting the 656.5M, that gives the S9's a solid 14 TH , its a 500 increase over standard. my personal thoughts are.. yes i can get them to 14,800 TH but at what cost?....i have been looking at burnt out boards from over clocking.. better stay safe me thinks.. until we can see what is a safe TH to over clock to.

Ok Update...
Had a couple of machines building up diffA % so adjusted UP to 706.5m seems to be running sweeter and ironed out %DiffA and zero HW errors...now 14,860 Th

Now got 10 S9,s running on 650m firmware, i have adjusted them up to 675m, i am on slushpool as i get lease HW faults from them.. want to keep these babies happy.. i had one S9 start racking up DiffA faults so i backed it off to 656.25m and its running fine..at 675m they are 14.400 Th

Hay buddy, I have just loaded the 650M FFQ Firmware to 4 of my units, they were on 13.5 auto freq, they are running perfect at 14,200/14300, the fan speeds are set at max lower i see, seems ok, but its cool outside,

note: Since upgraded TH I have a......Load Average 0.92, 0.77, 0.50?
Is that the power its pulling on each board?

This is the load average on a standard S9 Nov 17 firmware on Auto Freq  0.26, 0.26, 0.24
Ideas ?
Really impressed with your findings

Cheers

Thanks
Jase

You must have seen the post I made on the s9 topic where I detailed how to do this! Thanks for making a thread out of it. Has anyone found a good frequency to use that is stable without recompiling bminer to use more power. Figure the odds of damaging it are slim if your just bumping up the frequency without pushing more power to it.

So while we're on the subject, what's the highest hashrate that you all have achieved using a 13.5T-rated S9 with a 1600W psu?

My current best is 14.7T stable. It seems to max out the psu near 14.8T.

You can set the freq in cgi-bin/minerAdvanced.cgi. The default (with the 650M fw) is 650.00M, but you could set it at 656.25M or 662.50M etc. as long as you are not concerned about voiding any warranty protection you might have.

FYI...I also have got a under-performing Autotune 14Th S9 ...(Nov 17 Batch... lazy dog did only 13.6)
I flashed the 650 fixed freq. firmware onto it and it is now doing 13.9Th... no issues with temps or errors.
They fixed freq does not offer the option edit or choose the freq. it is exactly set to 650...so how did you manage to set 660.xx???

My other 14's are doing fine with the autotune... they are all running at near 650

Installing the older fixed rate firmware will not let you adjust voltage or fan speed.

Voltage is controlled inside the bmminer code, as is fan speed. I don't see any active way to modify them short of a recompile of bmminer, which isn't too hard.

However, you can skip all this downgrading shenanigans if you want, since the rootfs is ubi and mounted rw. --fixed-freq is the required command line for bmminer, which is called by single-board-test (statically in the binary). If you create a shell script (/usr/bin/bmminer) that calls the original bmminer executable, it will be run and you can intercept and change the parameters.

So dropping the other firmware allows for overclocking and presumably underclocking, does it open up the Voltage and/or fan PWM speed% as well?

Just an update, I have two S9s running at 706m, hashing at 15.1 Th/s for a full week and no problems. HW errors at .0002%, low temps.

Just another tidbit... I've had (4) machines now lose their configurations when downgrading from 1171 to the 650 fixed firmware.  No big deal, beyond the confusion figuring out that they had new DCHP assigned addresses.

Update:  It appears that by controlling the card speeds I've managed to get a couple of "dead" cards back online.  By "dead" I mean those that appear under miner status with an expected Ideal rating, but a 0 RT rating.  Obviously, having (3) cards hashing a bit slower is better than (2) cards hashing at full speed and one dead.

Note on Update:  Not sure how much this has to do with the fixed frequency option, or simply as Fanatic26 has repeatedly pointed out:  The 1117 firmware sucks.

I originally, accidentally did the firmware reversion to the wrong miner, I got my open windows mixed up and loaded the fixed frequency firmware to a perfectly good 14TH/s miner.
I freaked out at first because that wasn't the miner I was willing to risk.
But I actually didn't have any issues reverting that miner back to the autotune firmware.
It does appear to be hashing at a lower frequency then before but still maintaining 14+TH/s.
Orgininally the good miner was hashing between 649M and 661M, but with the good miner back on autotune it's at about 649M and 656M, but as I said, still maintaining 14+ TH/s.

The sickly miner still appears to be running good maintaining 14.2TH/s with the fixed frequency firmware loaded running at 662M.

It sounds like the firmware swap gave you a definite improvement to your under performing miner.
That's awesome. Glad to hear.

Hopefully some more people will be able to replicate the results.

For what its worth:  I've swapped several controller cards over the past couple of months with new ones I purchased from Bitmain.  All the new ones start out with a set frequency of 450.  Each time I've thought this was cool, because it would confirm that all my hash cards were accessible and had basic functionality.

Based on the above post, I just finished taking one of my "underperformers" (a 13.6TH machine rated at 14TH) and reverting it to fixed 650 firmware, then bumped it from 650 to 662.  One of the 3 cards is clocking a fair number of hardware errors at that speed, but overall the box is running at 13.93-13.98TH, an improvement.

About to revert it back just to see if it reverts to 13.6 (you know, basic scientific testing principles:  any phenomena needs to be shown to be repeatable at least 3 times, ideally at least 5 times, to draw a cause-and-effect conclusion).

Update:  Still playing, but having problems getting it to revert to auto-frequency - even with the November autofreq firmware.  The good news is that with the 1117 firmware, but fixed frequency, its still hashing at near 14Th and without hardware errors.  Weird.

I've looked for this information all over, and I get the same response, "It can't be done". Well obviously I can't leave well enough alone.

So here it is...

This worked for me, it may work for you.
You can do this if you want, but if you end up bricking your machine, don't come crying to me.

For those that don't already know, the first batches of S9s came with the ability to change the frequency of the machine, thus increasing the hashing speed, however doing so would void your warranty.
That is still the case today, overclocking your Antminer will void your warranty.

OVERCLOCKING YOUR ANTMINER WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY!!!

As some of you know, the Antminer S9s that have been released in the last twelve months are autotune units, and as such the advanced configurations menu is not immediately visible. You can get to the advanced configurations menu by simply placing "minerAdvanced.cgi" in the following way:

http://192.168.xx.xxx/cgi-bin/minerAdvanced.cgi  (Obviously the router assisgned IP of your unit will be your own.)

This menu really consists of only one thing:

"Search Frequency From": Along with a drop-down menu listing various frequencies.

Now if you have an autotune unit, you can do anything you want with this, and it won't change a damn thing. It'll act like it's getting ready to do something, but it actually does nothing.

So, here's the back-story.
I purchased three Antminer S9s from Bitmain to be delivered with the Nov. 2017 batch. These were 14TH/s models.
I received said miners, hooked them up, and everything was hunky-dory, until it wasn't.
All three machines worked just fine for the first couple weeks, and I do mean a "couple" weeks, as in 2 weeks.
Then one of the three miners started throwing up a bunch of hardware errors. So, I rebooted the machine, but it didn't help,
so I did a soft reset from the miner interface, it didn't help, I did a reset by sticking a paper clip in the little reset hole on the front of the miner, it didn't help either.
So, I did a hard reset by unplugging the machine, pushing the IP Call button, keeping the button depressed while I plugged the machine back into the outlet, and kept my finger on the button for another five seconds after plugging the machine back in before releasing the button.
And guess what?? It took care of my hardware errors, totally no more errors.

But now my brand new 14TH/s machine was only hashing at 13.5TH/s.

Now we already know that Bitmain sells us used machines, that's not really a secret, or that they take 13.5TH/s machines, overclock them to 14TH/s, put "autotune" firmware in them so that we can't overclock them further, and then try to act like we're getting a brand spanking new 14TH/s miner.

So, now I was being faced with a dilemma, pay to ship my Antminer back to China for repairs, and wait 2 months before they get around to sending it back to me, or send me a different unit altogether, or just accept the fact that somebody did a shitty job converting this unit to a 14TH/s unit, and just continue to mine with it, after all, is there really much difference between 13.5TH/s and 14TH/s.
So that's what I did for a couple months.

Well, obviously among other things, this coalition of big corporations such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Mailchimp, etc., in concert with old Wall Street dinosaurs, attempting to suppress the crypto markets in an attempt to control the will of the people, it's painfully obvious that the machines that in early January were bringing in revenue in excess of $36 per machine, per day, is now only bringing me around $6.95 per machine, per day.
So, I finally said, "Fuck it!!"

So this is what I did:
My handicapped miner was only hashing at a frequency of 626M, compared to my other two 14TH/s units which were hashing at a frequency between 650 and 662.
So, I went to the Bitmain website and downloaded the firmware for the "650M fixed-frequency" S9s.
Knowing that I could potentially be bricking my miner, I was willing to take that risk.
I pulled up the miner interface and loaded the 665M fixed-frequency firmware and sat back and waited. The miner rebooted, and LOW & BEHOLD!!!

My sick miner was now working at 650M and hashing between 13.9TH/s and 14.0 TH/s!!

Fuckin Sweet!!!

So, I said, "why stop there?"

I went to the advanced configuration menu and set the "Search Frequency From" to 662.5M, hit "Save&Apply"

And guess what, my once sick miner was now working at 662.5M and steady hashing at 14.2TH/s.


So to recap:

1.) I loaded the 650M fixed frequency firmware into my autotune unit.

and

2.) I changed the frequency to 662.5

And Now

I am hashing at 14.2TH/s at 662.5M, from the original 13.5 TH/s and a frequency of only 626M.
Temps are normal and hardware errors are around .0004% which is actually an improvement from .0008%

Like I said, this worked for me, and it may work for you, or you could end up bricking your machine.

But know, you're doing so at your own risk. And I cannot guaranty success.

But it could be worth a try.
It could be the Holy Grail of
Overclocking your Autotune Antminer S9.