I never got any response form Btimain regarding my S7 needing one blade replaced, so go EFF them. They also never compensated me with the batch1 BS they pulled last year. They ignore tickets and can burn for all I care.. Ohh yeah also, they are the reason Bitcoin mining profitability has dropped 70% since Oct/Nov of last year.
Haha, they do ignore tickets. I got some that are 2 months old. But all the hating asides, there's always 2 side to every story. I'm no fan of Bitmain either but my partners and I have bought hundreds of units from Bitmain without issues both via BTC and wire transfers. Delivery time is always 2 days via air, never failed to all 3 of our different city locations in the US. The only times you will have issues with wire transfer is if you have to deal with incompetent bankers, sometimes that includes the manager as they don't do international wires often. Their support do suck, no disagreement there and hence why I usually just ask the forum for help or we fix it ourselves. Most of the time reboot is the cure. The machine runs like tanks though as long as you don't move them around too much as their heat sink design is it's biggest flaws. Out of the hundreds of units we have, we've had about 5 units with loose heat sink, some are dued to our staff's stupidity being too rough trying to bang it out after they're stuck when attached via the side rails. I can comfortably say it can survive over 90 degree temperature much better than the Avalon 6 as we've done 3-4 weeks of heat stress test in my garage before deploying them into the larger farms.
I love my few Avalon 6s as they are very quiet. Runs solid if you have the Block C image. However the unit is designed to run better hot and even in cool to warm temp of 78F, the Unit will still run anywhere from 73-79C whereas the S7 would be operating at 60C or below. This is why it's not a good idea to stack the Avalon 6, as 3 of it's side gets extremely hot. There's only 1 FAN and it runs at lower RPM than the S7 fans, so with the lower noise, comes the cost of hotter operating temperatures which is part of their design. The Avalon 6 batch 1 however can runs faster when overvolted, I did that and burn both hash boards killing 1 unit when doing stress test on the Ambient temperature. It's code is designed to drop the hash rate once it hit 80C to cool it down, but when overvolted, maybe it didn't have sufficient time to react / cool down.
For home miners or people who's higher priority is noise level, winner is Avalon. Running it as a business, you simply can't beat the S7 as it's priced to kill off the competitions. You definitely hear a lot more horror story about it then the Avalon 6 but that's only because the install base is much much larger so of course there will be more reports on issues. My partners and I have hundreds of the S7s and they are still running strong without issues except for 2 units that have bad hash boards which Bitmain replaced but don't expect it to be fast! The volume of orders speaks for themselves, originally I wanted to have 50% Avalon 6 and 50% S7 but the price drop by Bitmain made it impossible to not favor their products. Doesn't matter if it's Bitmain, Bitfury, Spoondoolies, Avalon, etc, they all mine for profits too so they're also our worst competitor which makes this a very tough business for the long term.