Topic: The Chili – 30+GH/s BFL based Bitcoin Miner Assembly - page 70. (Read 137904 times)

If anyone is looking for chips (lots of them) I have a substantial amount arriving today: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/closed-bfl-4-ghs-chips-06-btc-per-chip-batch-29-236103

Is this correct:

Cooler
-------
pad
-------
PCB + Chips
------
foam
-------
backplate


The backplate is threaded and screws come in from the cooler through the PCB and tighten into the backplate?

Just a few quick updates as we wait for news from the assembly house.

We've had our first major screwup on the board, and it's entirely my fault. We used to have two different LEDs on the test board, green for the power rails and red for the status LEDs. On the production board there's only one main power LED along with the 8 status, and they're (supposed to be) all red. Unfortunately I screwed up and ordered the green ones, so the now-green status lights won't be as bright as they would have been. Sorry.

I am going through all our customers and making sure shipping information is all good and I have all the information needed to send your miners off to you ASAP, and will have everything entered so labels can be printed ahead of time.

A lot of people have been asking me about backplates. Apparently GPU backplates are difficult to find, which is really unfortunate. I would have thought those ATI x-plates that held on the 5xxx series GPUs would be all over the place. There isn't a great solution to that, I'm afraid. Using a thermal pad means you need a good bit of force to compress it to get good performance, and you will bend the PCB if there isn't a backplate in place. Arctic cooling makes one that you could use that they sell through their website.
http://www.arctic.ac/en/p/spare-parts/536/eva-foam-und-gpu-back-plate.html#
If you are handy and have a drill (and/or hacksaw), the easiest and cheapest solution is to just buy some 2.5" wide (63.5mm) 1/8"-1/4" aluminum flat bar and drill 4 holes in it to pass the heatsink screws through. You can find it at a hardware store or online, the stuff is pretty cheap
https://www.onlinemetals.com/merchant.cfm?pid=1138&step=4&showunits=inches&id=997&top_cat=0
You could even do the same for an LGA1155 heatsink if you don't want to deal with the backplate that comes with your cooler, you would just need to use 3.5" flat bar.
I'm personally just going to use these guys as my backplate and drill holes in the correct place, but I have the tooling to do so. It's definitely more work.
http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en?x=0&y=0&lang=en&site=us&KeyWords=VHS-45

I have had some people who are just getting their chips now approach me asking about when Batch 2 will start. Right now that's a hard question to answer. We're focused on getting the first ones out the door, and how quickly we can start another will depend on interest. One downside of using a large scale professional assembly house is that they are not set up to do batches of a couple dozen boards at a time. Luckily it appears though there might be a good bit of interest in batch 2, so if you are getting chips soon and are interested in having them mounted onto PCBs, please send me a PM or email at [email protected] and I can start to get an idea of what's out there and start planning to get a slot book in the assembly house.

No. The parts were all delivered to the assembly house yesterday, that doesn't mean that they shipped yesterday.

As posted on the previous page, shipping was scheduled for the end of this week, but it may have slipped by a day or two, so a few boards will probably ship at the end of this week, but I imagine the bulk will be next week...

Did mr teal start ship the boards or not yet?

The cooler I'll let ChipGeek/MrTeal confirm (though there are cheaper and probably better performing options listed above fwiw).

However, the TIM does not look good to me. It's a lot less conductive than the ones listed above, and although a little thinner, it's not enough to make up for the much lower thermal conductivity, so I would go with the one listed instead.

I'm looking at:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835608016
http://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail.tpl&type=Accessories&type_sub=Thermal%20Interface&model=AK-TT12-80

Will this compatible with The Chili?

Welcome back!


Unbelievable! Next you'll be saying you can produce "at least 400 units a day" and that you're "ramping up production" whilst "working weekends"... OK, I'll stop, I don't think we need emphasise how much more awesome you two are than BFL - actions speak louder than words, and your actions are brilliant!

As always, pics of it how it all goes down are cool, so +1 to that!


Whilst you say it in the next comment, it is worth emphasising that you do NOT NEED A PCI SLOT! These are only on the cards for pretty / to make mounting easier, they are not for connection (hence the USB cable). Just hammering this point home as there appears to be some confusion around this!

Also, you need TIM as well as a cooler & fan... And I was kind of joking when I said a host with internet, kind of hope everyone here knows that already, but you never know...

I just discovered this forum is alive again. 

It's looking like our schedule MIGHT slip by 1 or 2 days (not weeks!).  This is primarily due to the customer in the assembly house ahead of us is taking 1 to 1.5 days longer than anticipated.  So although some Chilis should ship by this Friday, some will likely slip to early next week.  I will try and post a couple of photos of the work in progress if time permits.

Confirm: yes mini-USB cable, NOT micro-USB cable.

As others have stated, you will need a computer with an internet connection and mining software.  The board needs a heatsink with fan and a mini-USB cable.  If you wish, you will also need to buy a PCI slot mounting bracket. 

Said a different way, we are only sending the card with the ASICs mounted on them.  All other "stuff" is not supplied.

Looking for PCI card brackets I see these. I'm not sure if they will fit or not.

http://www.alliedelec.com/search/productdetail.aspx?sku=70183122

http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/9203/9203K-ND/317297

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005FYCFG8/ref=ox_ya_os_product

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835186052

Looks good if you want to mount these like a video card.

For those wondering about USB cable type, I just got confirmation from MrTeal that it's a standard mini-USB camera type cable (NB not a micro-USB phone style).

That's awesome if it's right! Just check it's the right model as I can't see anything correct for that price...

I am leaning toward something like the Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo II (as described earlier) right now. It will work better in my environment. I have no idea what all kinds of boards will be attaching to this in the future... but I will try to keep them fitting like PCIe cards.

I see a Twin Turbo II for 39 on New Egg.

Nice setup!

I am hoping those coolers will be OK for running with the cards vertical - I have quite a lot of boards coming and so also need to achieve reasonable density. I can't see why they wouldn't be OK, they'll just take up quite a lot of horizontal room is all, so you won't be able to get one in each slot in that setup.

I will probably just buy a few blocks of wood and cut slots in them and stick the cards in that... Not elegant but it'll get the job done :/

You can get the density up by using GPU coolers (as above), but it really does ramp up the cost quite a bit if you're getting a lot of boards!

Here are some example coolers from MrTeal's post on the BFL forums.

I have a couple of the Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo II (Dual Fan GPU type cooler) that are waiting for the boards. - Top left in MrTeal's picture - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835186052

I will be sticking a couple Chili's and a Drillbit board into this machine.

I think I will need coolers that let me keep the boards vertical like a regular PCIe card.

The dimensions are about 33mm x 33mm required for each board, so just multiply up from there.

The thickness should be the minimum possible, so buy the 0.5mm thickness - the thicker the TIM the worse the performance, and the 0.5mm is plenty thick enough to cover any height differentials there might be.

Hi all,

A roll up for those keeping score:

Known Working Coolers:

Cooler-Master Hyper 212 Evo (These coolers look HUGE!)

I am going to try out ARCTIC Accelero Twin Turbo II VGA Coolers on my cards.


Known good TIM:

11.0 watt/mk thermal pad - unknown dimensions and thickness
17.0 watt/mk  thermal pad - unknown dimensions and thickness


Known Working PSU:

Looks like the board takes a 6 pin PSU connector. If you are going to use these boards with an existing PC seems like you should be able to power a number of them with the same PSU powering the Mobo... depending on the size of the PSU.

Anyone know the peak wattage on these cards?

PCIe Card Brackets:

No good sourcing on these yet.