A warning to everyone: Cooling these boards properly is crucial. Improper cooling will increase your power consumption, increase error rates, and shorten the life of the FPGAs. If the board or heatsinks feel hot at all, you are not cooling them properly. We are not responsible for any damages that may arise from insufficient cooling.
To emphasize here: Semiconductor devices can be prone to thermal runaway: Higher temperatures make them less efficient which leads to higher temperatures until its dead.
The GPUs most people use to mine today have automatic thermal throttling. Even if the fan fails the GPU will slow itself down before it self destructs. The FPGA mining devices do not. Cheap fans which are acceptable in devices which can self-throttle when the fan fails are not acceptable for devices which do not throttle.
It might be the case that miner will crash and fail into a low power state if it overheats, thus saving you from lasting damage— or it might irreparably harm itself. You don't want to be the person who finds out which of these failure modes is more likely.
