Post
Topic
Board Hardware
Re: ANTMINER S5+ is available to order, 7.722TH/S 0.445J/GH
by
notlist3d
on 20/08/2015, 08:43:37 UTC
You can use as many PSUs as you want as long as you don't have multiple PSUs powering the same individual board (of which there is 9).
Do all PCI ports need to be powered?  Or will it run with 2 on each board?  
2 is fine, still only about 165W per PCI-E.
Are you certain that using 2 is fine? The product description page says all three are required. It may be that each PCIe plug powers a specific set of chips; the 3 PCIe connectors may not share a common power bus at all as in, say, the S3 design. Without knowing the actual S5+ design, or having an actual unit to look at, saying "2 is fine" is only speculation at this point unless something more is known than what bitmain has disclosed so far.

Bitmain could confirm this here, but they aren't posting much these days. If anyone already has a unit, they could also confirm whether using 2 out of the 3 connectors works and post here.
What Bitmain customer Service told us was we have to use all 3 connectors for each board, As my understanding if each board need at least 382W(3436/9), in average each connector should be bear 127w@10.6A , and if it works  using only 2 connectors instead that will be 191w@15.9A for each connector , it is high risk to heat up or burn your cables if they are not good enough.    
This still doesn't answer the question of whether all 3 are *required* by design, or can 2 be used if the cables can handle the increased current?

BTW the power requirements aren't as high as you mention: 3436W quoted by bitmaintech is at the wall, using a 93% efficient PSU. So the DC power to the S5+ would only be 3436*0.93 or 3196 watts, or 355W per board. *If* the design allowed the use of 2 connectors per board, this would put 178W per connector (14.8A). This isn't bad, considering S3+ units can easily be powered with 2 PCIe cables and those use around 355W as well.

They make a big deal about using 3 per board, so I would not try to personally.  They actually ship a piece of paper with some general instructions, and an email with it to.   And in all of them it made sure you use 3 per board.

So under pcie specs should it run if high quality psu with nice cables... yes.  But they make sure to tell you only run with 3 in each.  If you do 2 i'm sure it violates warranty.

Many comments I can reply to in one quote! The reason it says 3 connectors are required is because I wrote that long ago for S5, and they just updated the numbers in the announcement without reconsidering what it was actually saying. If you've got 16AWG then you could use 2 PCI-E from the same branch, 18AWG and you'll need 2 branches and you should keep checking on it for the first 30 minutes.

Only problem I see is if something goes wrong.   If for some reason you need warranty it seems using 2 instead of 3 might be "inadequate power supply" and void warranty.

If they would care/void warranty I have no idea.   Thanks for writing it out I didn't look into it after all the warnings, but glad to know it works for those who need it and have right equipment.