Quote from: lightfoot on February 29, 2016, 02:13:31 AM

Quote from: GenTarkin on February 28, 2016, 05:57:07 PM

Question for ya all....

My Titan keeps causing my PSU's modular power connectors to eventually melt after like months and months of steady use. I think it may be because of crappy modular cable connectors n connections to the PSU.
The titan side of things - including the Y adapters remain in good shape.

By the way, when you melt the connector to the point where the board burns it's a bitch on wheels to fix.

Melting is caused by a couple of things. When you plug a miner in while the power is on, there is a little spark that happens because the miner's 12 volt caps are charging up from zero. Each spark leaves a nice pock mark on the plug or socket. Eventually that causes resistance which causes heat which causes more resistance.

The other issue is voltage. The cube is going to take a certain number of watts. When you start lowering th voltage below 12v due to cheap cabling, the current draw has to go up. Current is what generates heat in voltage drop situations (P=IE), so when you voltage drops to 10v the thing is now dropping 2v*20a=40w of heat along that line. Then it gets hotter resistance goes up, hilarity ensues.

Third thing is the interconnections between the PCIe connector and the Titan board, if you look at the ground lines on layer 1 and 6 you see that the PCIe pin goes to a via which connects to a very small set of four spider connectors to the ground plane. They do the same thing with +12, it's only a few mm, but as you heat up those pins you will start to burn out those spiders. Once one pin's spiders go the other spiders have to carry more of the load which burns those pins and you know where this leads.

Solution? You could run a supply with a massive amount of power, but remember those cubes don't have fuses in them so if something like a FET shorts inside a power supply you go from a simple *pop* to what could nicely be described as a small plasma fireball (see Amp Interrupt rating). This can then cause the phenolic on the board itself to conduct which will turn your unit into a 3,000 watt electric dryer in a 1 foot cube. This could then be described as "hilarious".

Or try dropping down the power. These units hash nicely at 60mh, do you really need 80+?

Well, the issue isnt the connectors on the Titan, its the connectors & cables on the PSU side (they are modular).
Also, my Titan's PSUs are fully powered down prior to any cables being messed with =) So, there should be no sparking or anything.