Re: Bitmain just announced the AntMiner A3 - 815GH/s Siacoin miner - Blake(2b)
- Mining pool selection - I set up SiaMining at first and was getting around 80SC/hour. In the spirit of decentralizing and supporting good pools, I swapped over to Luxor, and my SC/hour was much smaller. After over 90 minutes it was estimating about 30SC, so I reverted back to SiaMining. However, I just refreshed the Luxor page and it is showing 362SC for just under 2 hour's work. Why does the number fluctuate so much, and why was that figure so delayed? Is that typical with Luxor, or is it due to the nature of PPLNS? Also, it seemed to take MUCH longer for my hashrate to reach ~800 on Luxor (30 mins or so) vs. SiaMining where I had full hash within a couple minutes. Or should I go with F2Pool instead? Haven't tried that one out yet.
- HW error rate - People have been mentioning HW errors as "a lot of errors" or "an acceptable rate", but I haven't seen hard stats on what those rates actually are.
Is 0.01% too high? 0.1%? 1%? I'm currently at 0.006%...
I am jealous of your temps.
1) Mining pool--Luxor is having some sort of problem where their luck is currently at about 40%, so they switched over to PPLNS from PPS. Which means you get paid out in an average over time, but with their luck that low you're still going to make less right now (in theory). Siamining is PPS and currently paying out well. I'm with you though, I prefer Luxor and will switch back when whatever problem they're having gets sorted.
2) .01% is fine. .1% is ok. 1% is too much (opinions vary, but that's my standard).
3) Your cold air is your advantage, these things run hot. But I have mine overclocked (650 currently but usually 631). Overclocking voids your warranty, fair warning there. Your at-the-wall is your call; you can calculate profit with usage deducted at whattomine.com, it's usually pretty close. On a 20a 110 circuit, I'd suggest limiting wattage to 1700W for safety, you likely won't get anywhere near that though. HW isn't necessarily higher at higher frequencies, it depends. 631 drops more than 650 for me. It's more machine dependent.
Are HW errors at all related to the pool you are mining from? My hunch is no... but I was sitting in the other room and my miner shot up to 100% fan speed for no reason (when I checked the miner status PCB/Chip temps were like 30/40 so that wasn't the cause). But my error rate was nearly 3% which is way above what it has been to date (read: the 22 hours or so it's been running).
Also, it looks like there's something up with SiaMining, wondering if that could be the cause of the fan speed? Pool hashrate dropped like a rock. I figured it could be due to some miners going to AntPool, since https://siastats.info/mining_pools.html shows about 300TH/s that I don't think was there before. But then I noticed my own hashrate had gone down. To rule out that being the result of me getting a spike in HW errors or something else happening like it resetting and spiking the fanspeed, all/many of the addresses here: https://siamining.com/addresses are also getting cut in half...as if I needed a reason to switch back to Luxor, it does seem like their luck issues are getting better.
I found out that once you have overclocked, the hardware become less stable. Even you reture to the default 600, the hw error will suddenly jump in certain amount of time.(chips temp are <70) So I guess overclock is one way ticket, and there wont be anyway you can return to normal!
That seems to happen anyways. I have not overclocked my unit and there are still weird spikes in error rates, fan speed, and so forth. Yes, I have paid close attention to my chip temperatures, keeping them in the 60's/lower 70's.
Sometimes the ASIC maker of any FLAVOR, messes up and is too optimistic on speed....for the NEW ASIC product.....I'd underclock till maybe a firmware update or somethihng to be safe.
(don't have an A3 but I scare easy, what i'd do )