Re: ANTMINER S3 Discussion and Support Thread.

I like to tell another thing, my 2 PCI-E Power cables to S3 were a little hot.
My S3 hashrate was not stable at the rated 441Ghs but was averaging at 420. I ordered thermal paste.
Before thermal plates were arriving, I tried to plug two additional PCI-E power cables to S3.
The Antminer S3 is running at stock clocks 218.75 and PCI-E power cables are cool now.
The main reason for this post is to report that the miners stabilised at 441. Earlier it was 420.
Two thing I'm pointing out,
1. The miners plugged in continuously for 4 or 5 days and seems like it was running-in and stabilised at-last at 441.
2. Plugging the all four connectors even if you are not overclocking will some way help you.

Similar experience here. S3 clocked down to 212 as it would not stabilise at stock. Finally decided last night to have a fiddle as I had a bit of time on my hands. After removing the cover I did the following -

Straightened out the heatsink fins as some were bent close to where the screws were.
Tightened up one screw which was loose on one heatsink.
Pushed the cables to make sure they were seated properly, they all looked ok, no "give" when pushing.
Put the cover back on and instead of putting the cables into the sockets closest to the ethernet port I decided to try the other two.

Hooked it back up, checked the results after a couple of hours and it was hashing at 420. Decided to put the clock back to stock and it's been hashing at 440 for the last 24 hours!

Really strange as the only thing I felt I really did was swap the cables. Maybe it just needed a bit of TLC and me stroking its internals made it happy!

OK so I'm back to square one with this! Went back to fluctuating between 380-410 after about 72 hours on stock setting. Reset it back to 212.5 and it's hashing steadily at 410 now.

Just had a thought, has anyone ran one without the cover on? I'm thinking I might try it this weekend, wondering if the controller is getting too warm as its directly above the inside heatsinks and not to the side as with the S1. I understand the cover is required for decent airflow across the outside heat sinks so I'll either make some sides or blow air from another couple of fans on them.

One of my miners seems to work best if I leave it running for long periods. Although, that one also seems to need anywhere from 3 to 8 reboots to come up strong, meaning that within 10 minutes of the reboot it hits the 440ish mark and has no x's. If I take the effort to repeatedly reboot until I seem to hit a good start it will chug along for days with decent hash rate. My other miner works best with frequent reboots because when I leave it running for extended periods it drops to sub-400 range and even if it was doing 450+ for hours before that, it eventually brings the average down sub-400 over a longer time. That one has a cron job that reboots it every 6 hours and that seems to keep the long term hash rate at 450ish. These are fickle little machines.

I ran them both without the cover for more than a week but the first one I mentioned above now has the cover back on. The chips at the end of the second chain would sometimes go to x's either right after a reboot or within 5 to 10 minutes without the cover. Checking with my hand near the heatsinks (with cover off) I could feel that the end of the heatsink on one side really was getting warmer and not getting good air flow. These are both in a climate controlled server room with other fans blowing on or near them but even so this unit seems to like the cover on for those rear chips on that one side. My other one (the frequent rebooter) runs cover off and I almost never see x's on the chips.

Full disclosure: the frequent rebooter is set to 225 freq and the one that does not like reboots is set to 250. Both also have queue set to 2 which keeps them busy without maxing the load levels.

Thanks for the tips and the info around running with the cover off. I did have a cronjob reboot set for every 12 hours, think I'll try rebooting it a couple of times at stock freq as you've mentioned, see if I can get hashing back at 440!