the s3+ firmware + the 4.6 cg miner has pretty much got rid of the hardware errors I was getting on one of my S3s.  ok it was only 1.5% (according to Mantmonitor) now it's 0.0018%.

you can check the version via the api

if you are on a remote machine, from another copy of cgminer you can do the following command:
Where 192.168.1.99 is the S3.

Or on the S3 itself run