That's true but no PSU can take unlimited amps on the 5V rail. But I guess a quality PSU should shut down before a melt down happens.

I guess you friend used alot of Molex to PCI-E converters right?

Which device are you asking is alright? The antminer needs at least 30 amps (360W/12v = amp [I think]) so anything over that is gravy. All these newish devices want alot more amps than my old supplies use ,so if your planning on anything like an antminer or an avalon device check the amps as well. I'm probablhy getting griefed by my 8boards wanting more than I can give them and will be looking for more like the cousair hx brand since I know it works on higher devices like the antminer (the 650 has 54 amps so I should be good for a year till antminer s2 drops in price).


Just make sure your being specific on your device your asking about multiple devices in a post which was meant to be only for drillbit and was supposed to be killed in respects to use the official drillbit forum.


Enjoy

av16 is supposed to draw 4A at conservative settings and upto 6.5A at maximum safe settings per http://drillbitsystem.com/forum/index.php?topic=309.0.
I estimate that a single board takes about 5-6A when doing 22 GH/sec.  At 5A it will be 5*12=60W, so 22/60=0.367 GH/W. (probably need to add a few Watts for the essential fans).
The Antminer S1 at default settings does 180 GH and takes 360W at the wall, which makes 0.5 GH/W.  This suggests that the S1 is slightly more efficient, however both are significantly less efficient than the S2 or Spondoolies SP10.

Cheers

av16 is supposed to draw 4A at conservative settings and upto 6.5A at maximum safe settings per http://drillbitsystem.com/forum/index.php?topic=309.0.
I estimate that a single board takes about 5-6A when doing 22 GH/sec.  At 5A it will be 5*12=60W, so 22/60=0.367 GH/W. (probably need to add a few Watts for the essential fans).
The Antminer S1 at default settings does 180 GH and takes 360W at the wall, which makes 0.5 GH/W.  This suggests that the S1 is slightly more efficient, however both are significantly less efficient than the S2 or Spondoolies SP10.

Cheers

Unless you want to solve your particular cooling situation, you'd probably be better rewarded if you target something like the Antminer S1 or S2 with water cooling.  As I see it, the main bottleneck in the near future will be efficiency in GH/Watt, as with rise of difficulty mining might stop being profitable if the electricity cost becomes greater than BTC reward. Unfortunately the Av16 boards are far from being efficiency champions (unlike the earlier Bitfury based Drillbit devices.  I'll keep running mine while they can, but sadly just like BE's, they are approaching the 'departure lounge'....

Cheers

If you are using existing holes, then the risk is minimal.  I have 4 of these Av16 Drillbit boards, which are stacked with the heatsink on top.  So far I did not have any separation issues and they are working quite reliably.  These are significantly less efficient than the older bitfury based boards and require plenty of cooling.  I'm using 12 cm fans in push-pull from the sides, blowing air through the fins and also some old HDD cooler dual fans on top of each heatsink.  This keeps it at a reasonable temp of about 47 deg C.  Overcloocked to Av16:int:750:1:1000 they produce about 88 GH/s altogether.

Cheers

one thing i did notice when the heatsinks fell off is that there are holes in the board, this would fit nicely for heatsinks if someone would make a water based heatsink.......

Despite earlier photos showing the heatsink below, Barntech later suggested to position the board with the heatsink on top, to avoid the 'separation' that you described.  I started with the heatsink below, later turned the boards so it is on top on my 4 Av16 boards.  No separation so far on mine.  Drilling holes might be risky, as you could bridge internal ground and power layers.  The first and easy step is to turn the boards so the heatsinks face up.  You may want to consult Barntech (check out the drillbit forum at http://drillbitsystem.com/forum/, you may want to register there so that you may post your issue) about any adhesive or way of re-attaching the heatsinks to ensure good thermal transfer and avoid pre-mature thermal death of your ASICS.

Cheers

For the Eight board, my cgminer.conf file uses
"drillbit-options" : "Eight:int:53:2:950",
"usb" : ":1"

(the "usb": part tells it to look just for 1 device)

For the Av16 boards the conf file has
"drillbit-options" : "Av16:int:750:1:1000",
"usb" : ":1"

(again, cgminer sees this 'bunch' as a single USB device).
The 'Eight' or 'Av16' tells this instance which device type to apply this for.  I just happen to use different versions of cgminer for these 2 (currently running 4 instances of cgminer and 2 of bfgminer on the same pc to control a garden variety of miners including Drillbit Thumbs (bf), Drillbit AvThumbs, Drillbit Eight, Drillbit Av16's, Blue/Red Fury, Antminer U1/2's...

Cheers

These boards are not fully 'hot plug'.  Unless you can bring power to all of your Av16 boards at once, checkout the suggestion at http://drillbitsystem.com/forum/index.php?topic=309.15 about a power-up sequence to get all Av16 boards running.  I have now 4 Av16 boards and a single drillbit8 board.  I run the drillbit8 board on a separate instance of cgminer 4.0.1 and the Av16 boards on an instance of cgminer 4.2.1.  The Av16 boards are detected as a single entity with a "DRB 0: A 4..." designation meaning that it is a group of 4 boards. The Av16 are now running with a setting of "Av16:int:750:1:1000" (in cgminer.conf), getting about 87.5 GH/s, with a temp of 51-52 deg C.

Cheers