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Finally Arrived Giants from Jason Han

1chris1377

1chris1377

Member
Hello

I finally have my hands on the two giants i hve ordered from jason han...i love this boy

I have one problem..i have one working giant with sd card
and one without sd card...when i out the working sd card in the other giant...he works well...no problem..

i have bought a second new sd card...can i copy the data from it on the other sd card?


where i get the image for baikal giant...

please help me

chris

PS: Now at 3150 Mhash ! YES !
 
You need to do bitwise copy. Use dd in linux or some image-software (like acronis) in windows, also you can download free cloning software at bootable CD, like clonezilla and clone your sd to new card.
 
One Question wich Pool is the best to mine? where i can get the most profit? i would like to mine Dash and offer my rigs at miningrigrentals.
wich pool is the best for dash?
 
Thanks for the review, another happy JasonHan customer. I connected 2 Giants together, so only one PI is needed (if you have enough 10pin cables). Good to hear the SD card clone worked out for you (I had a similar problem as one of the PIs was not correctly configured).

I have about 10 miner settings, but currently mine 100% on https://dash.miningpoolhub.com (which has a fee of 0.9%, but works best for me, the UI is a bit slow on updates, but the mining works very well). Others used suprnova (no fees), which works ok too, but for me I never reached the same full hashrate (so suprnova was less profitable for me). I use suprnova for fallback, but miningpoolhub never failed me yet.

Nicehash was very profitable in the beginning too, but I rather mine Dash myself than getting btc and converting them to Dash, also profitability has dropped (it was 10-20% more profitable selling the mining power to Nicehash buyers than mining yourself, which was a bit strange a few weeks ago). I also mined MUE a week ago shortly and it was indeed a bit more profitable (as MUE was up and Dash a bit down), then it has reversed and now it is 10% more profitable again, but too much work for me as the pools for MUE are constantly down and have problems and Dash mining just works. Dash is pretty much the best thing you can get on any Baikal miner, check here:
https://whattomine.com/asic
 
Same here. I ordered 2 Giants from Jason Han, one came with an SD Card, but one without... And the SD Card it came with was Class 4. You need at least a Class 10 to make it work. Had to buy a couple of them and he will reimburse me.

One other problem I had is that the power supply from the ASIC that powers the Orange Pi isn't working... Very weird, because it gives out 4.98 ~ 5.00V, and the power supply from my other Giant gives out ~5.1V. I'm definitely sure it's the power supply that comes with the Giant.

I think I'll just power the Pi from another power supply, or find another way around it.

Also, I had problems by copying the files to the new SD Card. I had to use an image I downloaded from I think Baikal's site and used Win32 Disk Imager to flash it, then changed the pools, etc and it worked out fine.
 
Here's an update on my Giant's power supply. Jason said that I'd have to send the Giant back for them to fix the power supply that comes out of the Giant and into the Pi. That's obviously not the best solution, so I ended up powering the Pi with a 5V, 2A charger hooked to a USB cable, to which I cut the other end to get the power (red) and ground (black) wires from the USB, and connecting them to PI's GPIO pins 2 (VCC) and pins 6 (GND), respectively. Hopefully this helps someone.

It's a kind of gruesome solution, but it has worked fine for now, and saved me the shipping back to Korea, the miner down time not mining Dash, and the taxes when it comes back in. Good business if you ask me.
 

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Thanks for the tip. I modded all my Giants too (fans replaced for noise reduction) and removed most of the PIs after connecting all Giants together with some self-build cables (only one PI is needed to control them all). I noticed some strange things as well, like the 12v power coming from the board is not holding 12v when the thing is under full load. I am using an external 12v for the fans now and might also power the PI from that extra power supply in the future.

It is also getting a bit hot here, had ambient temperatures of around 30 degrees and keeping the miners at 40-45 degrees Celsius is not possible anymore, some of them go up to 60 degrees (at peak, even with the stock fans and some extra fans around them), which I hope is still okay as they are mostly around 40-48 degrees normally. If it gets really hot I probably have to use my AC .. but want to save the power it would need running 24/7, running some fans does not need much power.
 
LostInSpace said:
Thanks for the tip. I modded all my Giants too (fans replaced for noise reduction) and removed most of the PIs after connecting all Giants together with some self-build cables (only one PI is needed to control them all). I noticed some strange things as well, like the 12v power coming from the board is not holding 12v when the thing is under full load. I am using an external 12v for the fans now and might also power the PI from that extra power supply in the future.

It is also getting a bit hot here, had ambient temperatures of around 30 degrees and keeping the miners at 40-45 degrees Celsius is not possible anymore, some of them go up to 60 degrees (at peak, even with the stock fans and some extra fans around them), which I hope is still okay as they are mostly around 40-48 degrees normally. If it gets really hot I probably have to use my AC .. but want to save the power it would need running 24/7, running some fans does not need much power.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info as well. I had no idea you could control all Giants from a single Pi. How did you do that? I can imagine just connecting all Giant's USB cables to a USB hub, which goes directly to the sole Pi.

The Giant's specs specify 40º C max ambient temperature, so not sure what the max recommended internal temperature is. I have mine usually at 38 ~40. Except one Giant which is almost hitting 60, which I'm only using 1 of the 2 ASICs because for now, I don't have the couple of PCIe connectors to power it. I just put a fan right next to it to drop its temperature.
 
The cable connecting the 2 sides of the giants can be cascaded many times to each giant. Up to 10 times I guess, I think that was the limit Baikal recommended, so 5 Giants with 2 blades each in a row all controlled by a single PI. I have attached a quick picture. Some of the cables I had were broken, so I build some new ones out of old parts (all 10 pins must go into the 10 pins of the next blade).

Works the same way with the older units (150mh) or new newer cubes (300mh), again about 5 can be safely connected together. Got just 3 cubes for now however, but really saves a lot of work having them all together, when changing some settings, etc.

Temperature wise I can now stay well below 30º C, 40 would be crazy high, even in a server room (or especially in a server room), today I was around 37º C on pretty much all miners (but also doing qubit today, so less watts needed and less heat produced), 60-70º C was the absolute max. I reached in the past days and I started getting hardware errors and needed to reboot (which is super annoying if you don't notice as mining goes to pretty much zero, which would suck if undetected).
 

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Very cool... Didn't suspect you could daisy-chain up to 5 Giants together... And yeah, that's definitely useful and convenient.

One thing I'd like to report, and I'm not sure if you've experienced this, but due to the lack of PCIe cables I have (for the moment) I could only power 1 of the 2 ASICs that one of my Giants has. At first I thought it was alright, until I noticed that the temperature went up to 60ºC... I'm pretty sure it's the setup, because I powered only 1 of the 2 ASICs from another working Giant, and in a few minutes, it the temperature started to increase.

I'm not sure if it's a firmware issue or something, but I find it weird that it will start to heat so much, and even having a fan blow at it very close. In any case, I'd rather be on the safe side and keep the Giant off until I find how to power it on.

@LostInSpace do you happen to have a recommended PSU (power supply unit)? I found these ones on eBay, which Bitmain sells, but that's only good for 2 Giants. Not sure if you've found some other ones that have at least 12 PCIe connector, to power 3 Giants?
 
I have used a 970w psu (cheap one for 80 euros, but not a crappy one, it actually can deliver and is used in multigpu systems just fine, but anywhere close to 800w and it shuts down) and some older psus I had flying around (400-500w). Basically a bit of trial and error until I found a stable configuration.

Most PSUs have all 12v GPU PCIe cables connected together, I can pull up to 800w from that 970w supply on one 12v cable alone. I burned one cable already (but I guess it was made out of cheap chinesium), so it is always better to connect through to as many cables as possible. The actual needed 100w per blade (per PCIe) is not much, a fully on GPU easily needs 400w and works fine with just 1 cable as well. This means I split each PCIe to 3-4 giant blades (or cubes). Cables needed are cheap (2-3 bucks): http://www.ebay.com/itm/CPU-8Pin-to...481312?hash=item1c7a275120:g:Y1cAAOSwA3dYdxr~

Temperature increases rapidly (especially with X11) and after 30 minutes it is usually as hot as it gets, the passive fans are also not great (aluminium way too thin and not dissipating the heat well, a cpu or gpu cooler is much better, I also have thought about water cooling as it would solve all my problems, but too much work right now).

One disadvantage of hocking up all devices together is that when one fails, the others are also not mining anymore, for me it seems blade 0 and 3 do sometimes stop working (even at 29 degrees, I guess there is some faulty hardware, not figured it out yet). So for today I have connected the other blades to a second PI ..
 
That cable may actually be the solution to my problem! I didn't consider splitting the power from one PCIe connector into 2 using that cable you linked. The power supply I use (attached) apparently can provide 1850W. The 12V line uses 154A in total (power equals 1848W), so I can assume that the current is evenly distributed amont the 10 PCIe connectors (12V @ 15.4A = 184,8W each connector). It's weird, because to me, the numbers don't add up, as each giant consumes 225W per specs (and measured with a watt meter I have). I'm not sure how it works, and I'm a little unsure of even splitting the power even further, but I guess it's just a matter of giving it a try. If it comes to that, I'll just have to buy another PSU with at least 2 PCIe connectors and be done with it.

I'll definitely think about a better way to cool the miners. Most of them are at 35 ~ 40ºC, which I think is an OK temperature, but the more I cool them, the better.

Speaking of which, how long do you think that the Giants and ASIC miners in general can last running 24/7 without a fatal failure due to overuse and not being able to mine anymore? Without knowing much about them, I'd say about 3 years isn't too much to ask. What do you think?
 
Wow, that is a big power supply, 90+ gold and 1850w, with 154a on the 12v rail. Must have cost a pretty penny. You can easily power 8-9 giants with that thing. Current is usually NOT provided in separated ways (only server rigs with multiple PSUs do this for redundancy), so you can pull all those 1848w on the cable you hold, it will most likely meld, but the psu can push it :D with 400-500w on even a cheap 2$ cable from china everything works fine, so don't worry, you can easily power 2 complete giants with the cable you hold. I power my 2 GPUs (800W+) with a single cable as well, no problem.

With higher needs (4-5 giants) I would try to connect multiple 12v rails together (which is what I did, I pull power from all the 4x PCIe 12v (just from 2 strings) and 4 PATA cables (2 strings) and use that for my around 800w needs). The more and bigger cables you use the less the resistance: Less power loss and even if a cable is broken somewhere or too thin and would meld, the other rails can take it. Safety in numbers.

I would say the giants should last for at least a year, sometime in the far future the power costs will be too high to keep running them, but ROI should have been reached several times by then if all goes well (currently looking very good with mining Qubit for Digibyte, but difficulty has increased 3x already and the coin has "only" gained 80% since yesterday ^^). I also had no more hardware faults since yesterday, hopefully it is all good now, air flow is really good and today was the hottest day of the year here so far.
 
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