Further Enchancment for a Silent Modified Jasminer X4 1U ASIC Miner

It appears that evidently we sort of missed one thing necessary within the silent modification of the Jasminer X4 1U miners described right here and that’s to take note of the one different factor that generates warmth contained in the miner. That’s the controller chip on the miner’s management board that usually doesn’t include a cooling heatsink on prime of it. The Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC (XA7Z020) used is just not a standard FPGA like we sort of assumed with out correctly checking the specs of the chip. It’s in actual fact a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 Utility Processor Unit (APU), and as having a processor, even a decrease energy ARM one can get issues scorching when working and underneath load 24/7…

So, what apparently occurred in the course of the night time, with nobody current across the miner is the management board of the Jasminer X4 1U that we had been utilizing for testing simply dying on us for no obvious purpose. The one factor that involves thoughts is the chip overheating for some purpose and dying on us, though the conventional working temperature doesn’t appear to counsel any overheating points. Usually, when the miner is in its unique bundle contained in the 1U field with all of the high-rpm server followers the within ambient temperature might be decrease and thus no extra cooling has been offered for the controller board’s processor, however whenever you open it up and modify it to make use of silent followers issues may develop into totally different. Fortunately we’ve had a spare controller board already ordered simply in case one thing like that occurred, so we changed it instantly and the miner continued to perform like earlier than.

We’ve measure the working temperature of the Zynq APU on the brand new controller board and it’s nowhere close to harmful ranges for such chips, at round 52 levels Celsius (125.6 F) it needs to be just about secure even with out further cooling, proper. Effectively, it is perhaps now, but when what for some purpose this temp rises for some time, most likely that’s what occurred for some purpose with the APU getting larger load for an extended time period leading to overheating (thouhg it is also some completely unreleated purpose as nicely, can’t ensure). Simply to be on the secure facet, it’s a good suggestion so as to add a small reminiscence chip cooler on prime of the Zynq APU with a view to preserve the working temperature decrease always. Particularly for those who plan on utilizing a silent modified miner and the the usual configuration the place the difficulty may very well be much less inclined to seem.

Additionally, a great recommendation is perhaps to order a spare controller board simply in case, particularly if you’re working greater than only a single Jasminer X4 1U ASIC miner. That is to keep away from attainable downtime in case one thing occurs with the controller board in your miner. Do observe that you may join a number of hashing boards with Jasminer X4 ASICs to a single management board (our each had 3 connectors for hash board), although we’ve seen board with extra connectors as nicely. We’ve tried and the management board detects and features with a hashing board related to all the three out there ports. So, as a brief answer you may use a single management board to drive a number of hashboards of a number of miners in case you will have greater than juts one and also you get a lifeless controller board.