Do Titans have reliability issues?

It's been said that the Titan is king of the ASIC Scrypt miners, but I've also seen a lot of discussion of technical difficulties with them. So I'm curious about everyone's experience with them, if you have one.

I know you do, @rootdude! Would you consider yours dependable?

Edit: The only one I've found for sale so far was $4k on eBay or $10k brand new, and if the numbers add up, I can still make a profit with $4k down - more than with three 110MHs A2s. But if dependability is an issue, I'm wondering if the A2s would be better.

I've found that once you get them configured, they're pretty stable as long as you don't touch them. It's a good idea to have a few sdcards imaged, configured, and ready to go, because every time the power blinks you've got about a 25% chance of corrupting the pi's card. Also, as time goes by, the cubes will develop faults, and once a cube loses a few cores, it starts making its controller reboot every 10 minutes or so, which does some unkind things to your hashrate. Add to that the fact that KNC has basically disowned the Titan, and will not give any support other than telling you to reboot it, and they're a pretty awful investment. YMMV, but I'm ruing the day I decided to buy into them. (Yes, I actually rue the day) If it were possible to get replacement cubes or controllers or support, it'd be different, but as things are... stay the hell away from them.

kires wrote:If it were possible to get replacement cubes or controllers or support, it'd be different, but as things are... stay the hell away from them.

Yeah, that seems to be the sentiment I've seen so far. Thanks for your input!

A word of advice in return for you, purchase a UPS (uninterruptable power supply). It'll save you from those power blinks, and it'll only set you back about $50-$75 if you don't Tim-Taylor it.

And NEVER MOVE THEM. Not even an inch. I've had 5 of 8 titans burn out at the power connectors, presumably because they were slightly moved causing the PCI-E pins to be just slightly not touching as well as they could. That coupled with the faulty engineering -- overloading the connector with more amperage than it was designed for -- causes it to blacken, smoke and melt. It's amazing no one has had their house go up in flames.

Yes, they do have reliability issues even from a closed source firmware that runs on their controller board aspect they have reliability problems.
Ive heavily modded & rewritten many parts of the higher level "firmware" which runs on the RPI controller. Ive added tons of features, safety & reliability elements to the firmware.
Details can be found here: http://gentarkincustomtitan.pcriot.com & https://github.com/GenTarkin/Titan

GenTarkin -- if you want to make a deal with ProHashing operators to offer their customer's a discount on your firmware... I am all for it. Perhaps a version of your firmware that is free for Titan users but is bound to the ProHashing pool? If Steve and Chris can seem value in it perhaps they would pay you a flat fee for the firmware and then we would be only mining with your firmware on their pool?

That makes for troubleshooting difficult but I am trying to come up with a creative way to make a win-win-win here.

Perhaps if any other pool is used then your normal 17 minutes a day donation kicks in but if it's prohashing it'll work at 100%? That would allow for troubleshooting. Troubleshooting is needed. The donation thing would need to be clear on the dashboard. (An option to pay for a "full unlock" would probably be good too.)

Or instead, maybe something simple like 50% firmware sale for ProHashing users and the pool has a preset in the settings page?

Steve and Chris, is there any way a custom Titan firmware for Prohashing users would make sense?

I've got eight cubes, five are dead right now but I'd like to revive them and get them going with GenTarkin's firmware, preferably in submerged cooling.

ltc2084 wrote:GenTarkin -- if you want to make a deal with ProHashing operators to offer their customer's a discount on your firmware... I am all for it. Perhaps a version of your firmware that is free for Titan users but is bound to the ProHashing pool? If Steve and Chris can seem value in it perhaps they would pay you a flat fee for the firmware and then we would be only mining with your firmware on their pool?

That makes for troubleshooting difficult but I am trying to come up with a creative way to make a win-win-win here.

Perhaps if any other pool is used then your normal 17 minutes a day donation kicks in but if it's prohashing it'll work at 100%? That would allow for troubleshooting. Troubleshooting is needed. The donation thing would need to be clear on the dashboard. (An option to pay for a "full unlock" would probably be good too.)

Or instead, maybe something simple like 50% firmware sale for ProHashing users and the pool has a preset in the settings page?

Steve and Chris, is there any way a custom Titan firmware for Prohashing users would make sense?

I've got eight cubes, five are dead right now but I'd like to revive them and get them going with GenTarkin's firmware, preferably in submerged cooling.

The donation fee version is no longer available. Its simply pay per physical Titan miner now. I am definitey for working something out =)

My latest and greatest firmware is still around the corner(as my website states). Ive put months of work into coding & testing the upcoming firmware. It will have the ability to save Titan owners anywhere from 50-150w @ the wall per Titan.
Its the "Energy Saver" version. Basically it will autotune each die to find the best voltage at the clocks specified by the user.

It will also have some other fixes & features.
Im not sure how many people on prohashing use my current release firmware already.

Im open to any ideas, just not sure how to go bout them.
I guess, if prohashing had a way to tell the Titans to mine for me somehow on the backend of prohashing for a certain% through the day ... that would work.

Something like a user could select to use my firmware in their account page. If they do, then it will offer download link of the .bin file to install and their account(any miners hooked up to it) will be flagged to mine for me for a certain % through the day. .... As stated above this could all be handled via prohashings backend. Im just not sure what the benefit would be for prohashing themselves.

Prohashing wins: more hashrate when new Titan users switch to Prohashing
GenTarkin wins: gets paid something from Titan users who otherwise might not switch
Titan Owner wins: by getting better firmware (and switching to a good pool / community)

I'm suggesting something that I think has to be very simple though. Like you give us 50% off the firmware cost if we mine at ProHashing and in return Chris and Steve offer a flat fee to you.

I don't know if it can be made beneficial enough for everyone to go for it. Just seems a shame to have you do all that work but have it priced outside the reach.

I mean even though the Titans did cost so much we are lucky to see $5 a day profit from multiple cubes. Taking a third of the month's profit may be throwing good money after bad unless it really does save electricity or does mine better, right?

I think this is a great idea. The only issue I can see with it is how enough profit can be made for us to justify the opportunity cost of writing the code necessary to support firmware downloads. If exclusivity isn't involved, then people could just buy the firmware elsewhere and point it here anyway.

Do you have any idea what proportion of miners use Titans? We can't obtain that information from any logs, although it may be possible to run a query to estimate based on hashrate, if you know the hashrate they should be providing.

It would be hard to pin down a hashrate for Titans, as the surviving ones have such a wide range in terms of the number of functioning dies and cubes. I think I'm one of the relatively lucky Titan owners, in that my two combined have 'only' lost about 150 Mhs worth of dies, from a start of about 700 Mhs when they were new. Other owners ave suffered much higher failure rates than I have, I'm sure.