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Are any of these even worth bothering with at this point? They seem to still be quite expensive on eBay when they pop up.

In a few months, probably not worth it..  But ASIC miners haven't shipped in enough quantity to really impact things yet.  Hopefully soon though because I'm in the queues.  :)

Short answer No. 

FPGA are extremely efficient, but outdated compared with the up coming ASIC Miners that have like 5x the hash rate for half the cost. 

I would say no, because other things are starting to have a significant enough of an impact that they are not worth it at this point. However, your electricity costs are often a big part of this. I would say if you can make your money back + a profit, and aren't able to get an ASIC (better choice at this point), then get the FPGA.

I'm quite interested in the multiple LTC FPGA projects though. Since ASICs don't exist for LTC yet, FPGAs can still make a lot of sense.

An LTC-based FPGA would be tricky and expensive and for equivalent hashing rates, it would be more expensive than a video card.

Will have to wait and see. There are 3 projects ongoing I believe, the main one I'm interested in is jasinlee's. His price goal is to match the $/hashrate of GPUs. I believe he has engineering samples delivered and is the furthest along but isn't providing specs, prices, preorders, etc until testing is finished and they are ready to produce a final product.

Do you have any links to jasinlee's project?  I've worked on FPGA's before and I'm curious about his approach.

https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,2702.0.html

Is most official thread to follow.

Thanks for the info guys.  Some of the old butterfly labs FPGAs seem to go for a lot still.

the ltcfpga sites did not announce anything for months afaic

Yeah a couple on ebay past few days, I think ~$1300 which is way too rich for my blood. :) Some sold months ago for a lot less, but that was before the BTC price surge.

There should be some juicy developments for the fpgas in the next couple weeks.

The fun thing about Field Programmable Gate Arrays is that they're field programmable - if you're at all so inclined, it's always fun to repurpose them for something new, like brute forcing password hashes.

You can better wait for and get half sized avalon.

I suppose.. but not for the prices they're selling for now.

It's a gamble at best. Asics are only going to become more and more commonplace.

I'll be interested to see it.  I've been looking into creating an FPGA-based miner and I'm not coming remotely close to the $/kh/s rates of ATI video cards.  The salsa 20 core routine wants a lot of high-speed memory, and I just don't see how to get that with an FPGA.  If you rely on the gate-array itself, you can get the raw speed you need but you don't have enough concurrent hashes and if you try to do something like use the FPGA DDR routines to go to a DDR, it's orders of magnitude too slow from a memory throughput perspective.  It's the same fundamental issue that I think all of the FPGA investigations run into.  

I will be extremely interested to see your approach because right now, with a ~$300 FPGA, I'm still ~1/3 of the dollar-to-hash rate that I'd need to be to compete with a GPU... although power looks better.

https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,2702.0/topicseen.html (https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php/topic,2702.0/topicseen.html)

Thats the official thread I will post info to when we get updates.

there is ASIC DIY kit in develop now. may be u can you look into that

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179769.180

but wont be so soon, 1st board only come out at around july

Well, the real question is: Will you recover your cost before you can get the ASICs delivered?

Yes, probably, with the current valuation of Bitcoins you will, but who knows what tomorrow brings...

FPGA are re-programable, so might be worth something even if boom is gone.

i dont think FPGA will be reliable after the first big wave of asics was shipped. You should have started using FPGA one year ago, its def too late.

I want a LTC asic!!
 ;D ;D ;D