Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

Anybody out there think of working with a designer and manufacturer to make mining rigs that market as set-top boxes (with all the standard features).

Think of the what an amazing UI and experience can be achieved with all that power. 

I would imagine with a better form factor and some hype it would be more appealing to the average tech geek.

Thoughts?

Why?  Is there a market for set top boxes which are incredibly noisy, hot, and failure prone?

Generally speaking combining two random pieces of equipment doesn't make it better.  Like "has anyone thought of designing a cordless drill which also toasts bread?  You know that way you can have hot toast on the job site" :)

How the hell would you convince people to buy them when stand alone set top boxes are so ridiculously cheap (and not noisy)?  In what way would they perform the STU function better to justify the price?

You can look at BFL The Single. It's a cute box that have the STB form factor.
www.butterflylabs.com/product-details/

really. why bother.

drop a card in an existing HTPC setup. properly setup, cgminer keeps it quiet.

mine is a 6770 in an antec veris fusion black case. not exactly set top box size, but still on the small side. and there are smaller HTPC cases.

HTPCs are (usually) always on anyway, so the only added power draw is the card itself.

First tips is to not have more than one GPU on windows since you'll be sucking a full CPU core.

not with the newest ati/amd drivers, that problem is fixed

Isn't there a big drop in performance from these drivers ?

small drop for me, so i guess it just depends on what you prefer. I also game with my cards and it fixed a couple issues I was having so that's another plus for me

Except it doesn't exist...

I dunno, but there has to be a better way to cool these pc's. I know I don't keep my beer cold by placing a fan on it. And water cooling a pc is not cost effective and still dumps all the heat in the room. Some kind of pc case that's build into a window AC would be nice. That or they could start putting some descent heatsinks on these cards. 25 degrees outside and I still have the AC in the house. Summer is going to be fun.

Water cooling dumps the heater wherever the radiator is.  If the radiator is outside ....

AC units are horribly inefficient.  They are necessary because air is such a poor conductor for heat.  Given we don't want to heat air simply heating water (much better thermal conductivity) and dumping it outside is always going to be more efficient.

But they do. Seen the tri-slot ASUS cards? The problem is, whether you're doing air- or water-cooling, you do have to dump the huge amounts of heat somewhere. If you're running AC in your house, it will have to deal with the additional thermal load raising your energy bills.
You'd best plan for the summer now. I'm dumping the heat outside using air ducts. Doesn't look pretty but is extremely cost-effective.

Using GPUs ,there can be no talking about bitcoin rig set-top boxes. However hard you try you can't beat thermodynamics.

At present there is no such thing as a BFL FPGA rig, no one has ever seen one in the wild. Perhaps in, uhmmm... 4 to 6 weeks? :>

Butterflylabs is a scam. I mean, really? Anyone dumb enough to give these guys money deserves what they get.

Look like you are ~1000 posts late...

PS : It is not a scam (yet)

It was a scam the day they posted those fake pictures that have nothing to do with bitcoin mining. Think I have a old espresso machine in the garage, I can put a fancy heatsink on it. Label it a 20 watt, 24g/hash mining super computer and you can buy it from me.

Just because it doesn't look like a video card doesn't mean it couldn't do the same thing, relative to bitcoin mining.

He's got a point...they sold people a product that didn't exist, and may never exist.

"Mining rig" as "set-top box":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron)

^Agreed.

Are mining cards any good for transcoding video? I haven't had much luck finding software to do this.