Bitcoin Forum

Hi
I'm a very new miner still in the research phase and i've been having a look at what hardware to use. After tons of time I found that teh Antminer U3 is perfect for what I want to do. On the Bitmain website they edvertise that the batch 2 versions are for 20$ but they aren't available and seam to cost more than 50$ on all other places. Could you explain why or tell me of equivalent products??
Richard   

I agree with you the U3 is definitely a fun device. It's not much use in case you want to make money but it's definitely fun to play around with. So you still burn money, of course, but it's not as bad as with an S7. But the U3 has some issues as you can read in the thread about this device. Link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827356.0

In case you don't want to read through all the pages, here is the short list:
-In case of overclocking it's almost guaranteed that the device will get destroyed
-Running the device within the official specs is no guarantee that it won't get destroyed
-The Power Bricks have a tendency to burn through
-The USB-Implementation is rather flaky: So lots of connection problems are to be expected especially if you run Windows

Despite all of this, I also got two U3s and they make nice lottery-devices even though the chances for hitting a block are almost nil and it gets worse with every day. Best share so far was only 153M, so still miles away from solving a block.

You can still buy the U3 from several places. I got mine from www.usbminer.ch and paid them with BTC but you might buy them over ebay or have a look at the marketplace here. In case you buy a used one, make sure it's actually hashing before you pay.

Hope that helps.

Thank you very much the website you directed me to was very useful
Richard

20 dollars was if you bought a pack of 10 at least.  Some resellers bought them so it is always been higher then that by a bit.  The U3's lately have been going in 40-50 area which is surprising.  Also shipping on those since come in a nice box with padding is another 10 or so.   

I'm not sure I would recommend them if you don't have automation on fixing zombies.  You really have to watch them more then most miners I've had.   You could get a compac from sidehack and not watch it all day for zombies.  But it cost's more per T, but it's more efficient by far.

Your kinda in a hard market it's the lotto and learning.  No matter what you will not ROI unless you happen to sell at end and get lucky on price.

Before you go with U3 (if ever you haven't ordered one from www.usbminer.ch) I would say stop and invest in GekkoScience Compac BM1384 Stickminer instead, It's a bit expensive as per ratio to it's GHs but it wouldn't give you a head ache like U3 does. I always had to check couple of times in a day to see if everything was functioning normally with U3 but didn't have this problem with compact.

And automation can be done CrazyGuy wrote a amazing custom R1 firmware.  I ran 3 U3's for month's using it with a R1, no babysitting them at all.

But when I ran them on windows without something to detect and fix zombies life was a pain