Nah, they'll have plenty of supply a month or two after release on each model, possibly even on the release day.

 They don't favor cryptocoin mining because the demand is so very very UNSTEADY.

They prefer steady but growing sales to gamers because they can predict cash flows a LOT easier for future needs/expansion and such.

 AMD in particular got burnt HARD when the last "GPU Cryptocoin Bubble" burst, and their market evaporated in the massive flood of USED cards that killed a huge part of their sales for a good year or longer.

When I ran my farm on a SAT connection (routinely 700 ms more or less) I would see perhaps 1% stales due to the slow connection.

 Anything under 150 ms you're not going to see a noticeable difference - but you WILL see higher packet loss rates on "overseas" connections that WILL cost you shares.

 I suspect the power draw depends on where you set the card.

 I like my Aorus - but they ARE huge, need a lot of spacing.
 VERY good cooling though lets them boost quite high.

 I have no opinion on the Strix having zero experience with them to date.

Last time I checked, Volta was estimated to be a half year or so off - and it is NOT likely to provide a huge jump in performance, since it will still be getting build on the same manufacturing node.
 I expect 10-30% jump on each model over the corresponding 10xx series model, probably at the same wattage.

 Significant, but NOT going to make current cards unprofitable.

 Didn't see the "cost me about $150 from NewEgg last week" in my post?

 I don't see the bubble bursting.

 What I am seeing ALREADY HAPPENING is a slow irregular deflate of the bubble - pretty much already gone on the NVidia side but that side was a lot smaller bubble to start with, and some progress made on the AMD side.

 16.9.x and 16.10.x support most R9 models, specifically including the R9 290 and 390 (but I think those driver versions do NOT support the Tahiti-based cards like the R9 280x or HD 7970).

Bittrex works though I am not fond of their interface.

 I don't have experience with a LOT of other exchanges though - Bittrex, Poloniex, Coinbase, and used BTC-E for a short while in my early days.

When you cards heat up the outside air, humidity level will DROP - it's not going to be an issue.

 Condensation happens when the air is WARMER than the surface it passes over - the exact OPPOSITE of what mining rig does to the air.


 I might worry about a card with an OPERATING temperature a ways into the negative C range, mostly due to the possibility of the fan lubrication getting too cold - but it would take a VERY cold airflow to manage that.
 STARTUP of a rig that gets that cold might be a nightmare though.

 M.2 SATA might make some sense - if there was any space on the board to PUT it.

 M.2 NVMe would eat 4 PCI-E lanes you really prefer to use for GPU slots, and is severe overkill for a mining rig.


 I DO wish they had arranged the board so that the 16-bit slot doesn't BLOCK 3 of the 1x slots if you put a standard dual-width GPU IN the slot though.
 On the other hand, it kinda makes PS management a bit easier to not have 7 GPUs AND the MB/RAM/CPU on one PS and only 6 on each of the others....


 ASUS B250 Mining Expert is the motherboard model.

 https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/B250-MINING-EXPERT/

 Mine cost me about $150 from Newegg last week.

The Antminer S5 is designed to work with the SHA256 algorithm ONLY - it can be used for any coin that uses that algorithm like Bitcoin, Namecoin, Peercoin, and such ONLY.

 Litecoin uses the Scrypt algorithm, it can not be mined by an ASIC that only supports SHA256.


 So "YES" you will need different hardware to mine Litecoin with.

Poloniex has been citing "growth outgrowing their support staff" as an excuse for pathetically horrible support response time for most of the past YEAR now.

 This is ONE of the reasons I stopped using them.

 They also dropped their "chat box" which seemed like the only way to ever get a support ticket paid attention to....

Claymore might be getting confused since the R9 390 used the SAME GPU chip as the R9 290 did (with changes to the BIOS and slightly faster RAM).

If you are using a driver version older than 15.12 though, definitely upgrade to that version - it DID fix some issues.

Unless you have a LOT of flow restriction, pick one or the other - doing both push AND pull doesn't help airflow significantly otherwise and DOES waste power.

Work WITH natural airflow can help noticeably too.

 Unless they were born on Febuary 29, in which case they can live a LOT longer than folks born on other birthdates without having as many birthdays.

 9-)

 Probability very close to zero - Bitman seems to have decided the S5+ form factor was a mistake and is not interested in buillding rack miners since it's current "small" miner is already pushing power supply limits for a lot of it's market, and Bitfury seems to be getting out of miners entirely except for "container" sized stuff.

 I can see a SMALL possibility of Bitmain moving to one of the newer "enhanced" 14/16nm process node upgrades for better efficiency, but even that is iffy when they have so little competition and NONE of it has demonstrated a LOT higher efficiency or performance.


 I strongly suspect the next "much bigger performance" miner models will have to wait for a non-Intel 10nm or 7nm process to reach full production (Intel rarely shares their production lines, and when they do it's with someone BIG like Apple).

 Depends on the rig and the card - most of them I have to turn the TDP down a little to keep them in the 70-75C range when it's cool (like this past week) and under 80 when it's hot (this summer) without going past 85% fan.
 Some I've got down as low as 70% or so, but those are mostly in rigs I've upgraded to "4 card part-riser" and need to keep power consumption down to my target 6 amp max draw for infrastructure limit reasons.

 The Aorus 1080 ti models though are beasts - can run them at full TDP with 70-80% fan even when it's HOT and they stay plenty cool, as long as there is plenty of airspace in front of the fans.


 Profitability has been sliding up a bit this week - seems like something is pulling a fairly large amount of network hashrate out of ZCash this week, more than making up for the minor price drop.
 Not a HUGE jump, but noticeable....



 The ideal AMBIENT temp for operating GPUs is probably around freezing, but I'm not real interested in moving to northern Greenland or Siberia or that recent split-off northern Canadian province to achieve that year-round....

 Indicates you likely are trying to overclock that card too hard, or pushing the power supply too hard - EBWF will try to restart on it's own, at least in the most recent version, but it has limits on the sort of issues it can handle.


 The base Aorus 1080 ti can probably get to 800 sol/sec without undervolting if you turn the TDP up to 300 watts or so (120% in Afterburner) with +100 core +100 mem clocks - I see 780 more or less at 250 watt stock TDP with those clock settings.

 I suspect any of the "3 slot" well-cooled 1080ti models will be in the same ballpark.

I routinely plot any drive with a dedicated partition for BUST mining on my Ryzen gaming machine then move the drive to the machine it will be used in.
 (It's lovely that LINUX handles HPFS partitions for this sort of thing).

 Makes it easier to keep the plots from overlapping, as well as gets them plotted a LOT faster than anything else I have.

 You CAN move plot files from one drive to another, as long as the file is smaller than available space on the drive you are going to move it to.

 If you plot on a SSD then copy the plot file over, it can make for very fast plotting.



 Pursuant to a previous comment - the FIRST time you plot an UNUSED Archive drive, it plots about as fast as a Compute 8TB drive - it doesn't slow down unless you have to REWRITE over existing data on the drive, THEN it gets a lot slower.
 First-time plot on a brand new never before used for anything else Archive 8TB drive I had went at about 140 meg/sec drive write speed - but I later shifted some plots to another drive and had to replot that Archive, at which point it dropped to more like 20 Meg/sec write speed.

 I suspect this would be similar for any other SMR type drive.