They WERE talking about a possibility of pushing it up to 4Q 2017 at one point (to compete with Vega if needed) - now they know they don't need to refresh to be able to BEAT Vega, they appear to be sticking with the original plan (which gives them time to do more optimizations for a bigger jump).

The S9 however only met it's "original advertised specs" people made purchase decisions on in the first couple batches - and was VERY UNRELIABLE when pushed hard enough to meet those specs.

 The S9 CONTINUES to be a very iffy unit on reliability - I'd consider that a MUCH BIGGER ISSUE since Bitmain has never fixed it and doesn't appear interested in doing so.

The A4 for Innosilicon was a very rare case of them advertising a product before they had the silicon on hand - they did NOT have that issue with the A2 or A1 as they never did preorders on those AT ALL, and they appear to have dropped the A3 because it was not going to be ABLE to compete and never advertised specs on it at all.


 Complaining about inability to achieve ROI in 6 months is stupid in the current market - we're NOT looking at "new generations" every 8-12 months any more, more like 2-3 YEARS for the S9 and probably 5+ years for whatever shows up on the next generation of miners after the S9/L3+/A4+/A5/D22G/et cetera.
 I'm starting to wonder of mining chip designers are EVER going to have enough foundry capacity available to flood the LARGE network hashrate cryptocoins like Bitcoin or Litecoin (All of X11 combined in "unit of miner" basis is TINY compared to the other 2) in a timeframe of less than years.

 There are a few folks using BitFury chips to make miners being sold to the public - the Hotmine X5/X6 comes immediately to mind.

 I do with Sidehack would get to his BitFury project - at the rate he's going, the chips he has access to might be OUTDATED because he keeps puttering around with old OUTDATED stuff first.

 In my case, the CPU is working a BOINC project that DOES use as much of the entire CPU as it can, as is the iGPU on the CPU.
 I'm pretty sure that counts as "working on the computer at the same time".

 9-)

PDU route is easier, safer, usually less expensive, and cleaner if you aren't a trained electrician and would have to hire one to do your wiring work.

 For me, the "wire a subpanel" route is enough less cost that it's my go-to option, but I *AM* a one-time Journeyman and one-time certified Electrician (and keep up on changes to the NEC for this sort of stuff - not that there have been many).

 Doesn't really matter much, when one shifts a bit higher on profitability enough miners move to it to bring it back down again - very quickly and in some cases automatically.

 BURST pool payouts are often based on how much you earn - and can sometimes take a week.

 It DOES depend on the pool though - they don't all have the same identical payout rules.

 The current NVidia roadmap as I recall is saying "1H 2018" for their 10xx refresh (might be 20xx but I'd bet more likely 11xx series nomenclature).

My last power bill was just over $500 at the bottom line for a hair under 11KW used.

 The large majority is mining, but it's a mix of A2 Scrypt ASIC, ballpark 30 cards worth of NVidia rigs currently mining ZEC, and a bunch of misc. AMD rigs mostly working RC5-72 Dnet via the Moo Wrapper project on BOINC and earning some Gridcoin to pay the electric for those rigs (and not much more if at all, but I'm consistantly the #1 producer in all of Dnet on RC5 work AND by far the #1 Moo Wrapper producer, as well as being easily Top 20 in Gridcoin research production).

 I expect the next electric bill to be somewhat higher, as I've added more hardware this past month.

 I also have a bunch of optimization work to do on the rigs for ZEC mining, they WERE doing Folding@Home 'till a combination of the recent ABUSE by Vorshalk (a CureCoin DEVELOPER) that has been killing profitability of both CureCoin AND FoldingCoin coupled with my ongoing long-term issues with Stanford's frequently broken infrastructure ticked me off to the point I refuse to deal with those projects any more.


 Given your high electric rate, have you considered moving somewhere with LOW cost electric?
 My next planned move (probably sometime next year, possibly 2 years off) should net me a significant drop in electric cost (I'm in "only" the 3'd lowest cost residential/small business electric rate are of the country, the top 2 are "right next door" in adjacent counties).

Install Nicehash Legacy.
Run benchmarks.
Check benchmarked hashrates in mining calculator (WhatToMine is probably the best "comparison" one) to see what's most profitable - or just go "lazy" and use Nicehash itself, it'll usually be close to that.

One of my GTX 950 is currently pulling about 50 cents/day, my pair of GTX 960 about $1.35 between them, on one machine I'm just being lazy and running Nicehash on.

 (CPU and iGPU side of the A10 in that machine are doing other stuff at this time).

If the A5 meets it's efficiency specs AND matches up to traditional Innosilicon RELIABILITY, it might be the ONLY X11 miner that will be profitable 6 months from now unless you have VERY VERY cheap electric.

 WAY too much hashrate (especially out of Bitmain D3 units) going to be hitting the network by the end of November to leave much room for profitability of less efficient miners.
 I'm also not impressed with what I've been seeing so far about D3 reliability - seems to have the SAME issues as the S9 on that score so far.

 The A4 met it's FINAL advertised hashrate - it was the early "before the units actually exist" estimates it didn't meet.


 On the other hand, Innosilicon really needs to get to work on it's ordering process AND it's customer service - they do a better job than most on supporting their gear, but it's a PAIN dealing with them at all.
 I had issues with an A4 preorder from a month or two back - they JUST YESTERDAY finally emailed me with an offer of a fix for the issues, long since I'd SPENT the money on other gear....

 Stock TDP on a GTX 1080 ti starts at 250 watts and some aftermarket cards MIGHT BE HIGHER.

 I wouldn't even THINK about trying to run a pair of them on a 500 watt supply, and 2 of them + rest of system on a single 750 is going to be a bit marginal for reliability.

 Existing power supplies would be enough for most GTX 1080 models (the MSI Armor has a 240 watt TDP but in my experience with one it rarely got over 200 even WITH overclocking).


 G4400 box cooler is PLENTY to keep it cool - my G4600 with the box cooler in a NON A/C ENVIRONMENT runs a lot cooler than the GPUs in the system.

 M.2 NVMe uses PCI-E lanes and on some motherboards may shut down one or more slots (probably NOT an issue with the motherboard OP posted though).
 M.2 SATA shouldn't have that issue, but tends to be more expensive than a conventional hard drive.
 IMO if you're going to go that route use a USB flash drive, plenty fast enough and much lower cost.

 Windows 10 IMO is a bad choice for a dedicated miner - if you have to use Windows for mining go Win7, but better yet go with one of the LINUX-based mining distributions.

 Are they the plastic-case consumer grade junk, or are they the metal-case PRO grade gear that tends to work VERY reliably and last a VERY long time?

 It's a night and day difference between the 2 lines - almost like Netgear farms out the plastic-case junk to DLink or Linksys.....

 FS108, GS108, GS105 are all very reliable switch lines - some of my "original style" FS108 are pushing 20 YEARS of usage despite rarely having the luxury of living in an air-conditioned environment.


 I too would tend to suspect issues with whatever router you are using before I'd consider a pro-line Netgear switch to be bad.

 Could also be the cable(s).

My Gigabyte Aorus is a monster - very good cooling AND very high clocks (commonly boosts to over 2000 depending on what I'm doing with it).
Down side is the 3 slot width size.

 The Zotac AMP looks good, but I don't own one.
 Same 3 slot issue as the Aorus though.


 The 1080ti Founder's Edition has been widely reported to not have very good cooling - apparently that "vapor chamber" design isn't as efficient as good heat pipe setups.

Most or all of the MAJOR Chinese cryptocoin mines are in areas with a lot of hydropower - in at least some cases areas that have more hydropower THAN THEY CAN USE due to lack of transmission lines to areas that COULD use the power.

 This has NOTHING to do with coal usage or steel making.

 Odd, I've NEVER seen any of those cards in those price ranges.

 1080ti pricing has been back to the pre-price-jump pricing for a month or more already (though availability is still a LITTLE spotty at times), 1070 and 1080 are still at a SMALL premium but at least part of that is probably the recent NVidia "price hike due to ram pricing".

 The bubble can be said to have finally died when we see AMD 470/570 cards start showing up well under $200 (my pair of Sapphire ref-type blower cards cost me around $160 each from NewEgg) and 480/580 cards start showing up close to or under $200 WITH MOST MODELS BEING IN STOCK REGULARLY.

He's likely talking about comments made by crowtec (sp?) shortly before they dropped out of BURST.

Depending on the type, a NVMe interface SSD will use up to 4 PCI-E lanes - and those lanes are commonly "shared" with one or more PCI-E card slots.

 AM4 motherboards in particular like to send 16 of the Ryzen's 20 PCI-E 3.0 lanes hardwired to the first graphics slot, and the other 4 tend to feed everything else (most commonly the M.2 "Ultra" slot then the chipset PCI-E 2.0 lanes get spread around a lot for everything else).

I don't like the relatively low reliability of the S9, and nothing BitFury based showed up for a long time, so I've BEEN waiting.

 If the S9 was RELIABLE, I'd probably have been accumulating them for a while now.

 ASUS 1070 turbo has marginal cooling to start with - and gets VERY unhappy if the blower opening is blocked at all.
 It gets a LITTLE better if you remove the metal mounting bracket, but is still pretty hot running.

 Their 1080ti might work better, as it doesn't have a DVI connector blocking HALF the output airflow area and seems to be better about low-restriction on the metal mounting bracket as well.

 Seems like that one specific ASUS 1080ti model is the ONLY GTX 10xx series card (except for the various "mining 1060 models and perhaps some of the low-end 1050ti and below stuff) that skips the DVI connector for better cooling.