Given that the current dump is based on widespread rumours of China banning bitcoin exchanges in their countries, and on a STATEMENT by a "voluntary group" associated with those regulators that "bitcoin exchanges have no legal basis for existance", I suspect the current "dip" is going to get a LOT WORSE before it starts recovering.

Bitfury USED to make miners and sell them - but the only miners they make themselves on their CURRENT chips are the big "container" things.

 Their older rack-mount miners are too far behind the curve to be profitable any more, unless you can get one CHEAP and have FREE electric.

 I was confused, forgot I'd been working on the system that was on flypool. Ignore the doom and gloom.

 9-0

If I push towards max hash (my norm) I'm seeing 760sol/s right now out of my Aorus 1080 ti - +5% power, +50 cpu, +200 memory - and I'm CERTAIN that's not the most it's capable of, I've been having "crashing driver" issues with the newest Nvidia 3xx.41 junk and am in the process of rolling back to something more reliable.
 At my power cost, there's no point in "efficient" on ZEC mining at this time, I NET more by not being efficient and I'm nowhere near power limits on the new place.

 They're just being price competative, since they don't OWN the market any more they don't have a choice.

 I wouldn't say they've been around a VERY long time, but they do have a good reputation for their miners being as claimed (and a very POOR reputation for being a PITA to order stuff from).

Pricing has dropped SOME from where it got to at it's peak - but still quite a bit on the high side for any RX 470/480/570/580 card and availability is STILL very sparse and spotty.

 On the Nvidia side, even the GTX 1070 is finally getting back down to CLOSE to pre-surge pricing though availability is still somewhat spotty.

 STILL not seeing anything resembling a "flood" of cards on my local Craigslist - been *2* current-production cards advertised at all as stand-alone and 3-4 systems with "current" cards in the last month.

 Since I live in the Cryptocoin Capitol of the USA, that seems like a pretty strong indicator....

No clue then, mine is running with 3 cards in the MB just fine once I got the system put together last night.

 I'm starting to incline towards the "defective board" crowd.


 And for the record, Intel boards tend to be noticeably MORE expensive for comparable capabilities vs AMD, and the CPUs are a LOT more expensive - the power usage differences are MINIMAL where they exist at all.

 Try finding ANY 6-core CPU in the current-in-production Intel lineup for less than ... what, $400 something? As opposed to the FX8320e or the FX8350 or even the FX 8370 all at well under $150 with *8* cores.

 I grant that the FX series is lower performance per core, but they're about the SAME hashrate on Monero (for one applicable example) that the Ryzen manages.

 Different algorithms, OF COURSE you don't see the same hashrate.

 Use 16.9.2, it matches the performance of 15.12 very closely even on old GCN cards while supporting up to the RX 4xx series.

 The new "blockchain" driver is a disaster and a waste of time in my limited testing of it.
 It worked on my RX 470 cards but NOT well, and didn't even INSTALL on anything older.


 After doing some machine building this week, I was reminded that 16.10.1 was NOT the WHQL version I was thinking of, does not appear to support APUs at all - though it DID work OK on older discrete GPUs when I was testing driver versions.

 As of the last time I walked into an Office Depot (last year), yes.

 I'm not sure how much longer that will last, but might be longer than many folks think - 100 MBPS is plenty for most business usage, a LOT of companies are wired for Cat 5 (which does NOT support Gigabit for anything other than very SHORT runs), and they just don't have incentive to "upgrade" when their wiring would take tons of money to upgrade.

 The savings are in places that have installed base to deal with - most small miners have little IF ANY incentive to worry about "installed base of gear and wiring".

 The connector ITSELF is rated for 288 watts - but the WIRING to it out of most power supplies is commonly NOT rated more than perhaps 150-200.

 Splitting a 6-pin to a pair of 8-pins is A VERY VERY BAD IDEA.

 The connectors on the EVGA G2 1300 POWER SUPPLY aren't wired the same as PCI-E connections - I'm pretty sure they are using 4 pins each for +12v and ground, so those should be able to handle 350 watts or so - given that the PCI-E spec for an 8-pin connector limits it to 150 watts, you should be able to safely run an EVGA-type dual-cable from EACH of those connections on the power supply as long as you don't exceed it's total power capacity.


 The PCI-E spec is VERY VERY conservative on avoiding overload on the power connectors.
 Don't confuse THAT spec with what the connector ITSELF is actually rated at.

 Irritating timing, I had just bought one of those about a week before that - JUST out of their price-match timeframe.

 On the other hand, Bitcoin dropped over 10% in that same timeframe, so it worked out OK.


 flypool seems to have been suffering from a DDOS attack today, not sure if it's over yet or not - but those seem to happen semi-randomly to ALL the pools at times.

 10 MEGAbit is plenty to handle tons of rigs - latency isn't a significant issue at ETHERNET SWITCHING speeds, your latency via the Internet to the pool is going to be thousands of times higher, and the bandwidth usage is SMALL.

 Avoid wifi - it's NOT nearly as reliable as a good Ethernet wired connection.



 With that said, Gigabit is cheap enough any more there's no point in going with less and it's got a lot more room for future expansion - unless you get the 100 Megabit gear DIRT cheap and it's good stuff like 3Com, Cisco, or Netgear "Blue Box" professional gear.

More than one ground path = ground LOOP which CAUSES issues.

 BAD IDEA.

 It's not an issue in cases because the points where the hold-down screws go into the motherboard are ISOLATED electrically from anything else.


 As others have already said, the MB is grounded through the ground leads to the power supply.

Windows drivers are the ones with limits on how many GPUs you can use per brand (usually 8 sometimes less), not LINUX.

 Windows is more user friendly (except for most users, and has better tools for fan control/power management/overclocking - there is no LINUX equal to Afterburner.

 LINUX is more stable and far LESS crash prone.


 My "big rig" ETH miner (3 x R9 290, upgraded from an "Avatar" Litecoin mining rig) went MONTHS at a time without downtime, I'm pretty sure the only downtime it EVER had was when I physically had to move it or when I had a power outage.
 Several of my other LINUX-based mining and crunching rigs have managed even LONGER uptimes, back when I was still in Iowa and was in the same place for the last 8 years or so there - often measured in YEARS between power outages.

 I've NEVER seen a Windows mining (or crunching) rig go much more than a month without some sort of a crash.


 For reference - when I say "crunching" I'm usually talking about the Distributed.net cryptography project, which puts pretty much identical stresses on a rig for the SAME reason that cryptocoin mining does (less I/O usage though).

Strange that the design of the 2 is so different.

 Pricing, like the Pandaminer, isn't all that impressive.

Baikal has traditionally had good products but a really painful ordering process.

I suspect their X10 miner is going to be "too little, too late to the game" unless they can push it out the door with VERY quick turnaround - late October will be too late....

ASIC-based miners took over Bitcoin (and all other SHA256 based coins) several years back.
They are SO MUCH MORE EFFICIENT than GPUs that a GPU would be LUCKY to ever earn dust, and WOULD die before it could earn back it's own cost even on free electric.

 Current top-end GPUs might get to a hashrate in the 2 Gigahash/sec ballpark - LOW END current ASIC models manage 3000 TIMES that on ballpark 5-6 times the power use.

 It's like trying to compete in Formula One or NASCAR racing with a foot-pedal type kiddie go-kart.

The spacings are probably WAY tight to use ANY standard 1060 - that setup is specifically designed for passive cooling of the cards.

S7 stock is rated for a hair under 1300 watts - but I agree that running one on a 1300 watt supply if you don't DOWNclock it quite a bit is a bad idea.

 I suspect most of them on EVGA supplies were running the 1600 G2 or 1600 P2, or were the S7-LN model that only used around 700-800 range.

 Does your chicken farm use these type coops?

http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/design-build/yahoos-compute-coop-is-not-for-chickens/93474.fullarticle