Hardware cost has ZERO effect on profitability, the effect there is on "time to achieve 100% ROI of the money invested".

The numbers in that F3 video are NOT consistent with it being an Equihash miner - it was showing over 2 THOUSAND times more hashrate than a GTX 1080 ti.

I was thinking more likely Lyra2RE2 or perhaps Nist5.

My current setup allows about 4 inches center-to-center for each card.
3x spacing is NOT "tons of space", that's what I had on some of my Folding rigs between cards #1 and #2 and it was NOT ENOUGH for good cooling.

Active cooling helps some, but even with a couple Delta fans blowing air through a couple of those rigs they STILL got pretty hot in my "mining room" since the ambient temp wasn't exactly low in the summer.

My "mining shelf/rack" doesn't have sag issues.
Vibration .... not sure yet, but the weight of the GPU helps hold it IN the slot and the slot does latch on one end - the MB end of the risers doesn't see much vibration.

Those clips look like an interesting idea to cure THAT issue, too bad I don't have a 3d printer.....

Close - there are probably stlll some "last gen" units like the Innosilicon A2, KNC Titan, and Alcheminer in use since they're still PROFITABLE if you have 4 cent/kwh or less electric cost - but the L3+/A4/L21/A6 have long since become the bulk of Scrypt mining hashrate and likely account for close to 95% of that hashrate.

I am not planning to buy any because of the uncertainty about "when" on the move to Proof of Stake and that I'm currently very short on spare cash, coupled with the relatively LOW reliability of most Bitmain options.
I am not planning to sell a rig to finance buying one (or more likely 2).

I'm on the fence on "would it be a good idea" - if you had sold the rig a month ago when GPU pricing was still crazy-inflated, it would have made sense even WITH the uncertainty of "will an E3 manage to pay for itself" if the E3 was going to ship in the next week or two, and probably even with the "not ship 'till July" issue.
I'm not going to say it's a BAD idea - but it's a bit higher risk than I'm willing to take right now.

If I did buy an ASIC miner in this month, there are other options that I suspect will be more profitable longer than the E3 would be.


There's also the lingering uncertainty about the rumored "F3", if it exists, and what algorithm it's FOR if it does actually exist.
If it turns out the numbers in that one video that caused all of the rumors are correct, and *if* it was mining on Ethereum, that thing WOULD have a noticeable impact sooner than the E3 would - unless the E3 is a 28nm effort and the F3 is a 14/16 nm effort that has to compete for very limited foundry capacity that would reduce it's available numbers to be built A LOT.

Activity isn't a measure of post COUNT - it is a measure of how many weeks in a row you've made at least one post.
I find the claim of $20+ a day per $1 in electric usage hard to believe, even if you're in one of the 2 counties "next door" to me where electric is available for 3c/KWH or a hair less even for for small miners.
$10 to $1 ratio, sure with a well optimized rig, but I don't see any way RIGHT NOW to get to $20 to $1.

A month ago, $20 to $1 would have been believable.

180 Mhash/sec is at least 6 RX 470/480/570/580 even with BIOS straps and all other optimizations. (widely reported in the 28-30 Mhash range for best optimized cards, sometimes a bit less).
It's also a HAIR less than 6 x GTX 1070 (31-32 Mhash common numbers, rarely under 31).

Power usage is pretty much a tossup with a well-optimized 6 card rig - bit higher than the Nvidia option, right around the same vs the AMD option.

The size IS interesting, and has led to some speculation that it's somehow a GPU rig - but the PRICE makes it unlikely to be GPU based.

Coin price is one of the 2 PRIMARY factors in mining profitability.
Electric cost is the other one.

Right this second, you need appx. 800 Mhash/sec to earn 1.9 ETH per month - that would be 26 Nvidia 1070 models or 28-30 AMD RX 470/480/570/580 models.
Power consumption presuming WELL OPTIMIZED rigs would be around 3000 watts on the Nvidia side and 3500-4000 watts on the AMD side.
The AMD option would be lower up-front cost at current card pricing.

My power bill for 4 KW continuous power draw 24 hours a day 30 days a month would be a bit under $160 ALL fees and taxes included, and I could drop it to about $110 if I lived one county over.


In my case, the actual numbers are a bit lower for ETH income, a bit higher on power use per rig (the R290 rig eats a LOT more power than a 1070 or Polaris rig would but since the cards are long paid for and ARE still profitable), but the majority of my income right now is from ZEC not ETH.
I DID just drop my electric bill by almost a third, when I shut down my A2 Scrypt farm 'cause it wasn't even breaking even any more *BEFORE* factoring in cooling costs (though evap cooling is CHEAP, and a lot of my cooling is forced-airflow).

My "imaginary earnings" have been paying my rent, electric bill, Internet bill, buying food, putting gas in the van, and other such stuff for 2 years now with ZERO other income past the first few months of that timeframe.
The cash in my wallet and the money in my credit union checking account sure don't SEEM imaginary.

Bitmain didn't announce the E3 last year, they announced 2 GPU-based rigs (G1 and G2 as I recall) last year.

The alleged F3 is still a "one video as the only source of information" rumor.
That video is VERY uninformative about any hard facts, VERY short, and it's entirely likely it wasn't about an ethash miner anyway even if the miner pictured DOES actually exist.

Videos are EASY to manipulate - we've seen "fake" ones too often in this industry before after all.

Why are people even talking about the Bitmain AI chip and this thing?

That chip is optimized for FLOATING POINT operations, like any AI chip - it is NOT going to process INTEGER operations very well like mining requires, NOR is it going to be efficient at doing so.

The BM 1680 is NOT A MINING CHIP and is not going to offer decent performance per $ or watt since the bulk of the chip would go to waste AND WASTE SOME POWER if someone tried to mine on it.

Mining IS profitable - it's just not at the crazy-high "anyone can make money hand over fist" levels it hit for most of the past year.

At this point there have been ZERO announcements of ASIC that are more efficient than GPUs, and only one RUMOR that so far is not confirmed if "the miner" even exists or what algorithm it is for or what it's power consumption is.
As I've already pointed out (as have a few others), the E3 is NOT more efficient than CURRENT GPUs - and the "next generation" Nvidia cards should be noticeably more efficient YET, later this year.

ETH switch to Proof of Stake is a "when" not a "if" question - but it looks like the earliest move to "full POS" won't happen 'till late this year at the soonest, and the non-ETH coins that also use the ethash algorithm don't appear to be planning "anti-ASIC" forks anytime soon.

*HOWEVER*, there is going to be a major shakeout on miners with ETH stops being mineable - 9 million (ballpark estimate) GPUs is 3-4 times more than all other GPU mineable coins COMBINED are using, which is going to swamp profitability to the point that you have to have super-cheap electric to survive, and WILL drive a lot of miners out of mining.
It's going to be worse than 2014 in some ways, as there are a TON more GPUs involved at this point - but on the other side, it won't be as bad in some ways due to the much larger choice of other coins to mine that also have a large existing GPU count.

GPU mining never died - you just had to be in a LOW COST area for it to be profitable between mid-2014 and spring of 2017.
I was making enough money at it to turn pro *2 YEARS AGO* - which put me in quite a good situation when the price explosion happened and all of a sudden my mining net income jumped by a factor of "lots" due to the massive profitability jump.

On the other hand, profitability RIGHT NOW is somewhat lower than it was 2 years ago - but I invested enough of my profits back into my farm that I'm still able to live off it with some leeway - it is just taking noticeably more GPUs to manage that.

I could almost make money running a S7 right now - and if I was one county over those old units WOULD be profitable.
It is NOT "all about price", part of the equation is also about your COST - mostly the cost of electric.

BTC miners are NOT losing money, those that are in areas with too high electric cost have probably shut down their miners while those that are in super-low electric cost areas are still making money.

So far, all of the announcements out of Samsung fit into "we're providing foundry space to ASIC miner makers" like eBang, JUST LIKE TSMC and GF have been doing for years now.

Samsung has NOT announced any intention of competing with them.

I meant March - and the hash rate increase goes back a LOT further than that 3 months, and there were CONSTANT small peaks and dips in there due to luck.
I also DID say "slowly" dropping - but it's still a DROP.

I have yet to see a multi-card board that had "good for cooling" space between the cards, or I'd find them more interesting.

There is no way they could do so that an ASIC designer couldn't match the applicable data submitted through careful design work.