In Washington State at the power rates cited?
 The 2 county PUDs that get into that rate range for home electric KNOW about "bitcoin mining" very well indeed.


 As far as USPS being involved - probability zero.
 That's just excess paranoia worrying about it.

Unless your electric is SUPER cheap, they're not going to be profitable to run - and that's going to get worse fairly soon when Innosilicon starts shipping their A4 miners.

Most likely the miner is on DHCP - the best solution is to set up your own DHCP server on your computer, don't even connect to the Internet at all, connect the SP-20 to your computer via your router, make sure YOUR ROUTER doesn't have a DHCP service running on it, and look at the logs of YOUR DHCP server to see what address the SP20 is connecting at, then go into it to reset it to a static address on your normal subnet where you can FIND it to point a web browser at it.

 Alternatively, if you can access the logs on your router and it is running a DHCP server, you can skip the "set up your own DHCP server on your computer" part and just use the one on the router.

 10 cents / kwh is VERY marginal for being able to even break even on mining, long term.
 IMO consider seriously having whatever mining gear you get hosted, or consider moving to an area with a much lower electric cost, before you start mining.

 This is also a very good time to "wait and see" as there have been quite a few announcements of upcomming gear that isn't actually being delivered yet - do some research, and consider that you don't have to mine Bitcoin, you CAN mine "altcoins" and often the altcoins are MORE profitable for months to a year at a time for the same amount of $ investment in mining gear.

It's not hard to be profitable in cryptocoin mining.
Just move to where power is cheap, and don't get taken in by miner scams.

 9-)

 Problem with the R4 is that it's almost IDENTICAL price with the 11.85 GH S9  version, offers less than 3/4th the hash for the same money AT THE SAME EFFICIENCY.

 The ONLY pluses to it are (1) quieter (2) smaller power draw makes it a LITTLE more flexable on where you can put one.

 IMO it's NOT worth the major $/h premium you pay for the thing for the minor advantages it offers.


 It's too bad nobody makes an efficient SHA256 miner on the order of the Baikal one for X11/X13/etc - THOSE would sell like hotcakes to HOME miners, small VERY low power draw and EASY to make quiet with such a low power draw per miner.....

 EVGA 1300 G2 has enough 6-pin leads to handle a 6-card rig.
 In my limited experience with 2 of them, it's a good PS and kinda overkill for a 6-card RX4xx rig.

The other issue with Monero is that it's not a good coin to mine with GPUs in the first place - seems to be much more efficient to mine with good CPUs.

 Termostats on the fans I used to draw air into and out of my place.
 It's NOT really complicated, even if you have too much heat out of them.


 If you don't have enough miner heat to keep your place warm by themselves, your regular heating system handles keeping the temperatures in the right range.



 wmabern - try putting a fan blowing air INTO your register in the room with the miner(s) in it.
 The ducting thing might cause enough of a fight between your central HVAC fan and the fans of the miners to cause the miners to not be able to cool enough due to their fans not being able to push enough air against the force of the HVAC fan when it's on.
 *IF* your HVAC system has return air ductwork instead of relying on drawing through hallways and such, duct the output of the miners into the return air intake duct for their room - then the HVAC fan will be working WITH the miner fans to draw air through them.

 NVidia targeted higher-end cards at the start, which sell in smaller quantites - and I AM still seeing some shortage issues despite that and despite NVidia having had the 1080 and the 1070 on the market a fair bit longer than the RX 480 has been available.
 Try finding that Gigabyte "ITX" 1070 card in stock anywhere for example - it's been VERY VERY spotty so far (and I have a specific use for 2 or 3 of them over the next week or 2).

 AMD isn't so much "behind" NVidia, as they started out targeting the "mainstream" market - and have probably sold quite a few more RX 480 units than NVidia has sold on all GTX 1xxx + Titan X Pascal units COMBINED, though the total on DOLLAR sales is going to be a lot closer.

 The real tale will be next year, when AMD finally releases cards INTENDED to go head-to-head against the current NVidia offerings.

 You go into whatever software you're using to overclock the cards with, and set up the fan profile in there.

It looks like your card 2 is having cooling issues causing it to thermally limit the clockrate and probably eventually crashing - and ALL of your cards are running a lot hotter than they SHOULD be.

 Do NOT let the cards set their own fan speed, default fan speed curves from the manufacturers are NOT designed with 100% usage in mind like mining puts on a card and let them get WAY too hot.
 KICK THOSE FANSPEEDS UP A LOT.


 I usually use a curve that goes something in the ballpark:

 setpoint 40c    40%
 setpoint 50c    60%
 setpoint 60c    80%
 setpoint 70c   100%


 Works well on every card I've used it on where I CAN set up a fan curve (my AMD R9 290s and R9 280Xs are running under LINUX and amiconfig utility only allows for one fan speed setting)

 For perspective - on Ethereum mining my GTX 1070s (same gen as your RX 480s) pull pretty much the same power and hashrate, but run at about 60c with the fan curve I posted.

I've had generally quite good experiences with NewEgg - the only real ISSUES I've ever had from them were more about FedEx and UPS being very very POOR on serving homes, and NewEgg's shipping service doesn't let you PICK your shipper.

 I'm in the US though, no clue how well they would work as a source for parts to Europe, or what kind of customs / VAT issues you might have ordering parts from them if you're in Europe.

The issues with the S9 are more the "glue on heatsink" + much higher thermal density than any previous miner Bitmain ever came up with - except the S7 which had similar issues.

 The S5 was "small chips" and proved to be quite reliable as a general rule, while the KnC Titan was "large chips" that had a major issue with parts of the chip dying A LOT.

 Gigabyte Windforce GTX 1070 8MB - 55 Mh for *2* cards at 146/151 watts (151 is the card that is running the monitor), small memory-only overclock stock bios and no serious effort made at tuning yet.
 Win 7, 372.70 drivers
 Temps around 60c at about 80% fanspeed in a room that's usually around 82f.

 (no, it's not PRICE competative with the RX 480/470, but I've got longer range plans for that machine that dictated a NVidia solution but cost less than a single Titan X Pascal for same-to-slightly better performance).


 I wasn't comparing CHEAPEST 480 to CHEAPEST 470 - but I have seen some of the cheapest 480s on NewEgg dip a hair below some of the more expensive 470s - thus my comment about the price RANGE overlapping.
 And yes, this CAN happen on the same brand when you include comparing both 8GB and 4GB models, though it's not common.

There is some variance on yields between the manufacturers - and I suspect some between different fabs at the SAME manfacturer - but they've all been reporting major gains on yield this year, it's not that much of an issue any more.

 The REAL limit is flat out total capasity limitations.


 From what I've been seeing around the web, it doesn't look likely that there will be any more major "new cards" announced for the rest of the year - and even if any WERE announced there would be major "availability" issues for a while.

 Keep in mind we're still seeing major issues with availability on all of the CURRENT new-gen cards.

 I saw 30 briefly with a 800mhs memory overclock, but it wasn't stable long-term.

 27 MH/s with a 300 Mhs memory overclock on my pair of Gigabyte Windforce cards right now, no other OC attempted and due to IRL issues haven't had the TIME to try to fine tune them more yet.

 372.70 has been released for Win7 (and presumably Win 10 as well).

Avalon actually beat Bitmain on price/hash?

 That WOULD be a shock.

 Close, though, might happen - and given Avalon's track record on reliability, close might just be good enough...

The only major difference between 14nm and 16nm is the manufacturer - in practice, they're pretty much identical for efficiency and in yield.

 The main issue is that there are only a very few founderies so far that can make the stuff at all - and there's a TON of demand for it from folks that make VERY HIGH VOLUME stuff like smartphones, not just GPUs and CPUs and ASIC for mining (though GPU/CPU sales from folks like Intel/AMD/NVidia/IBM/etc aren't exactly LOW volume).

 Also keep in mind that a lot of the output of Global Founderies in particular is probably "locked in" to AMD and IBM due to the history and contracts that resulted in Global Founderies existance and current fab ownerships. To a real degree, there's only what, 4 companies that actually own fabs any more - TSMC, Global Founderies, Intel, and maybe Samsung? Might be a couple others I'm forgetting, and perhaps some SMALL foundery owners I'm not aware of, but when it comes to CURRENT process it's a very short list.



 So yes, there IS a bottleneck on current process, vs a rather high "pent up demand" for chips from current process....