They were using a bunch of 1U server power supplys to come up with ENOUGH power to fuel that monster - ballpark 15KW or some such it was specced at?

 Nothing to do with power supply optimisation, EVERYTHING to do with feeding it ENOUGH power.

You miss the point of that 7870 rig.

 I already HAD everything else to put it together - so my ENTIRE out of pocket cost for the rig is the $80 I paid for the card.

 Pretty good risk that it'll achieve ROI and then some - and yes, I do factor the electric use of the entire system (it's a little Semperon machine, the rest of the system don't eat a lot).

 It's mining 11+ MH, or roughly $1.30 a day right now while eating about 30 cents in electric, so netting close to $1/day. If it had a gold power supply in it instead of a generic NAXN, it would probably be eating less than a quarter a day in electric.

 *IF* current difficulty and price on Ethereum stayed the same (yes, I realise that's VERY unlikely), it would achieve ROI in less than 3 months then go profitable (I've actually been running the thing for a bit already, so it's close to 2 months to ROI point right now). Realistically, I figure it will probably ROI in 3-4 months from now, then be pure profit for a while after that.

 It'll get even cheaper to run after I move this summer, and by the time Ethereum is no longer profitable I'll probably move it over to crunching RC5-72 - unless something else that AMD GPUs can mine profitably well has come along in the meantime.

Well, dang.

 S9 release in early July looks fairly likely now.

Given the issues Intel has had getting 10nm to work at all, I'd bet AGAINST 10nm going mainstream in 2018, and wouldn't bet on it managing mass production in 2019.

Also, it's VERY doubtfull that 10nm would manage a 3:1 improvement in efficiency - and iffy if it could manage even a 2:1 ratio.
Quantum effects have gotten to be a serious issue and limitation as feature sizes keep getting smaller.


 My guess is "no S11 before 2020", but I wouldn't be shocked to be a year off.

 Where did you find an AM1 motherboard with 3 PCI-E slots?

I'd rather not have the PSU.
I'm NOT fond of Enermax power supplies in general (had way too many dead ones still in warenttee), and a 1000 watt unit on that miner is overkill anyway (a good 850 like the Seasonic X850 Gold or the EVGA G2 in that ballpark would make a LOT more sense), but too small for any other useage I'd want to put it to.

 Then again, looks like they might have had to go to a 1000 watt unit to get enough PCI-E connectors - my X850s only have 6 of them....

Specs on the miners you're building from those chips?

 9-)

 Uh, no. More like a WEEK after the first such reported poll, and does not appear to have any connection.

 The chinese run on BTC is more likely due to the continuing issues with their economy and the prospect of ANOTHER devaluation of the Yuan in the not-too-distant future, coupled with the increasing tensions due to the South China Sea politics getting a bit scary-close to shooting incicents and in potential eventual war....

I never bothered trying to solo Ethereum - though I'm up to around 230ish MH now.

 I DID play around with the new Antpool for Ethereum - and dropped it after about 2 hours and ZERO reported hashrate even though my MINER reported a couple shares found in that timeframe. I'm just glad I decided to use one of the Ti750 rigs for that experiment, small loss....


 Mining has ALWAYS been competative - folks shifting to the "new hot coin" is VERY OLD news, and that's not factoring multi-coin pools or even multi-ALGORYTHM pools/miners like NiceHash....

It's not the "2 cards in one rig" that's an issue - it's the "2 cards pulling WAY TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT to the power capasity of your power supply" I'm talking about.
However, I went back and re-read, and noticed 970 - for some reason I was thinking 980.
2 GTX 970 should be OK on your existing power supply as long as you don't massively overclock or overvolt/overclock them.


 I prefer a simple "nvidia-smi -l 10" for my report window - the "10" part sets the auto-loop to 10 seconds, adjust to your preference. That report would be perfect IMO if it reported active clock rates, but it's close enough as is. It's also a much smaller report than PrecisionX, and shows all 3 cards at one time (don't get me started on the massive waste of space Sapphire's Trixx utility chews up for about the SAME functionality as EVGA's PrecisionX).

 I'm seeing about 20 MH/s out of each of my 3x R9 280x, split between 2 different rigs at this point.
 Gigabyte 3GB Windforce units, 1100/1500 and running pretty cool at those settings despite the somewhat hot weather we've had this week (as opposed to my Sapphire R9 290s that are thermal limit throttling some despite the massive airflow in their cases).


 I do wish the R9 2xx cards would pay attention when I set their clocks to UNDERclock with ATICONFIG. 8-(

 Innosilicon has a very good record of actually DELIVERING - with something in the ballpark of the specs they announce for their gear when it goes up for sale.
 They appear to have badly missed their INITIAL preliminary specs from last winter - but Bitfury arguably did so as well, since they were claiming .06 J/GH efficiency for THEIR chip at one point but it can only meet that claim at a VERY LOW voltage/hashrate - and Innosilicon DID claim their estimates from last winter were just that, preliminary ESTIMATES based on pre-production "tape out" chips or some such.

I'd LOVE to see 4 figure prices on Bitcoin again - but I'm not holding my breath.

 More rise, though, I do expect to see.

 Next spike probably, just missed on the last one.

China economic woes, I suspect, coupled with rising war fears.

 The halfing had ZERO to do with the near-doubling of price late last year - that happened after the Chinese Markets announced they were able to take fiat payments (after a longish period they COULDN'T) allowing for a large rush of capitol into Bitcoin from Chinese investors.

 It might be a factor in the current runup - but I suspect it's a minor one, as it would be more likely to cause a slower surge not the "spikes" we've BEEN seeing this past week.

 I did - but more I was mining and accumulating.

 8-)

 $800 for the actual "rig" I bought from Newegg ($799 plus $25ish for shipping to be picky), bit over 60MH at about 600 watts (3xR9 280x) but nowhere near optimised yet.
 I am shifting a couple of my R9 290s over to it, as the PS in it is WAY overkill for 3x 280x cards (1350W Enermax Platinum).

 To be fair, parts cost would have been higher had I had to assemble all the parts seperately - just the 3 GPU + PS were more priced out seperately than what I paid for the whole rig. 8-)



 The thing with Ethereum is that it's the new kid on the block, folks are only starting to jump into it EN MASS recently due to it's price runup, but the hashrate jump hasn't caught up to the price yet. Very nice place for those of us that already had existing hardware or planned "was going to buy it anyway" purchases on tap, not so good for the "Johnnie Come Latelys" that don't have left over hardware from other coinmining or other usages....

SLI = bad for mining, offers ZERO benefit and sometimes causes issues that reduce your hashrate per card.
 For a machine that's primarily for gaming, SLI is usefull.

 You probably want a better power supply, given your stated plans - that second card is going to be pushing your existing supply VERY hard if you game with the machine or if you ever start mining something on it that can use an NVidia card efficiently.

run your own DHCP server.

 Watch for your SP20 to connect to that server, then note the address it connnected at.

 Log into that address with your browser, then set the bloody miner up for a Static IP address SO YOU KNOW WHERE IT IS AT in the future.



 DHCP is a PAIN far too much of the time, I hate it when people inflict it on you for no good reason.

I ran my SP20 for a long time, don't remember if I ever heard OF myminer.io

 So no, it's NOT needed.