If you got a Titan for under $1400 with all cubes working, that's VERY impressive - they're normally about 2-3 times that.

 *BUT*

 Don't count the output of ALL your Titans as how long that ONE will ROI - you have to count *IT'S* output only for a fair ROI calculation.


 Or are you saying that's what you earn in 30 days, *NOT* that's how long you expect to ROI your new Titan in?

 It's due to go POS sometime next year. Looks a bit marginal for anythign past ONE year at this point, and the DAG size growth is guarenteed to keep eroding hashrate.


 X11 ASIC have been seen - but in TINY quantities that appear to have had no noticeable difference on the network hashrate. That SHOULD change soon, but it's not happened YET.


 Only 2Gig cards I have (and am mining with) were either already on hand (my NVidia stuff and some leftovers from Litecoin/X11 mining days), one VERY cheap HD7870 that's well on the way to paying for itself, and a couple of GTX 750ti small form factor cards I was going to get for the machines they are going into anyway eventually.
 I doubt I'll bother with any more 2Gig cards - I've pretty much filled up every open PCI-E slot I had available (living situation RIGHT NOW precludes going open-case and risers, that should change after I move this summer) so even cheap used stuff is about out of attractiveness for now.

Ah, but that was a rare case of the parts BEING a deal - I'm pretty sure Newegg just wanted to blow the things out 'cause they were wasting warehouse space.

 I've had too many issues with eBay to trust them - starting with their INSISTANCE on forcing PayRipoffPal down your throat.

 Did some digging around on Amazon, and found the prices on the components were just as high or higher - it appears that used R9 series are going back up again with the Ethereum surge.

 *shrug*

 I did the due dilligance well enough to be comfortable that I saved a fair bit of money over trying to assemble from parts - the used parts market near me is SMALL on anything reasonably current, and too many of the FEW sellers tend to want way too much (as an example, I've got local sellers trying to sell USED GTX 970s for less than $20 less than Newegg wants for NEW ones - those folks in particular are in for a rude shock in a couple of days).


 One of the things I actually miss about spending most of my life in-or-near a major city is the used market and such was a LOT bigger.


 Once I move, I get to start looking at doing open-case builds - probably. No roomate with a cat any more (I like the cat, but it DOES like to jump on and chew on anything resembling a cord that's bouncing around in the air, and it loves to attack fans that aren't enclosed somehow).

 Actually, they have - their Farm Boys were pretty much ALL sold direct-to-customer in small quantities, and the later runs of the other A2 units were as well.

 With that said, they DID do "dealer and big farm only" sales for a while - I suspect they plan to follow the same successfull model with the A4, though the "partners" are an added twist that will probably soak a big chunk of the first batch.



 BTW - don't tell Zoomhash they're at a disadvantage, I'm sure they've been selling off a bunch of their used A2 units out of their farm for months for a REASON - despite having VERY VERY cheap electric in the area that farm is in.

 They've said the miners would be 400-500 MH - and as it happens, the only A2 Mega units I have that are NOT seeing 108-111 MH consistantly I don't trust the power supplies enough to push that hard.

 The power specs on the A2s DID tend to be a bit optimistic sometimes - manufacturing variances I'd guess - but they generally hit the rated hashrate pretty closely if you clocked them that way.


 I still prefer the proven RELIABILITY of Innosilicon designs to date over anyone else in the Cryptomining ASIC field that sold gear to the public.

 A4 and miners due out on it June/July timeframe.

 Their silence on the A3 has been deafening - starting to wonder if it's another LK-1401 in efficiency but came to market too late to be viable with it.

 Unlike SFARDS the Innosilicon company has a rather long track record in chip design - they were around as a chip design house BEFORE Bitcoin existed, which makes them pretty much unique in the industry - and they have a MUCH better rep for delivering on gear when they announce it will be available than most, and THE TOP rep for reliable chips AND board-level design work (Gridseed/SFARDS seems to have had good chips, but crap for board-level designs).

 I saw somewhere that they're talking "100k chip quantity or don't bother" at this point - that might change as they get more gear out the door.
 Sadly, I don't see Sidehack designing a "small" miner, but the Moonlander guy probably would, and Innosilicon themselves will probably release some smaller miners similar to the Mini and the Farm Boy.



 As of RIGHT NOW though, it appears that nobody is selling recent chips to anyone other than major integrators or large farms that roll their own boards.

Amazon
eBay
 long shot Craigslist, I see an occasional listing for Scrypt gear locally.

 Seems like the old GridSeed "orbs" would be a good choice for your project.

Makes me happy I never bought anything from KNC.

 Doesn't affect my future plans though, as I never planned to buy any of their "breaks too often, CRAP design" junk anyway.

AMD changed their driver structure in the 16.x series, which seems to have had a negative effect on a LOT of computational-specific projects (many of the 16.x drivers have been noted as being a LOT slower on Folding, for example, with 1 or 2 specific exceptions).

 It's too bad the Nano is so bloody expen$ive for the hashrate it delivers - even though it's very EFFICIENT it's $/hash is so poor it's a very poor candidate to achieve ROI on.

 If it could scale the hashrate up with it's cores, it would be KILLER - instead, it's beaten out by quite a few older cards that are MUCH less expen$ive....



 I might try playing with driver versions on my next single-card build - which will be an R9 290 as it happens - just to see what's what.

Asus has a fairly good rep as a mining card.

 Sapphire and Gigabyte have better.

 MSI has a fairly goor rep.

 I'm not sure I'd waste time on any R7 model though, by the time you factor in the SYSTEM cost and power usage they turn out to be somewhat less efficient than the low-to-mid R9 models.

 Should stay profitable for a while, but it comes down to how many A4 units Innosilicon sells over that 6 month period (they SHOULD start arriving next month for the "Partners" it appears) and if the Alcheminer folks get their Scrypt-2 project running by then.

 The other part to worry about on the Titans is that they are notorious for random cores dying, though MOST of the infant mortality problems with them should have gotten weeded out by now.

Right now is a good time to WAIT on any NVidia GTC 9xx purchace - the GTX 1080 is due out FRIDAY, and that should put some serious price pressure on the high-end and mid-range current 9xx series - probably won't affect the 950 and little if any effect on the 960 though.

 Then June 10 comes the 1070 - and THAT should have some trickle-down effect on the 960 as well, through again the 950 probably won't notice much if at all.


 Forget about the http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=59-258-006 triple-280X system though, I appear to have gotten Newegg's last one. 8-)


 $800 was too cheap to pass up given the components - 3x$200ish vid cards, $200+ power supply ALONE - then add in the motherboard with 3xPCI-E 16 slots (among others), HD, RAM, and a BIG high-end case. Worst situation, I can probably part out the thing for $1000+ anytime in the next couple months - but I'd be more inclined to swap cards around, drop my trio of 7xxx series at some point, and put 3+ GTX 1080s or 1070s in this thing eventually.

 Up side for me - my existing X240s should work in that machine when I have motherboards start dying, so I can kick that Semperon 145 to the door - or swap CPUs around before that if I end up Folding on that machine eventually. Not sure about the 5050e or 4850e cpus I have, depends on which MB it is - but I've got enough X240s that shouldn't matter.

Ouch.
PS overheating due to dead fan is BAD NEWS - though if you can replace that fan, the PS itself MIGHT still be OK.

 0.13 is a rather HIGH electric rate - THAT is what is killing your profitability on most coins, it's almost DOUBLE my non-Summer rate.

 For me, Dash specifically is profitable - but it's not by a LOT, electric does eat enough that the power company profits more than I do where I'm at currently.

The wattmeter isn't useless, as it shows the entire comsumption of the SYSTEM - which is a lot more applicable to figuring profitability than JUST the card (or cards) IN the system.
CPUs and motherboards and ram and drives etc eat power TOO, and if the system isn't being used for anything else that MATTERS.

Trying to price match vs. the S5 on a miner that was quite a bit more expensive to build (and had MUCH better overall capabilities) probably killed Spondoolies financials.

 I suspect they HAD to find a buyer to survive - unfortunately the buyer they found turned out to be in even WORSE shape in the medium term than Spondoolies was.

The difference is that the Titans are used units with a LONG HISTORY of having cores die frequently, while the Innosilicon A2 was arguably the most stable and rock-solid miner ever built (the LKetc Dragon models it was based on CAN argue that point).

 The only advantage the Titans ever had over the A2 was their efficiency - but Litecoin never dropped far enough for A2s to become unprofitable unless you had very HIGH electric cost.


 *YET*


 That should change eventually if enough A4 units get sold.

I remember seeing a listing on Alibaba at one point, probably from a Google search, at somewhat over $4k - but it was a reseller, not Innosilicon themselves.

 Guess I get to wait for Zoomhash to start reselling them (I am 10 Sigma certain Zoomhash was one of Innosilicon's "partners").


 I'm also going to be VERY curious to see how their announced "A2 upgrade" stuff works out.


 I suspect Innosilicon will start selling to individuals eventually, but they want to get the "big batch" orders first to pay for development.

Your site works pretty well in Firefox, but current Chrome version it never loads anything.
 Might be an XP issue though, Google has stated they no longer support XP for Chrome updates (kinda dumb given how many CORPORATE machines still run XP).


 DO NOT SET UP CRAPCHA. That stuff SUCKS. It's a cure that is MUCH worse than the disease.

Ethereum isn't the only GPU-mineable coin that can be profitable right now - it's just probably the MOST profitable, and pretty much profitable even if you have average-to-high electric rates at this point.

 X11 (Dash) is still GPU mineable, there hasn't been enough ASIC deployment to noticeably affect the hash rate.
 YET.
 But that looks likely to change this summer.

 There are other coins that can be GPU mined for a profit if you have cheap to VERY VERY cheap electric, but cryptocoin mining has always had a "cost of electric" factor to it's profitability.


 8GB cards are overkill for Ethereum mining, though if you plan to have other uses for the card later the extra memory might be useful.
 Based on DAG file size growth rate and probable timeframe of Ethereum converting to PoS from PoW, it's uncertain if a 4GB card would be overkill (3GB will almost definitely be needed late this year or early next year, I forget the exact timeframe, if Ethereum stays profitable to mine).


 IMO avoid HIS fan-cooled cards, they tend to use VERY CHEAP fans that die way too young. Their Ice-Q BLOWER models seem to use good blowers though.


 Rents in the US vary a lot - but the average if you avoid HIGH RENT areas like Southern California or the New York megaplex seems to be in the ballpark of $10-15/m(squared).
 Where I live right now is at the low end of that range, but it's a fairly low cost-of-living area - apartments for $500 are easy to find, most around here are less than that for
 1-2 bedroom places.
 Most folks in the US don't speak Metric very well if at all, US is still on the old "imperial" measurements system with feet, miles, and such with some exceptions.

 Food - varies. I eat pretty comfortably on $190/month but a lot of that is Diet Pepsi consumption - drop the soda and I could get down to more like $100-$120 range.
 I have pretty simple tastes though.