Snazzy. I just got a bunch of those R-boxes in for repair last week, had never seen one in person before but they're nice little units. Glad you got everything up and going.
Just make sure there's enough clearance between the fans and the wall to pull in adequate air for cooling.

Difficulty will only drop if a lot of farms turn off their gear. It's likely that most folks will be mining at a loss for the first period after the halving. What sucks is, since mining only alters the total supply by a fraction at a time, the supply/demand curve won't be moved very much at all by the halving so it won't have much effect on the exchange rate.

Any miner that's plugged in and running will get some ROI. Whether it breaks even or gets a positive return is another question.

Cheeseater, SP tells me you should contact them about those two units. They might want to buy them back so they can analyze them and find the problem, same as they said to the OP.

The model I'm currently looking at would probably have a 15V input limit. I was hoping for 20V input because a simple one-board quiet desk miner would be great for home users to play with and would run off a decent laptop brick. The requirement to keep 12V at 12V would be removed entirely from this board and input voltage variations between the listed upperbound and lowerbound would have very little effect on operating efficiency - maybe a 3% W/GH variation across the band.

I remember reading something in November 2013, someone advised the only way to make money from bitcoin mining was to be a hardware manufacturer, or otherwise get hardware for free. I took that as a challenge, and worked from 17GH to 3TH in about six months with no out-of-pocket expenses between mining and serving the community with repair work and hardware kits. It's possible to come out ahead, it's just not easy. You'll probably need to start out with a whole lot of money, a whole lot of luck, or a whole lot of elbow grease.

Ah, groovy. I've had one of our prototype-batch DPS2K boards powering an S2 continuously since June or so.

I'd really like to see more large-form-factor miners with server PSUs instead of no-name ATX supplies running 95% capacity. I'm really surprised the one in my Dragon hasn't smoked out yet.

A smart scammer would vanitygen the first 6 or 7 digits of the posted address. Thank goodness scammers are lazy.

Yes, I think they got the fuses from the same supplier. The sockets are also the same - the only 49-port hub in my custody had a burned fuse socket and required rebuilding. I would actually be surprised if the sockets were rated for 40A, given the two pins on 'em are noticeably weaker than my server board's screw terminals rated for 20A each. That coupled with the poor contact from narrow-blade fuses, those things were burning all over the place.

Should I have my hosting customer whose 2 SP10s have three blown VRMs between them contact you as well? I think August, October and January. The burns weren't quite as exciting as this one. The center of the flameout on the two instances I tore it down for a checkup after appeared to be capacitors.

Are you after more dollars, or more BTC? The only ways to get more BTC are to buy them or mine them. If you want to mine, you need to either purchase a miner (but there's a lot of math and speculation involved whether it'd be worth doing so) or lease shares from someone else's miner (which cloud mining sites tend to make easy, but yeah a lot of them are actually thieves).

My recommendation is, if you want 1600W of 12V power, don't use a super-expensive ATX supply. Get two 800W server PSUs and load-balance.

The fuses that shipped with those things have thin blades which don't adequately contact the socket and tend to overheat there instead of at the actual fuse part. I've repaired I don't know how many with melted fuse sockets for that reason. Go buy a pack of 30A fuses from O'reilly or something and you probably won't have an issue.

I've had two SP10s in my custody for hosting since about July, and this has happened to me three times (twice on one machine). One of them blew a VRM in January when the intake temps were about 14C. That grey bead to the uppper right corner is the only connection between your VRM/bank and the 12V rail, which means if you're worried just remove it and thew hole burnt section is now electrically cut off. Both my SP10s still work at reduced capacity.

I would probably buy an upgrade kit. Just throwing that out there. Maybe not right away, depends on the price.

Oh yeah, when I was starting out in mining the first thing I did was figure out how to max out my gear. I made a lot more selling overclock kits than I did mining, turned it all into hardware and went from 17GH to about 3TH inside of six months with no out-of-pocket expenses. Now I'm actually working on underclock info instead, and most of my mining revenues go to buying old gear for our museum shelf. The main reason we're hosting is so people that want to mine "small-time" but can't afford it at home can get a good deal. That, and because it means more hardware to play with...

I actually liked the work and maintenance (playing with the hardware is most of the fun for me) so I turned my home mining into hosting. Working out pretty well I guess.

That's one of the reasons why I don't like large single chip miners, because the VRMs are a lot more intensive and concentrated high currents mean a lot of resistive losses. Spondoolies' next-gen stuff will use the same concept. It's actually pretty impressive that they can get their gear as efficient as it is and still have 100A VRMs on every single ASIC.

Aaaand... ignoring that guy. Ask any teacher on the planet, people learn better when they're not being berated by angry jackasses. There's plenty of room for criticism, but explaining someone's errors while punching him in the face has been proven unsuccessful by just about every 4th-grade bully in history.

No, what you really need is a PSU that doesn't use 20AWG wires for its PCIe 6-pins. 16AWG would be quite comfortable drawing that load, and you'll have no trouble finding it on a not-garbage PSU. I'm not trying to be rude, but I assume the one you're using was either fairly old, fairly cheap or both?

It probably won't be hard to track down a half-decent PSU with at least 25A on the 12V rail. Look for 80+ Gold rating. I'd recommend a server PSU as an affordable option but the power output is overkill and if you're running R-Boxes you probably want something quiet - which you're  not likely to find from server hardware.

Fart around in the Computer Hardware sales forum (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=75.0) and see if anything pops up. I bet some of this guy's stuff (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=958566.0) would meet your needs.