NVidea Maxwell cards (750 Ti, 950/960/up) are good at X11.
Used to be a TON better at it than AMD for a while, but recent miner software upgrades seems to have leveled the field quite a bit.

 Might be specific for this miner, I was mining Ethereum using QTMiner on a machine that had 1 GIG of ram in the machine (and a 2 Gig GTX960).

 It had to do some special manipulation stuff on the DAG per some of the messages I saw out of it, which meant the first DAG took bloody near forever to get set up, but it then mined successfully for a while (I ended up moving the card to a different machine in a "consolodation" move after a couple days).


 I would RECOMMEND at least 2 GIG main system memory to avoid this issue, though.

Wouldn't be an S8 - and I doubt there ever will be an S8 for the same reasons there never was an S6.

 I could see a faint possibility of an S7- :

 More chips per board, running the BM1385 at it's most efficient point.
 Probably 2/3ds as many strings as an S7 due to needing more chips for the efficient string operating point.

 Very long shot, 2 boards instead of 3 - but that might be an "S7- Lite" instead, which would be a LONG OVERDUE actual home miner but the price point would have to be too low to make it viable to Bitmain as a product given how cheap they've had to drop the S7 to.



 S9 would be the "next gen" Bitmain chip - and it better show up a lot sooner than a year from now or Bitfury among a couple others aren't going to leave them any market TO share, unless that "next gen" Bitmain chip and mners based on it are noticeably more efficient than anything then on the market.


 Clock rate has almost ZERO effect on efficiency, efficiency is almost ALL about the voltage you run the chip at - thus the need for "more chips per string" to maximise the efficiency of the BM1385 in a potential future miner.

Realistically, 800 Mhz is VERY VERY overclocked on a Gridseed blade. they SHOULD have specced as "stock" at 600, not the 750 they "stock" clocked at (which was already a mild overclock given their badly UNDERdesigned power supply circuitry).


 It's not the actual mining chips that are the issue, it's the overload on the buck converter.

How hot a card gets depends a lot more on how much clearance you have in front of the fan(s) of that card than on anything else - IF all of the cards are in the same rig and all of their fans are WORKING correctly and set to the same speed/profile.

 My #2 card in my only 64-bit machine gets noticeably hotter, 'cause it's got a lot less fan intake clearance than the other 2 cards (stupid motherboard designers don't allow space for dual-width cards WAY too much of the time).

You ARE talking about the orbs, NOT the blades I hope?

 Trying to dual mine with the BLADES = instant mass failure, as their power circuitry is NOT designed to handle the consumption of that many of the GC3355 chips in SHA256 mining mode (much less in dual-mining mode).


 The ORBS had almost identical circuitry, but only 5 chips per orb vs. 40 per blade.


 I'll also point out that the GC3355 was a money-loser trying to mine any SHA256 coin less than 6 months after it first showed up, unless you had FREE electric - it held out a lot longer on Scrypt due to a lot less competition, and if your electric is cheap ENOUGH it might still manage to break-even on Scrypt-only.

 Last time I checked Innosilicon doesn't HAVE a "data center" or "data hall" or any significant mining operation at all.

 They seem to be the only Cryptocoin Mining Chip/Miner manufacturer that doesn't do a lot of mining themselves - probably because they were a well-established Chip manufacturer before they got into Cryptocoin chip making (and still ARE a manufacturer of lots of other chips).

Unlike every other manufacturer AFAIK making cryptocoin chips, Innosilicon doesn't rely on cryptocoin for most to all of their income, much less most to all of their profit.



I won't talk about some of their DEALERS (and likely partners) that DO in fact mine *cough Zoomhash cough*....

 I'd be impressed if I hadn't had 4 of my 5 A2 units run for 4 months straight - befrore I reset my home to "summer mode" and had to shut those 4 down to move them.
 The 5'th one is at 4.5 months and still going....

Worst was the first Griidseed 80 blade I bought - at appx. $1600 - about 3 WEEKS before they dropped to under $1000. Never did manage ROI on that thing, though the other 2 I ended up with did manage it eventually and I did make back a fairly sizeable chunk of what I paid for that one before it died.

 I'm pretty sure I ended up even or better on everything else I've mined with, except perhaps the 7870 and 7850 AMD GPUs - and those got used for other stuff after they became unprofitable on Litecoin (unfortunately, both have also died since, or I'd be using them on Ethereum). I'm SURE I managed to pay off all of my 7750s via Litecoin mining, though one of those has died since (bloody HIS doesn't believe in GOOD fans on their cards, WAY too many issues with them to the point I'll never buy another one again - and I notice Newegg has DROPPED them).

 Funny part - the oldest GPU I bought and used on mining (Sapphire 7750 low profile) is STILL running strong with ZERO issues, currently crunching RC5 since it doesn't have enough RAM for Ethereum and my electric is too high for X11 to be break-even (I might get to reconsider that after my planned move this summer).



 The book is still out on my A2 Terminator units, they're not at break-even yet but they're still quite profitable even at CURRENT electric rate, and should be profitable after I move even if difficulty goes up a LOT after the A4 starts shipping.

 "apparently" still under NDA. Didn't say I signed one or had any chips.

They've never gotten around to offering "upgrade boards" before, despite talking about doing so.
I don't see any major probability of them doing so now.


 What I CAN see happening is them offering a single batch of "S7+" about a month before they introduce their next-gen (probably called S9) miner - like they did with the S5+ shortly before they introduced the S7.


 But of course, they may decide that was a one-shot option and won't work THIS time with the halfing so close, even if they cram as many BM1385s on the board as they can to maximise the efficiency....

I would happily test 100 of these units.

 I'd settle for testing one.


 9-)

Dual Miner is a DEALER/DISTRIBUTOR selling the "iBeLink" miner.

 DualMiner DID make some mining gear back in the day, USB boards using the Gridseed GC3355 chip, they do NOT make this X11 miner.

Litecoin has been worth a bit over $3 since around it's halfing last summer - been more stable than anything else I know of.

 I do miss the days it was GPU mineable and worth a lot more per, though - but still have a bunch of the hardware it paid for. 8-)

500 watts would be nice, but anything under 1 KW would be viable for home mining - if it's better designed for "moderatly quiet efficient" cooling than some recent units have been.

 Do note that the S5 wasn't much over 500 watts but still managed to be QUITE loud (my A2 Mega's are about the same noise level, despite *3 to 5* 120mm high-flow fans vs. 1).


 Delta focused flow fans (like the FFB series) are nice when you have a restricted flow path (like in the S7) but they're a lot noisier than the AFB line at the same rated CFM level - tradeoff is that the AFBs don't handle high-restriction flow paths nearly as well.

Can't talk about engineering samples that are apparently still under NDA, and nothing available "to the public" yet, other than wild-speculation.

 

 They won't. Not worth the cost for a very tiny to non-existant market.

Mine the shitcoins while they're profitable, then shut down (or in my case revert to my competative nature on crunching other stuff) 'till the next profitable shitcoin comes along, then mine THAT for a while, rinse and repeat.

But in the background I have some real miners running.....

R9 nano is a DUAL-slot width card - it's about the same size as my EVGA GTX 950 SC cards, perhaps a hair shorter but SAME width - that WIDTH is the issue, not the card length.

 It's a nice powerfull card (though works very poorly on Ethereum per every posting I've seen about it), but kinda expen$ive. From what I've seen it doesn't seem to mine Ethereum anywhere near well enough to justify the cost, as R9 cards at about HALF the price can match it's hashrate.

 I'd LOVE to have about 9 of them crunching RC5 though - that would be "instant #1 on the daily list" easy (my off-the-cuff ballpark estimate is that 6 would be a tossup in production for that #1 position).



 If you want to see a true SMALL card, look up the Sapphire low profile 7750 card - it's the most powerfull "TRUE single-slot" card I've ever been able to find info about (and as luck would have it I managed to buy one of the last ones Newegg ever had for sale).

 I don't know why AMD chose to ignore the 7750 when they did their "rebrand" on most of the initial R5/R7/R9 line, the best single-slot card in THAT lineup was only a 384 Stream unit card vs. the 512 on the 7750, and same issue with low-profile cards (which are the most likely to be TRUE single-slot cards this past decade and some).

The X11 ASIC will only achieve 1 month ROI if you're one of the very first to get one - and there aren't a lot sold for a while causing the difficulty to skyrocket and the reward to plummet.

 Even if you were one of the folks that got one of the FIRST batch units, though, I don't think 1 month ROI is a reasonable expectation - more like 1 YEAR as I recall from calcs on it?



 Rapid ROI on any coin any more is unrealistic - the new name of the game now that ASICs are catching up with semiconductor state-of-the-art is "get your electric cost DOWN and expect to take many many months or years to achieve RoI".