Shipping Date: January 2016


 May or may not be a scam, but I'd not even bother looking at anything that far out, ESPECIALLY from a company that has "KnC chips" written all over their specs.

 To be picky, there are 2 counties IN the state of Washington with electric BASE rates around 3 cents/KWh (Chelan and Douglas) - actual cost will be a little higher due to meter charges and such, but they're both still easily under 4 cents/KWh and probably close to 3 if you use a lot amount of power. Do note that they've been having drought conditions in the Columbia river watershed upriver from that area, so the local PUDs have been adding surcharges for part of the last 2-3 years due to the lack of the usual water flow.

 There is a third county (Douglas) where you can easily get a little under 5 cents/KWh (base rate a bit over 4 unless you use a LOT of power, then you can get a little under) on a smallish farm. Same surcharges issue for the same reason.


 Watch out for the rents though, especially in/near Wenatchee itself. They're not SoCal or SeaTac level high, but....


 MegaBigPower's actual farm location is not actually in Wenatchee, I'm pretty sure, based on comments they've posted - I suspect they're on the other side of the river somewhere in Douglass county like East Wenatchee or Wenatchee Beach areas, perhaps further north.



 Most of the REST of Washington state has quite a bit higher power rates.

KNC announced working silicon on a 14nm FinFet process already in use recently (couple weeks ago? Last week? can't remember offhand).
They've abandoned selling hardware in favor of their own megafarming efforts, though, so VERIFYING that they're actually using their new stuff would be difficult at best.

 You look likely to be the first to the general market.

Unfortunately, while the A2 was a nice chip, the initial offering for the miners based on it was even MORE overpriced than the SFARDS offering for the time.

 Also, KnC's Titan is definitively the best chip on the market for Scrypt right now - the A2 was somewhat less efficient, though it seems to have been a lot more reliable.
 Titans seem to have had more an issue at board-level design (can YOU say "OVERLOAD the PCi-E connectors" even at STOCK clock), but the chip-level reliability of the Titans seems to have been fairly poor at the chip level too, implying that KnC had to "overclock" them to meet their specified target hashrates with resulting poor long-term reliability.

 The Alcheminer was pretty close to a tossup at reported REAL hash rates with the A2, about double for about double the power consumption, but not enough of them out there getting long-term reported on to get a good feel for reliabilty. I'm NOT happy with the way that unit pushes it's PCi-E connectors, almost as bad as the Titans that way.


 More competition in both SHA256 and Scrypt miners, with better efficiency than current offerings, WOULD be nice - if they're PRICED reasonably enough to successfully ROI at an electric rate higher than 3 cents / KWH.


 I'm guessing BitFury has pulled out of making "home" miners entirely at this point?


 Zoomhash, or someone else?

Why lucky?

 Yet Another Altcoin is NOT what the world needs.

That's easy, who the heck has ever heard OF Monero?

 (Besides the original poster, that is).

 Windows is KNOWN to have security holes that M$ will not fix, due to the fact it would break backwards compatability if they DID try to fix them.

 Windows security is a pathetic JOKE.

 There are 3 reasons you see almost all trojans/viruses/etc written for Windows:

 1) There ARE a lot more Windows machines around.
 2) There are a LOT more vulnerabilities in Windows
 3) LINUX users tend to be a LOT more security concious on average than Windows users


 Hint - there are a LOT more Internet SERVERS that run LINUX than run Windows. There are 2 primary reasons for THAT (1) STABILITY (2) SECURITY

Most of my computers run Slackware LINUX - some of them are very old machines running older versions, but it gets the job done, they're dedicated single-function machines that never download anything, and they're behind a LINIX-based firewall so security on them isn't a major issue.

 I have 3 machines for gaming ONLY that run XP Sp3
 I have 1 machine for gaming running Windows 7, that will eventually probably replace one of the XP machines.

 If it wasn't for games, I'd be 100% LINUX by now - but some of the games I play do NOT play well with WINE if at all.

Format C:

 You can't PAY me to use that abortion called Windows 8. Debateably THE WORSE excuse for a MS operating system release, though ME and MS-DOS 4.0 can argue the point.



 I use AVG on my single Win7 and multiple XP systems. It seems to do the job well enough to date that I've not bothered looking at alternatives.

 "The Best" in virus protection has been a moving target for Windows machines for decades. LINUX on the other hand rarely gets virus attacks, since it inherently has a LOT fewer security holes and they tend to get FIXED (as opposed to Windows holes just getting papered over or relocated a bit) pretty fast.




 Look up a report that was widely posted some years back about a Microsoft vice president that got fired, something like a month or two, after a confrence where he mentione that some Windows security issues CAN'T be fixed without breaking backwards compatability with older programs.

 Mickey$loth corporate PR "CLAIMED" there was no connection between the two events....

The server grade PSs are not bad at all, but LONG term I figure on using the seasonics in actual computers once bitcoin mining gets to the point you CAN'T mine profitably as a non-big-company major farm operator.

 I was actually doing research a year or so back based on computer builds to work on Distributed.Net (RC5), GIMPS (Mersenne Primes), and Folding@Home (+ curecoin, might as well get a pittance for doing what I was gonna do anyway) at the same time, and the Seasonics are what my research decided on.

 AMD A10 (GPU running Dnetc, CPU cores running Prime95), 3x GTX970s (or whatever was going to be comparable at the time) for the folding.


 Just turned out to be a research timesaver that the most common power supplies used in SHA256 and Scrypt mining were some of the SAME ones I'd already done the research on.

 8-)

$999 Christmas special?

 *ROFLMAOSC* that would STILL be very overpriced, it would be overpriced as a Black Thursday special even with an extra month to fail to ROI.


 SFARDS has an "order" page on their website now under the ...Products I think? .... tab, but it's "sold out" and probably will be so 'till August sometime.

But have you looked at the PRICE on the EVGA 1600 gold?

 *wince*

 IIRC I can almost get 2 Seasonic X-1250s for the cost of ONE 1600.
 DEFINITELY 1.5

How are your room temperatures that they are in? Might be an overheating issue.

The actual connectors (per MOLEX datasheets) commonly used on PCi-E power connections are specified for 8 amps per contact (the contacts themselve are seperately rated for 11 amps but that is an OPEN AIR rating, you have to derate for using them in a multi-contact connector due to heat retention). This works out to the +12 connectors on either a 6-pin OR an 8-pin PCi-E connector maxxing out at 288 watts (which is where that maximum "Max PSU Power Unit" figure per connector/loop on the SP20 comes FROM).

 You're have to be overclocking a S5 to exceed that rating on one connector - but it's STILL a bad idea, as the boards aren't designed to be run from a single connector and you're likely to be overstressing some of the +12V traces ON the boards a lot by misconnecting the power leads.

 This is the reason Titans have so MANY power connector issues - they DID exceed the rating of the connector even at their STOCK clock, pulling over 300 watts per connector (the extra 2 pins on a PCi-E 8-pin connector are both GROUND leads, IMO a rather dumb thing for the PCi-E spec to have done - sure, the ground leads run cooler, but that doesn't appreciably help the +12 leads).


 Keeping the bottom of an S5 on a flat surface helps cooling overall a LOT - raising it up lets a LOT of the airflow escape without cooling anything. It's even a good idea to try to close off the open parts of the top to help cooling some, but that's less importans as the controller board blocks quite a bit of the top airflow excape route.

I don't trust Corsair nearly as well as I trust Seasonic. Corsair does NOT make any of their own power supplies, never has - Seasonic DOES and in fact is a OEM for other brands as well.

 If I went with anything else, it would be the EVGA 13000 gold units a lot of other folks use - but only 6 PCIE cables (granted 2 of them have 2 connectors each) and the gauge of the cables doesn't look any bigger than the *8* Seasonic has..... dunno.

 Seasonic has a better rep overall than EVGA does, but it's at least a fairly close competition there. Corsair isn't in the same ballpark on a LOT of their power supplies.

50% load is actually the "sweet spot" on most Gold power supplies, but 70-80% is usually close enough.
 
 8-)


 As it is, the output air from my Seasonics is warm, but not very warm - and the fan doesn't seem to be spinning very fast. With a single S5, the fan was taking a while to kick on at all....

 If that transistor shorted out collector-to-emitter, the voltage on the output would be essencially zero.
 Also, ONE CIRCUIT does not prove anything - both a PNP and a NPN transistor can be used to pull an open-collector type output to ground, you just have to set up the INPUT to the transistor correctly to do so.

 I'm not "the idiot who said open collector", that's from the SPECIFICATION that you obviously still haven't bothered to read.



 BTW, where is the 555 timer in the circuit you posted? It seems to have gone missing....

You don't pull up an open collector line with a transistor, you pull it up with a resistor - which has NO polarity.

 Try reading the specification sometime, instead of raising strawman arguments with nothing to do with the spec then ASSuming that I have no knowlage of electronics.

 Any fan that does not run 100% with the PWM line open is BROKEN (either by design or by failure), and does not meet the SPECIFICATION for PWM fans (the spec specifically calls for the fan to have an internal pull-up on that line and the DRIVER to the line to be open-collector).

 But yes, I did test it to be sure, having seen way too many items fail to meet specs over the years....

I'm actually, in final configuration, running 3 S5s from a pair of X1250s (I'm very conservative about power supplies, and like things to run COOL for longevity).

 When I was initially TESTING them, I was running one at a time solo on a X1250.