We just finished liquidating one of our mines a few months ago, so things probably haven't changed that much.  Our mine was considerably larger than yours (about 4 or 5x), and was exclusively Nvidia GPU's - but a mix from 1060's to 1080TI's... We sold to one buyer, primarily because we didn't want to go through all the pain and suffering of selling the individual parts - and he bought everything; cards, cases, PDU's, cables, you name it.  For the cards, what he was paying was basically about 30% off of what eBay sells for - so just a quick check looks like RX580's go for around ~$120 range, so if you have the boxes for the cards, figure probably ~$50k, if you don't have the boxes, then maybe closer to $40k (he knocked off about $10 for no box, but the bulk of ours had boxes).  He also paid more or less for different manufacturers, as some have far better warranties than other.  The cables and everything else are really worth very little - we bought most of our PDU's and cables surplus, so we already were getting the $500 Dell PDU for $50, he basically paid us about half of that, so $25 each.  Really the bulk of your values is going to be in cards, so my guess would be closer to $50k for everything you've got - really I'd be surprised if a miner would buy it, you're really talking about a liquidator, so I don't think you'll find you have any 'in place' value (especially as others pointed out in terms of ROI).  We also ran our systems very similar to yours, custom Ubuntu although we had local SSD's on each machine (as they were cheap as hell) - but he didn't really care one way or the other about that, just interested in hardware.  And keep in mind this was for Nvidia GPU's, so I have no idea if the market is stronger or weaker for ATI... 

It always ebbs and flows - first CPU then GPU, then FPGA, then ASIC, then CPU, then GPU, etc, etc... For all the time I've been mining, everyone always says "This is the end!", but it always seems like right at the last minute, something changes making the economics shift, and you're back in business.  Maybe that happens again, maybe not - the reality is that what's really happening is the less sophisticated or more risky miners are getting flushed from the system, but to my mind, that's how the system has always worked.

I love this thread - there's some interesting perspectives, and fun comments, but in particular I love the fact that there's so many different long term forum members posting their thoughts, instead of just the deluge of single post users asking the same thing.  Just reminds me of the 'good old days' of crypto.

I've played with several immersion systems in the past, and apart from the 3M one that was hideously expensive, the others tended to be a bit of a nightmare to clean up when you ultimately remove the rigs from the fluid - how does your system compare?  Is it more oily, or is it more on the engineered fluid side of the spectrum?  Do you have some solvent that is used to help remove excess fluid when removing a unit?

Also, how are you calculating the payback period?  It can't be the delta between the cost of just free-air systems and yours?  Plus I don't think the S9 is really the best ASIC to use in your pricing model. 

Yeah, we just got a bunch of Sept 10 A9's, and got the duty hit - it wasn't that bad on ours, I think it came out to about 10% of invoice price, but it can depend heavily on what type of class they pick for the product.


You'll probably get a letter in a couple weeks (assuming you used some express carrier) - many times they deliver without collecting the duties first (or at least that's what my experience has been).  DHL generally won't move it an inch until they get paid, but UPS and FedEx seem to have some different system.

You have to be careful about what they put on the invoice (for type of class or price), as you're liable to correct that if there's some mistake.  One of my friends got hit with that a couple years ago and had to pay massive fines.

What did you pay for it?  One of my suppliers in China quoted $4600 (this is just the machine, no shipping, psu, etc)...

It looks interesting, but isn't Vert and Mona supposed to be switching to a new algo in Q1?  My supplier also said this is going to be the only production run of these devices (due to this) - which could be a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it...

FWIW, I was just checking on the status of my Sept 10th order, and my supplier said that Innosilicon is actually raising the prices on the A9's for the next batch, and that it's supposed to be the last batch they're doing.  It will be interesting to see if this is accurate or not - with the revenue they're generating right now, it seems crazy to raise the price, but also it might be to the point that they're just not worth it to manufacturer so it's on to the next algo.

I've heard the same thing - figured I would run them myself and see if I ran into any issues, and so far haven't had a single one fail.  Might be that they aren't as voltage tolerant as some of the others, we run everything at 208v, so wouldn't be surprised at all if they die at 120v (if they even work at that).  I normally buy any of the quality breakouts and the DPS2000BB PSU's, and just have those on hand if they fail.  I've also heard that the Bitmain PSU's are pretty solid - but still not as good as the DPS's.

Probably not - you'll more than likely just be flushing your money down the toilet.  99% of places that only accept payment in BTC and have no track record or contact information are going to be scams.  You can buy from Chinese dealers on Alibaba and use their Trade Assurance (escrow) service, and get the same or better pricing - and not have to worry about them running off with your money.  I do all of my overseas ordering through them, unless I'm dealing with the manufacturer directly - super easy to do and makes sure you're covered.

If you look enough, you'll hear bad things about both companies... Neither Bitmain or Innosilicon is going to win any customer service awards.   I've used both for years now, and in general I find their quality to be about the same, with maybe a slight edge to Innosilicon.  I have some A9's right now and have found them to perform to spec and be pretty reliable, but obviously some people on the forum have had different experiences - but the challenge is always that I'm not going to come on the forum and make a post like "All my A9's work fine!", because that's expected, you're only going to post when there's a problem.  I've had machines repaired by both companies - neither was good at the time, as it took a ton of time to do.

Personally I think the A9 is a better option than the Z9 - the efficiency difference means a longer effective life, and more better return.

Are you sure they aren't just telling you to turn off the CPU portion of their miner, so it only uses your GPU's?  That's how I would read that - not that they're telling you to turn off your rigs.

I think it's pretty unlikely that they blocked your IP because of the post, I've made positive and negative posts about Nicehash, and have never seen a comment one way or the other.  They do have some kind of automated temporary banning of IP's if your miner is misbehaving, and I have run into that a long time ago, but if I remember it was reset after a few hours.

Can't speak to the price, as we use exclusively Nvidia these days but I've used a bunch of these Chinese cases - they're all much better than open frame rigs IMO, as you can control airflow, and most are using riser-less motherboards, which is a must have for me.  If you're home mining, then open frame rigs are great - not saying you can't industrial mine with them, they just are much more work in my experience.

Some cases are better designed than others, and for my purposes their G12 isn't the best - in particular how they have airflow setup.  I suspect they didn't spend any time modeling airflow, and just tossed vents and fans all over it - by this I mean they have vents on the front that are far too close to the intakes, so if there is any kind of positive pressure inside the case, it's going to short-circuit the airflow and suck in hot air from the case.  Then it has two kind of random fans stuck on the back top, which makes these cases unstackable and I have no idea what they thought they were doing with them, as it disrupts the straight flow of air you want from the front right out the back.  Venting on the back is a bit more of a mixed bag depending on what they're doing - the open area around the connectors I personally like, because it tends to help the airflow around the PSU, which has a tendency to trap air around it and get hotter than normal.  I also like the extra-wide card slots, as once again it helps keep the air flowing inbetween the cards, instead of just over them, like the slots across the back top do.  All in all not the best design - solid meh from me.

My preferred cases are these:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Awesome-6-GPU-Altcoin-Mining-Rig-Case-just-add-cards-Fast-US-Shipping/253663963171?hash=item3b0f8ce823%3Ag%3ACsQAAOSwl5VbBcA0&_sop=16&_pgn=3&_sacat=0&_nkw=gpu+mining+rig&_from=R40&rt=nc

Although I've used these with success as well, although I prefer the PSU on the other one as it's a more tradition ATX:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/8-GPU-Mining-Server-Case-w-4-FANS-Motherboard-Power-Memory-Rsiers-Frame-Rig-ETH/401486164608?epid=27014163342&hash=item5d7a70b280%3Ag%3AhaIAAOSwcSxacuOV&_sop=16&_pgn=3&_sacat=0&_nkw=gpu+mining+rig&_from=R40&rt=nc

Generally on these cases you'll see vents on the sides or top, but they are more to normalize pressure in case (to extend fan life) than for anything else - although they do disrupt airflow a bit.

Also keep in mind that any of these machines PSU really isn't going to work well at 110v - I'm not saying they WON'T work, just that they won't work for long.  

One more somewhat random comment - as I was searching on eBay for cases, I ran across this:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/MINING-RIG-GPU-SYSTEM-MP1061009N-9xGPUs-6GB-225MH-s-ETH/142870841634?hash=item2143c40922%3Ag%3AJzcAAOSw2khbTTpZ&_sop=16&_pgn=3&_sacat=0&_nkw=gpu+mining+rig&_from=R40&rt=nc

Before you get excited it's a scam, in particular the fact it says 'PLEASE NOTE: Delivery ~ 30 days', so just be careful - I've run into that lately on eBay, they try to get outside of the 30 days easy return period the eBay normally provides.  It never works, but it can tie up your money and be a huge PIA.  I also wouldn't buy from random places you find on Google - unless it's a provider that's been around for a while, just stick to eBay or the forum (with escrow), and you'll probably have a good experience.

Either way, Good luck!

FWIW, I've got a couple of A9's and I upgraded them a bit over a day ago to the latest release (July 6th) and have found it to be much more consistent and reliable for me (both local UI and pool-side) - plus they fixed that stupid hash rate total bug where it always showed like 6x the actual hashrate in the UI.  These are all machines from their latest batch, so not sure if that matters or not - and they're all performing +/- 2KSol/s of the promised 50k.  I also haven't played around at all with their performance tab, so still just the default 'Balanced'.  Pool-side reject rate is 0.75% right now, and hash rate is matching what I would expect...

You should consider putting up some real screenshots - I have zero interest in wasting my time trying to set the thing up if once it's setup correctly it's not what I'm looking for.  All of the clipart instead of actual pictures of what things look like just makes it look cheap or not fully baked.  Oh, and you have some misspellings on your pictures such as "Insert you wallet", etc.

You should probably check out Excavator - it's better than most of the others for running different algos on different cards - as it supports most of the algo's out there, and it's trivial to assign different algo's to difference cards.  Plus you can do it on the fly without stopping anything via their JSON API - pretty cool.

https://github.com/nicehash/excavator
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1777827.0

Don't forget that they've got that slow start in effect for the first couple weeks, so really there's no telling what it will be like until after then...  That's why at the moment it's probably not worth mining it.

I haven't used that specific one - but I have been using a bunch of Chinese no-name boards lately, and really I've found them to be fine.  The biggest issue I think you could run into with this would be the BIOS, but if the one they ship with works well, then you probably have nothing to worry about.  Most of the 'name brand' Chinese boards like Onda and Colorful are just OEM anyway from someone else, so it's not like they really have that much insight or help otherwise.

If you get it, just make sure to post your experiences with it so others can learn as well. 

I'd love to hear what ideas you have for hot climates - last summer it got up to almost 50c (120f), but thankfully since it's the desert evap works wonders.  I'm not aware of anything that is efficient at converting heat into cold short of something like an ammonia loop, but I tend to limit my DIY adventures to things that don't use lethal gas if you screw up.    The biggest issue that I'm aware of with something like that is that the heat-density of mining gear isn't high enough to make it cost effective - but of course if you were running a chiller loop or something similar, then it would be an option.

If you check out some of the people who have built shipping container homes, you'd probably be well-served in painting the top and sides of the container white.  That's probably the single cheapest thing you can do that will really help keep it cooler in the summer - there's been numerous people in the tiny home communities that have commented on what a difference that makes.

I threw some of my BTC into LTC for the fork - why not, let's see what happens... The consensus is that it's a scam, but all they really were able to do is pre-allocate a bunch of LCC in their 'genesis' block - but that's worth nothing unless the coin gains some traction.  I think the idea of having an alternative coin that uses SHA256 and based off of LTC is interesting, and if they actually do some dev, then it might be helpful - when TX fees got super high, I used LTC to move funds around as it was much easier to quickly move in and out of things.

I will say this, their premise that this somehow gives new life to old SHA256 hardware is kind of a joke - assuming this does get traction and becomes more profitable, the mainstream miners will point their new rigs at it.  Your old S5 isn't going to somehow do better on this than on BTC - it will just amount to a larger percentage of the total hashrate, but on a coin with a radically lower valuation.

Right now it's all a bit of pipe dreams though - they've done the fork, the network is 'alive', and now we'll just see how many miners point their rigs over to it and support it. 

This page shows how many machines people are using on there, per algo:

https://www.nicehash.com/algorithm

So it looks like conservatively there's 500k machines running on there, and even each person had 10+ machines that means there's tens of thousands of people using it again.

Is it safe?  Probably more than some pools out there... Could it get hacked again?  Sure, but so can someplace that hasn't been hacked.

If you like what they offer, and their fees are acceptable for you, then you should use them.