I'll just leave this here...

http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/prospero-x-1.html

Black Arrow is one of the few companies that has consistently delivered products on time and have been very transparent in their business practices. And if you are worried about buying directly from china, bobsag3 here on the boards is a US reseller for them. http://www.minersource.net He is also a part of the DZ miner co-op which has tons of Black Arrow bitfury boards hashing away as we speak.

As far as ROI goes for the X-1, that is speculation at best. I personally do mostly scrypt mining at this point but I did order one X-1 for the hell of it and I expect it to probably break even and mabey make half a bitcoin in profit at best depending on where difficulty is at by the beginning of march.

I agree with this. As hardware becomes cheaper to manufacture and wattage/gh goes down I think it will definitely become profitable again. Combine that with a difficulty plateau and things could be looking pretty decent some time next year.

I am new to mining also but fortunately I have an unhealthy obsession with speculative math and predicting futures and I would have to agree that there is no value in buying miners currently. It makes much more sense to buy $4000 worth of bitcoins than it does to buy a $4000 miner and only get $3000 back in bitcoins. With the miners currently on the market or the ones shipping soon this isn't far off from being the best case scenario with the way difficulty is going up. Worst case is you order a miner and by the time it arrives its a $4k space heater and nothing more. On the flip side if you bought that $4k of bitcoin at $200 a coin by the end of the year when they are at $300 you will have $6k

so... back in 2009 I started mining with my liquid cooled, very overclocked cpu, only to stop five minutes later thinking, "meh, these things will never be worth anything". And deleted everything.

Needless to say, I am now working on a time travel device. 

Glad to see registration open again. This forum has been an invaluable resource for me over the last few weeks and its nice to know I can return the favor someday.