It's also important to note the impact a miner will have on you in terms of heat an noise, in addition to the concerns I lived in s small dorm room, and a 600W loud heater (i.e. a single S5) would have made the room intolerable.

Mining is not for a college dorm room. And to be perfectly blunt, a good college education is WAY more valuable than the BTC you could mine. Pick a moderately useful major, and study hard. skip the BTC mining until you graduate.

I wonder if perhaps this "Monster S5+" miner reflects a delay in the long fabled S7. This clearly looks a like a "Data Center or Farm" only kind of device. I hope that doesn't portend anything for the S7.

While the difficulty increase was very small, it was still an increase. Barring some crash in BTC price, or after the halving, I don't think we'll see a difficulty of 50B (or less again).

I'll just keep my 460W SP20 running a while longer.

If you want a single power supply to run TWO S5 miners (as you stated), then you need an absolute minimum of 1200W, without overclock. You really should allow more like 750W per miner if you wish overclock at all, which means more like 1500W total. I don't know why you wouldn't consider two power supplies instead of 1. You didn't state your location or electrical system voltage (e.g. 120V in the USA), but you might find it easier to deploy one per S5.

You could consider one of the server power supplies advertised on the Marketplace sub-forum. While economical, they might be a bit loud depending on your situation. They will likely be the cheapest and fairly efficient.

Your mention of an 850, or even a 1000 would only be good for a single S5.

You want to make sure you get high quality cables and connectors with your supplies.

One thing I'll add. I am pretty sure I saw that the chips would sell for roughly $30 each. That would put the parts cost for this in at least the $70-80 range (wild guess on my part). Maybe j4bberwock got a better price, but I don't think anybody should expect this to be cheap.

@sidehack

Did you sell enough to actually build these and not lose your shirt?

Doesn't sound like they are in any rush to actually sell anything, does it?

So is the scam the used S5's for sale at below market prices? While the Imperator feels like vaporware, it's hard to see an actual scam without any money being sent in. Just trying to understand the thinking. The whole thing feel really odd to me.

Their website also mentions that they have S5 units for $199. That sounds too good to be true to me. I added two replies that I think are clearly within the scope of their announcement. We'll see if they get deleted or not. I clearly can't support a 4800 Watt miner, so wouldn't try and get a test unit. I can't figure out how they expect to put 4800W into an ATX chassis and then dissipate the heat with four 120MM fans. I also can't imagine what kind of PSU fits within an ATX chassis and handles 4800 Watts.

Even if you can't get one of their new units, their website suggests that you buy an S5 for $199.  Might be a good consolation prize.

It's going to dissipate 4800W within an ATX form factor, with four 120MM fans? That feels like a stretch to me. I'll be very interested to see what you find inside. I think of the crazy loud S5 which dissipates 600W let's say. So this will be roughly on the oder of eight S5's within an ATX chassis, with half as many fans? Very impressive if accurate.

You should probably take your sales offer to the Marketplace sub-forum. You will probably get more takers there.

Has anyone tried turning an SP20 on it's side? It would seem you could eliminate the "hanging heatsink" if you rotated the SP 20 so that the blades are horizontal and not vertical. It would look a bit odd, but I wonder how it would change the temps.

It's kind of odd too considering all the good, and not cheap, choices that Spondoolies made on the SP20. I've seen the 2-screw diagonal heatsinks on small chips on a motherboard, but never the CPU. Maybe the chips weren't level enough on the board and it need a little "give" to avoid cracking the ASIC.

I know zero about the T1, but I am 99% sure that the Anminer S3 doesn't require, nor can it use, a Raspberry Pi. The Antminer S3 is a completely standalone miner. It does need a power supply, but not a computer to tun the mining software.

The expectation to date though has been that the "S7" would involve a new ASIC (e.g. BM1386), and NOT a new board with S5-class chips on it (the S5++ moniker).

This would certainly fit the S4+ model which was an "S4 do-over" with only the boards guys doing the work, and the ASIC guys sitting on the bench.

Good thing this a speculation thread, as we won't really know until they announce specs, or ship on to somebody outside of Antpool.

So there were two parts to impersonating Phillip here:

1) Choose an Id that LOOKS very similar as in philipRna1957, rather than the version with "m".

2) Select an Avatar that is text "Legendary", rather than an actual picture.

Just trying to understand what happened here.........

My understanding is that Spondoolies didn't originally add a "glue bond" on the SP20, but did later in order to prevent the heatsink from rocking during shipment. I haven't heard that the glue bond was to actually improve thermal performance. It's too bad they didn't just originally use a 4-screw heatsink design.

The normal English definition don't always apply within the realm of Bitcoin. "New" doesn't mean unused. It probably means not previously sold, and comes with a warranty. "Pre-order" sometimes means you have invested in the company. It doesn't always mean you are a customer. It might also mean "you are a fool".

Maybe Bitmain will deliver the "S2 Upgrade" by then.......

You guys have it all wrong. It's the BitFury mining light bulb that's filling in all the hashrate these days. That's why nobody can see, it's so well distributed. Forget those multi-TH miners, it's a hoard of 5GH miners that's doing it........

For OP and others, this and several others are really flippant responses, in case it isn't obvious. I have to hand it to Mr. Bravo, for the most excellent graphic. That needs to be on the package of some vapor-miner.