the price for the l3+ was reasonable for once. i was totally shocked that they had legit prices on a new miner. not new to everyone but new to the general public.

Not to toot bitmains horn or ne thing but i read multiple news stories online about chinese asic makers tryin block segwit on litecoin and their proof was mainly that they posted up tons of new hashing power onto the network. Well now it has become clear why that has happened so hopefully at least part of the issue will go away now that users will most likely put these on pools other than antpool to mine ltc. Im not saying the same is true for bitcoin or ne other coin im just saying in this particular case the writers of those stories guessed the reason for the increase and in this case were wrong it seems.

On to the l3+ though....i hope to hell its not as expensive as folks are expecting. Sure the break even times for ltc r much shorter since prices r higher but we have seen the pump before and a crash shortly after back down to $4 per coin. There is a huge risk betting based on the current price given the history of lct and that kinda scares me a bit but replacing the titans i have been running for so long with more powerful and efficient miners so i can sell these on interest me as well. I will and often do go all in on bitcoin but ltc is more of a hobby mining opp for me and not so much of a biz so im torn here. What do you guys think the cost of one of these miners will be? I hope its not that $4800 price tag like that ebay link says lol. If it is i might just stick to my titans since they already broke even a long time ago and are well taken care of and my power is free.

So i was talkin to my asian friend (came here about a year ago) and we were talking about the quality over quantity issue with the majority of products coming from china and she told me chinese companies sell even cheaper made products to their own people! She said the cheap knockoff stuff you find on ebay and other websites is considered great quality compared to the stuff people sell in random shops and on carts in markets over there. Its a big issue from what she told me :/.


I really wanted a buy a ton of these l3's to fill up a third location i plan to rent out but bitmain doesnt have them listed for sale and when they were listed they were only available to people in china directly...then i thought about what my asian lady friend said and it kinda clicked. Maybe the reason they were sold there first is because they r worried about quality and were unsure how long they will last before dying on customers and knew selling to customers in china is alot less risky than sellin to hot headed amerrrcans like me and many others interested in these machines. That made me want to hold off until the next version comes out because i have heard some bad stuff about these l3's so far and while someone did get theirs replaced (the guy posting above) others werent so lucky from what i hear. Again i dont own any l3's and was wanting a bunch of them so im going nased on hearsay not based on personal experience and this is an opinion not facts i can prove or back up...i just wanna make that clear so i dont get my dick ripped off by hardcore supporters lolol.

I run knc titans as my script/alt coin miners so of course the l3's look great to me on the outside. I dont have one to play around with and test so i cant say how reliable they are with fan speeds and temps but it would be nice to have more hands on reviews that are positive and it would be nice if they didnt have so many paid reviews of their hardware...it makes finding legit opinions very hard lol.

im interested in having this answered too....i asked but no one replied...you asked and no one replied again. if thats the case im owed a few coupons so far lol.
r u a troll?? i feel like u keep poppin up to flash you bit shot lifestyle around to everyone....the only problem is people on the interwebz know not to believe everything they hear. its easy to over embellish your numbers. i agree with you that btc mining is still doable with the right conditions and alotta luck with power costs/mining locations and experience that first hand every single day but at .10 per kwh your looking at not making much back if any at all. especially since most power costs are split into power and distribution costs so while your power cost may be .10 per kwh you distribution adds another few cents per kwh to the cost of running those machines not to mention cooling costs which raises the power. if i didnt have free power i know i wouldnt be mining and what your saying goes against all the bs you spewed in your previous posts....who bases roi on numbers that dont exist yet? thats not hitting roi...thats gambling and while thats up to you i have to say the other dude that posted is right....if your betting on btc prices going up to make money u should just buy and hold coins not miners. but thats assuming the miners are claiming to be buyer are actually being bought and used lol which im guessing thats where your fudging your numbers a bit but im a skeptical kinda guy.

are you talking about customers that ordered for the feb 20th delivery date?? because i didnt get any coupons for any of those miners....

lol thats fine buddy.


lol sorry man. my posts get a bit long at times dont they??

ur one silly dude lol.

1. just lashing out at anyone that replies in a hostile way is ignorant period. uk this to be true and yet u still do it so maybe you want to be called out on your foolishness and thats what i did.

2. there is no new software kiddo lol. the firmware they use is basically the same firmware. the pre autotune firmware allowed you to set the freq and really the big diff between the older versions and the newer versions is that it was adapted to run their newer hashing boards. if you get technical your right...its different because it doesnt match line for line what the previous versions had but (here is another analogy -_-) my 2007 infiniti g35x sedan is basically the same as the 2008...the engine and perfomance is the same but there r a few features that were added like heated wiper blades and cooled passanger and driver seats instead of the seats in mine which can only warm your ass up not cool it down. as a whole are these considered a complete redesign of the model car?? nope! the complete redesign came with the g37x sedan that completely changed everything except for a few lines of the body. bitmain is just like my car...except they went backwards and removed a feature that could have been kept...the firmware auto tunes the freq....if the firmware runs all of the frews to find the most efficient one to run at explain how that cant be turned off to allow a user to set the freq? or why a ceiling cant be added?? do you know if bitmains firmware has a ceiling or do you think it goes to any freq is wants to even if its higher than the designed operating speed?? back to the car comparison....uk most cars have a rev limiter?? did uk they have a mph/kph limiter as well?? i removed both from my cars ecu but its there to make the car safer....do u think bitmain doesnt have a hardcoded limit to keep their boards safe??

3. there you go makin it all about u...ur not bitcoin....bitcoin isnt u. what is ideal for u isnt ideal for others. ur hittin that brick wall i mentioned earlier .

4. no you dont know how firmware works lol. the firmware used in the autotune miners esentially selects a freq and runs the boards at that freq...if the hw errors arent bad it says ok lets run it faster...and faster....and faster. why do you think it took 30 minutes to boot up before?? u think the miner just sat there doing nothing for 30 minutes until it felt it waited long enough to start mining?? this is info from bitmain not from me so before you post make sure you know what your quoting because your making yourself look silly. im not a hard core coder or a hardware developer but im positive if bitmain chose to let us manually set the freq for the miner they can do it.

5. yet again your back to your beliefs...you need to understand the conditions people r mining in r never exactly the same from miner to miner or day to day. we have seen miners that with 100% fan speed their temps r still pushing above 100 degrees....having the ability to change the freq manually will allow people that have that miner to say "hey at 550 freq its running ballz hot let me try 525 or even 500 instead to get lower temps". what part of this is so hard to get exactly? is it the facts part or the numbers part?? cause i would love to help you with both. what you consider an appropriate use of the miner isnt always what other believe. you are not them and they are not u...its their device like i said before...if they want to earn a little less who r we to say otherwise?? do u think ur opinion matters to ne one in this world that much that u feel u have the right to tell others what they can do with their devices?? if so please come back down to earth....we r all waiting here to have a legit convo with u but as of right now i feel like im talking to a kid that cant see when hes wrong or a very very controlling boyfriend/girlfriend that wont be happy unless things r the way they say it has to be. grow up kid. your only making urself look bad....even if its online its still pathetic.

6. so because i had to lower my freq that somehow means idk ne thing about airflow or roi?? ok u got me....im dyin to know what you mean by that because it sounds so silly i cant resist getting more info on your theory. maybe what i said was hard to understand so let me break this down for u sweety. do u know how an industrial roof top mounted ac unit works?? do uk what a chiller is?? its not some tiny unit sitting on the roof like the one in your backyard at home. the chiller for one of our buildings is about 2/3 as big as the building.....by 2/3 i mean the flat surface of the roof covers the entire building....2/3 of that is taken up by the chiller/fan motors pumping air through the building. anyway when that big ass unit has a pump go down it runs at half capacity....because the ciller uses water not a giant radiator wrapped around the compressor like at your house....so running at half capacity i can either run my miners full speed and they overheat and stop mining at 80 degrees (this happened when i ran all s7's so keep that in mind) and dont come back up until rebooted. orrrrr i cut the speed down to compensate for the lossed cooling while the pump got fixed. one involves 0 mining and making 0 btc....not to mentioned hardware damage that can happen. the other involves no miner going down and they still hash at partial speed making me money until the pump got fixed and they could run at full speed again. idk y i had to explain this again but hopefully your tiny brain can comprehend what i said this time. or maybe its ignorance that is causing you to speak outta turn? did you start mining with the s9?? if so that would explain why you dont know about the cut off temps and about changing freqs on every model produced so far.

there your wrong again....the freq isnt preset like you think they are. the freq is tested by the firmware when it boots up to find the optimal freq to use for the boards installed into the miner. i have to factor in roi times with every purchase and increased difficulty based on guestimates and so on. i have free power....so my roi times r much faster than most other people but needing to break even doesnt mean i am willing to harm my machines to get to roi as fast as possible. environments change...having a miner that can change too is the smart way to go....know what thats called sweety?? flexibility! i hope u stop being so thick headed in the future lol. its not a good look at all. my boss used to tell me "dont be so rigid...." and if my responses were anything like yours i can 100% see why she wanted me to be more flexible because your just not open to what other people have to say even if it proves u wrong. best of luck

whoaaaa even i have to post on this comment (sorry for the delay kiddo...the east coast got hit with a snow storm and i cant bring myself to reply to ignorance on my free time when at home).

1. idk y ur being rude to philip. i dont recall ever seeing a rude thing said by him to anyone...i obviously didnt check all the posts he has made but it seems a little messed up to insult someone that took the time to post facts for u.

2. yes we r self entitled but at the same time we arent. like others said these features have been around for 6 years....its nothing that is new or recently added....in fact the removal is new and recent and wasnt needed at all actually. they could have edited the firmware to not allow overclocking but to allow underclocking. as easily as they were able to add the list of freq's....its even easier to not add freqs to the list. in fact adding the freqs would probably make the firmware process easier because they dont have to reproduce the firmware for each version of the auto freq miner so by not letting the user set the freq they ultimately created MORE work for themselves. but ur a smart guy....u already thought about that huh??

3. like others said the r4 is marketed to home miners....but that doesnt have manual freqs either....so what exactly is your reasoning there? they were advertised as home miners yet the customization you claim should only be available to home miners is somehow not available for those home mining machines. but this post isnt about the r4...imma stick with talking about the s9....did you buy your s9?? ik i bought all of mine....every last one of them. because i bought them i feel i am entitled to features that were there and can be added back....there is no reason they cant set a freq ceiling setting for autotune miners. not only that but since i bought my miner im also entirled to mine however i want. if i want to turn the fucker on and let it hash locally until the thing dies a year from now not making me a single cent that is what i will do. its my choice not yours or bitmains. the freq was our choice as well until they removed it to make things easier but people familiar with their miners are annoyed with that including me and this feature needs to be brought back.

4. like i said i only have 1 s9 running in my house and thats because its cold as balls. i have s7's underclocked and being used as space heaters in rooms so they are quiet and make money that would otherwise be wasted on an actual space heater. but the majority of my miners are run in 2 locations (again i purchased every single one and no investors are here to help me out with the huge ass bill buying all these s9's) with roof top sc units. the question i have for you is have you ever had an industrial ac unit die?? well a year ago or so the chiller on the roof had a pump fail which left the cooling running at half power. if i had all autotune s9's i wouldnt have been able to lower to freq to compensate for the half cooling i was getting until the pump got replaced. but because i had s7's i was able to remote in an drop the freqs down and make sure the temps were good while the repairs were going for a couple of days. so yes the manual freq option is good to have for ALL versions not just pre autotune miners which i might add arent made anymore. this is coming from a non home miner. if i didnt have manual freq i would have to drive to the offices and turn off the miners which takes time and money to do and i would have had to drive back to flip them back on to start mining. this way i had 0 downtime and only a few minutes of lost time logging in and changing the freqs for the miners.

your entitled to your own opinion sweety....in the end what you say doesnt reflect what the community is saying. not just me...not just respected members of this forum....randos pros amateurs and everything in between have said this about the post autotune miners. u say they dont care what we think...they make miners for themselves and dont care if we like them or not but if that was the case y do u think they sell us miners to begin with?? because they are bein nice to us?? nope! they sell them to us at a price that is higher than what they will make with them. they pay alot less to produce these things and can only imagine how low their roi times r with these miners but one thing im certain about is they dont do this to help us out....they do it because we pay alot more than what the machine will bring them and thats an upfront payment too not a payment that comes in staggered like bitcoin mining payments. $1500 cash upfront sounds a whole lot better than $1500 over 8 months doesnt it??

so basically your saying if the possibility is there we shouldnt and have no right to want the features that we have had up to this point. im not talkin about different versions of miners either...s9's have had freq control since day 1 of their release bitmain just took the ability to manually set it away. if bitmain took the ability away do you think its hard to add the ability back? if they coded everything they use 100% fresh then i can be more accepting of them controlling their firmware but since barely anything related to their firmware actually belongs to them its hard to agree with you buddy. ontop of that you have other seasoned miners saying the same thing im saying but your right....simply because you provide wild comparisons that arent even in the realm of what is practical. whats next?? using a rocket to travel overseas instead of flying in an airplane?! be more serious with your replies.

there u go bein rigid again buddy. u would think someone with the username computergenie would know things arent as rigid as ur making them out to be but its fine if you want to continue thinking that way. just as long as you are ready to accept that nearly every product and device can and will be used in more than one way without you freakin out with smoke comin from your ears. the world isnt black and white so please learn to understand that in the future. this is a good first step.

noy true. the setting was built into the miner before and was removed. the miner runs a freq check to clock the miner to the max possible speeds those boards can handle so essentially the miner does the same exact thing to allowing the user to set a limit or an under clocked freq wouldn't add much to developing the firmware especially since most of what they use for firmware is stolen from other miner developers. I run miners in 2 locations with roof top dedicated ac units and those miners run at 100%. allowing people to under clock them when running at home will actually bring them MORE business because not everyone has a setup like mine or others and are forced to run them at home or not at all. cutting out an entire market isnt smart for any business especially when its the market that created said company. do u think bitmain would be ne thing if home miners didnt buy their hardware?

I get your comparisons i really do but the devices you listed have issues....a pizza oven is large so cooking something small isnt practical....a cement mixer is the same way....buying a server....well idk what your point there is people use servers as home PC's all the time for whatever reason. most dont install win 7 and so on on it because the hardware is designed for server os's but some can handle non server os just fine and have drivers added to it. some people like having the best of the best for whatever reason even if they dont need it. but even with all the items you listed your forgetting 1 things....they all have flexibility when it comes to how it gets used. can you tell me where the s9 flexibility is?? i dont recall you listing any of that in your reply.

if we went by your logic that would mean someone that buys a truck can only use it to haul stuff and not as a daily driver....people buying a mac can only use it to do video editing and pic editing.....people with an xbox one can only play xbox one games....well last i checked 360 games work on the xbox one. now why is that?? its called FLEXIBILITY. no condition is ever 100% the same no matter how perfect it is there are always going to be variations and regular manufacturers dont limit their devices to 1 and only 1 use. can a carrot peeler also be used on a potato or even an apple or what about a cucumber?? next time dont be so rigid with your thinking. you will end up hitting a brick wall later on down the road and unless you change your views on stuff you wont ever get around it.

i know i would....it would be useful to home miners too that want to run their miners in the summer so they can underclock them during peak/high temp hours and run them at normal speeds when the temps drop and power rates are lower. i run 1 s9 in my basement to keep it warm in the winter but it costs too much to run these things in the house during the summer at least for me. in the winter they replace the space heaters i would use to heat rooms but high traffic areas of the house get an underclocked s7 not an s9.

im not sure why they refuse to add the ability to underclock the miner. i would think most people wouldnt/dont overclock their s7's-9's so removing the ability to underclock them is a bit confusing to me and i never really understood it.

im not sure why this isnt being answered when people ask but the temps are fine.

the reason the temps are different are:

1. they mix and match boards to hit the frequencies needed to hash at whatever speeds they listed the miner to have plus or minus 10%. this means they can add under performing boards that run at slower speeds and 1 awesomely performing board that can handle much faster speeds. they find the 3 boards...add their numbers up....slap a sticker on the tupe and send it off to the customer. not every asic/board hashes at the same speed. some batches of chips are worse than others and some chips in a batch can handle things better. so since the autotune firmware tunes the boards to the max speed they can handle to find the sweat spot some boards may hash at 500mhz and others will be 600+ and that 600+ board will be warmer than the 500 board because more power is going through it.

2. the heatsinks are perfectly set. look at other pics of miners....you will see alot of heatsinks that have fins that dont line up with the heatsinks next to it for whatever reason. maybe it got bumped or moved before the thermal glue set and hardened....who knows.

3. the position of the board matters alot too. the fan blade part of the fan moves the most air. that means at the far end of the fan housing and the center of the fan moves the least amount of air over the heatsinks. this is the same with each and every single fan ever produced lol. anyway since the airflow is lower in those spots the temps are warmer which reflects the differences shown in the status page. if there was enough room for another fan this would probably change quite a bit but miners want the smallest solution possible so they can pack more miners into a small space so you have to compromise a little.

4. the thermal glue is shit lol. if they had large 1 piece heatsinks like they did on the old s1's the fans would be quieter and the temps would be lower because there will be much more surface area than they have now (between the heatsinks and 1 solid piece spreads the heat out from hot spots to cold spots keeping the temps about the same). they chose to glue the heatsinks down so not much we can do there unfortunately but the glue they use is probably not the best solution available. the amount used also makes a difference....since we cant see under the chip we dont know if the glue is covering the whole chip or just a dot in the center or if they pushed the heatsink down or just let it rest ontop of the dab of glue filling all the space on the heatsink and chip. there are alot of factors effecting temps with just this process alone.

these are PWM fans so the voltage will stay the same at 12v plus or minus 10%. 3 pin fans are controlled via the voltage being pushed to the fan. if the controller can handle 3a max that doesn't mean its using 3a all the time. the usage depends on the fans speed and how efficient that fan is at moving the high volume of air through the limited and restricted space...basically like the guy above said the static pressure. pushing air through a hollow tube is much easier than pushing it through a tube with obstructions which is what the s9 is. You should also note that just because the fan spins faster or has a higher CFM doesnt mean its a better fan. it can use more power due to an inefficient design and also if the fan isnt designed for a high static pressure it can move all the air in the world and it still wouldnt be able to work with the s9's design. So there is alot more to fan swap outs than just voltage amperage and cfm.

NotFuzzyWarm  - yessir...i dont think the tiny traces can handle much more power than they are handling now but honestly i wouldnt want to test it anyway. chances are the traces are just the right size for the fans being used now and since mining is a numbers game im positive bitmain is trying to cut costs wherever possible even if that means making traces less able to handle bigger loads. smaller traces + less material = some savings that add up based on the number of boards they have produced. you can do what you mentioned and unhook the red and black wire and power them on directly from the 12v supply. You can also control the fan speed of ann the s9's if you unhook the blue wire and connect that to an external pwm controller. it has to be a 4 pin controller though not a 3 pin and it can only be the blue wire...the other wires stay in the molex connected to the controller. I posted this info in a previous post but if you think its a good idea so you can run the miner in your living room think again....it raises the temps so you need super cooling to run them at lower speeds and on new models you cant control the freq at all so its really only usable on pre auto tune firmware unless you have beastly cooling setup.

before you go replacing the fan with a different model you might want to check the power the current fan uses and how many watts the replacement uses. if the replacement uses too much ur gonna damage the controller. it may work for a bit of time but the extra wear on components will take its toll eventually and they will fail. are you willing to take that chance? that fan you posted uses almost 40 watts of power....im not sure what the stock fan is rated at.

the batch of s9's that were slated for a feb 20th delivery run faster and quieter than previous generations as far as i can tell. so quiet in fact i can run one in my house without hearing it all the way on the third floor when its running in the basement! it uses a little more power but its just there to heat the downstairs during the winter so the trip to the washer and dryer isnt so bad (tile floors and bare feet suck in the winter time lol). the rest of my s9's run in temp controlled rooms with dedicated ac units but so far not one of my s9's has gone down except for one that tripped the breaker on one plug because it wasnt able to handle the power draw. after replacing the wall socket with a 20a socket with 2 plugs and hooking everything back up it fired back up and has been running great. others say they have issues with all generations but i havent and i have almost 30 s9's running and buy them as i get the btc from mining so my generations are all spread out.

well first you need to know if the batch your miner came from was before the auto tune firmware or after. the next thing is to find out if its a post t9 miner or a pre t9 miner. either way im sure you wont have much luck finding a spare controller on ebay or amazon...your better off emailing bitmain about getting a replacement...they arent too expensive i dont think. the only way people are selling spare parts is if a miner broke and they wanna make money off the pieces that still function properly. since most s9's are still under warranty or are running fine chances are no one has had to scrap their s9 for whatever little bit of money it can get on the secondary market. you can try but why waste the time and effort? just email them and get info on a replacement controller.

over here fedex sends you a bill in the mail for a minimum of $32 and can be higher based on what is being imported.

idk about feb 20th delays...i got an email last night from bitmain saying my s9's are being picked up and my tracking info will be sent to me.

you should never buy a miner from anyone with bitcoins unless you get it from a trusted source and in this case the best source for s9's would be from bitmain directly even if they arent in stock. im not here to make fun of you and im glad no one else is being a dick about it too just be careful when/if you decide to purchase miners in the future. there are alot of scammers out there that wont hesitate to steal your bitcoins the first chance they get.

Doesn't sound like a "problem" to me lol. as long as you know the rules on ebay and don't get greedy selling miners should be smooth sailing. you can never know when someone will try to scam you but that's when selling anything really. I had more scammers hit my laptops i resell than my old miners i resell after upgrading. Just be sure to mark the miners somewhere and take pics of the serial numbers and sticker locations for the boards in case a buyer decides they are going to send you back boards that didn't belong to that miner in the first place. it only takes a few minutes to mark a board and take pics and it could save you some time later on if you do run into a scammer but they aren't as widespread as people think.