This thread, while pretending to be "non-partisan" has tended strongly into the bfl camp off the bat, and now I'd like to pose some avalon questions (torn between bumping this old thread or starting a new one, oh well, here goes)


Question regarding QFN design: is the entire back of the pcb grounded? couldn't you place a big slab of copper with some heatpipes to some fins? to take care of some of this heat? or even better a big slab of copper with channels for running fluid for water-cooling?

I'm not convinced that the avalon cooling design is optimized at all, and I think there is a great deal of room for improvement (and thus, hopefully room for better performance/overclocking!)

Even just running some copper tubing squashed in between those aluminum fins, and running a chiller (think liquid cooling with icecubes)

?? is it worth it to even try to cool these chips better? or just attach a few extra fans and some venting/channeling and just leave it at that?

personally, I did not get any increase going from 12.10 to 13.1, and yes those squares were annoying,

I just went back to 12.10 and all is good again, roughly 665 from 7970 @ 1090

Does anyone know what circuit your typical electric stove runs off? in north america? specifically Canada?

(*side note, I don't use my stove, but the plug on the front of it seems to run my AC quite nicely

Update, after an hour and a half with 0 confirmations on my btc transaction, I now have 2/6, and my order has been changed to "processing"

-still no email from avalon

*edit, decided to lay down for a bit, got up waaaay to early in order to try to order. When I got up, my confirmation email has indeed arrived from avalon. and it seems to have arrived just moments after this original post.

ok, just got my third! email from walletbit, still no word from avalon, and still 0 confirmations on my btc transaction... maybe I should have tipped?

consider yourself lucky, mine still shows "cancelled" 

I believe what he meant to say was "Order # 1625, the BTC was sent..."

1625 btc is over 40 grand, not sure I'd want to gamble that amount.

When I go back to avalon site and view my account, it shows my order as cancelled still... I'm assuming this is the same for everyone?

ok, now the race is on!

*my own personal race between bfl product and avalon, will be interesting to see which arrives first (or neither?   )

same, no email confirmation yet

*edit* just received email confirmation from walletbit - all info looks correct, but they added a Batch number: 18520 - don't know what that means?

yours much lower than mine,

Description   Amount
Order #1597 - Avalon ASIC Unit x 1   56.82106592 (USD 1,500.00)
Item total   56.82106592

tx: d17b74bd7508545adb19f58f1e9b545550c84d685df1270f5deb87a5cd615c7e

??

I clicked the link it gave, but it showed an error saying my wallet was already opened, so I just sent payment to the address it showed me...

I hope this worked, it's kinda exciting/scary to just randomly throw bitcoins around though, I felt much more secure about my credit card purchase from "that other ASIC company"

tempted to attempt a purchase from batch 2.1 solely to see what comes first,

a shipment from avalon (when very few confirmed shipments have appeared, from batch 1 shipping, like a month ago?)

or shipment from bfl (who hasn't even built the device yet, and no idea when my order from early feb might arrive, if ever?)

- meh, if I'm expecting the price of bitcoin to correct back down to around $15-20, then it's not that bad of a gamble? like 50 or 60 btc?


I'm thinking I'm gonna order one just to see how the race finishes  -- though judging from the last preorder fiasco, I probably won't even get my order in, and all of this is moot...

let the chaos begin!

Thanks for that pdf link!

and yes, my original post is failing in logic... but it all made so much sense to me friday night after the bar... oh well, teaches me once again the cardinal rule: Don't post drunk.

(*though if I hadn't, I probably never would have been introduced to Rosenfeld's paper, so I guess one can find a silver lining there*)

I was on bitminter for a while, and I have to agree, when the pool goes on a lucky run, it is amazing and far outpaces what I would have earned on pps -x%

I've been thinking a lot about how the (soon to be) rapidly increasing difficulty will affect the earnings of different pool payment schemes, at different periods during the difficulty cycle, and posted a question to all pool operators.

I realize this amounts to nothing more than shameless self promotion, but with 2 pool operators replying in one thread? I just couldn't resist  

-edit: forgot to mention, bitminter incorporates the easiest mining interface ever - AND, more importantly, when the 7970's first came out the bitminter miner was giving me the best hashrates I could find (was possibly due to my inexperience with cgminer, but it took months before I could get an equivalent hashrate - DrHarribo deserves great credit for this, and I nearly forgot)

(*disclaimer- I'm very late to the game and don't expect to get any ASICs of my own any time soon*)

Premise:
I expect that the hashrate will increase greatly over the next few months (years?)

If I were a 'money-grubbing scumbag' (aren't we all   ) then I think I would most likely mine at a pplns (or similar*) pool for the first n days when the hashrate to difficulty ratio is favourable, and then switch to pps towards the end of that difficulty period.

My reasoning comes mostly from here

The reasoning being: the hashrate will be increasing so quickly that at the tail end of each difficulty period, the actual rewards paid out on pplns* would be much less than those of the pps systems (as I understand it, pps re-calculates their amount per share based on the difficulty that is set at the beginning of each difficulty change).

if this is indeed the case, then a miner on a pplns* pool (or a solo miner for that matter) could reasonably expect that he/she would earn the greatest amount of coins at the very beginning of the difficulty change, and much less as the next difficulty change draws near.

and, oh yeah, I promised a question...

Question:

What do you - the pool operators - plan to do about this? Will you simply maintain the status quo? Let the miners do as they will? Does this migration of hash power just become a new kind of pool-hopping? (never really got into pool-hopping myself, maybe this kind of thing is already old news to those that do hop)


Bonus suggestion: If I were an ASIC owner, and if I were a lazy bastard (aren't we all ) I would be on the lookout for a "progressive" pps pool. This pool would offer low percentages at the beginning of the difficulty change, and then grow to progressively larger % towards the end ( say, 1% first few days, then 2% for a few days, and so on, until a max of say 5% near the end of the diff. period)


I dunno? Stellar idea? or stupid? let me know!



* for the purpose of this thread I am lumping all non-pps payment schemes together and just calling them pplns for simplicity. SMPPS DGM, prop. whatever... I believe the core issue will be the same in all cases, to varying degrees.

no reason really, just a guess on where the manufacturer might decide to place them, based on possibly shorter connections to those resistors? in the middle, (I know next to nothing about how this works, but I remember running into ram timing issues when overclocking when I had to use the further away pair of ram slots because my heatsink got in the way)

-- and also "cost-optimal" i.e. less costly for the manufacturer by allowing a slightly smaller heatsink base to cover all 4 chips?



My personal choice would obviously be the 4 on the corners to spread the heat out as much as possible 

- not sure where you got the 3mm number from, was that spec mentioned by BFL?

and thanks for the link! I was wondering where to find high-performance pads.

this "mega-miner" is now above 2.2 TH - unless he somehow has roughly 35 Avalon devices, I'm guessing that this is ASICminer now online and steadily ramping up production.

even without adding those 12 estimated TH to OOC's charts it looks like we should go past 10 million sometime in early march.

I suspect that it's possible that some of the people who got in on the second batch of Avalons might get theirs before march, (though I still haven't seen much evidence of batch one) but I highly doubt that any bfl orders placed after July 31 will arrive before the 10 million mark.

I'm expecting to receive my ASIC (which was ordered very late) on exactly my birthday (an undisclosed day in May) And I'd be ecstatic if the difficulty were still below 100 million! (OOC's charts say we should be around 30 mil by that point, but those are long range forecasts and have a pretty high degree of uncertainty at this point)

@OOC: -btw, any idea when we might expect updated charts?

Mister Gornick, could you please elaborate or link an explanation of this? I was recently trying to seach on this subject and came up empty.

if I send bitcoins, how do I prove that these bitcoins came from me?

many thanks to anyone who can solve this riddle for me (and if I can successfully figure this out, perhaps a small ((very small, I'm bitcoin broke atm)) donation

thanks in advance

--shmadz

thanks, this makes total sense, I'm familiar with these pads and I always thought they were crap for heat exchange. I've removed these pads and replaced with AS5 on many motherboards with good results, but it appears I may have been "playing with fire"    (never tried this on a GPU tho)

QUESTION:
Does this make the pad itself the "thermal bottleneck" in this system? and if so, isn't that copper heatsink kinda overkill?

In other words... Does the thermal substrate (in this case, the pad) have a limit to the amount of heat it can dissipate per second? If this is the case, then would it really matter as long as there's barely sufficient heatsink (i.e. able to remove the heat from the entire pad faster than the pad can transfer the heat from the chips)??