Not specifically from mining burst, but just that drives DIE over time - and drives made in the last decade seem to be a bit less reliable on a long-term basis vs many older drives.
 Burst doesn't seem to put a lot of load on the drive once it's plotted.

 I speak from both personal experience (I only run folding when it's more profitable than doing other stuff with my multiple 1070-based rigs) and from talking to other CUrecoin folders, though I concede I haven't spoken to hundreds of them.

 I do NOT bother folding on older gear - it's not worth it, even the GTX 950 and 960 cards I bought back when the 9xx series was still pretty new aren't worth trying to fold with any more.

 I don't pay attention to the ASIC side, as that's not folding.

 And for the record - I'm not *currently* one of the big folders, but if I chose to be I'd easily crack the top 10 *AGAIN* with my existing rigs, though I'm certainly no competition to Ed barring a major cash infusion.

There is no "one true answer" as each coin is different, but there is a simple short guideline.

 Coins that have an ASIC option, GPU mining makes zero sense as a GPU can't compete with specialised hardware and will lose money.

 Coins with NO ASIC available and that are GPU mineable it makes sense where the coin can be mined profitably (or at least at close to break if you are hoping for a big pump at some point).

 Coins with no ASIC and no GPU program available, it's not an option.

It's worth doing if you already have the spare hard drive space, but it does NOT make sense to buy additional drives for BURST mining - even the low-cost-per-TH drives like the Seagate Archive series (which should work VERY well on Burst) would take FOREVER to pay off, with a significant chance of "dead drive" before it managed to do so.

 If the price doubled, that would change, but at this point the ROI payoff is measured in YEARS.

 If you're building a new machine anyway, it might make sense to "oversize" the drive a bit, but otherwise no IMO.


 On the up side, for those few of us that still have some 32-bit OS machines, the Java client WILL work on a 32-bit Java installation - one of the very FEW coins mineable at all on a 32-bit system.

As long as you don't make hardware changes or driver updates, the order should stay the same - AMD or NVidia.



Mixed card management can be a pain to figure out initially, but it usually just keeps working once you DO get it set up right as long as you don't CHANGE anything.

Pandaminer is probably the most compact for an 8-card rig, but you can probably build a 2-card rig in a very small "media center" type case with proper part selection.

 Quite a few MicroATX boards around that will suppport 2 GPUs.

Are you sure you ordered through the actual site of the actual company that made the miner?

 There are a LOT of scams around involving sites with names SIMILAR to a legitimate site that aren't the real manufacturer site (though that seems to be most common for folks to try to scam pretending to be Bitmain).

Per the initial review in another thread it's 3 connectors per board, so the point is moot - that's well under 200 watts/connector.


BTW, it's not the fault of the CONNECTOR that some folks had cables melt 'cause they didn't use cables with adequate wire gauge.

 At that kind of investment level, you should be looking into adding a GPU and a good power supply upgrade for an existing computer and look into altcoin mining, or wait a little while for SideHack to get his BitFury pod design up running and up for sale.

 No worse than the Spondoolies SP20E - most of which ran QUITE reliably, if not at their quoted hashrate, pulling a machine-limited 288 watts per connector (which IS the spec for the CONNECTOR).

 Titans and Neptunes had issues 'cause they were trying to pull 300+ watts through those same connectors, and had marginal setups on the circuit board to handle the current level.

 They definitely need to work on communications and on pricing to be competative though, except perhaps for folks that want miners "RIGHT NOW" and don't want to wait on the next batch of whatever out of BitMain or pay Avalon pricing for the 721.

 Bitmain does not have a monopoly - and to my specific knowlage there are at least 5 companies with working or are working on SHA256 mining chips (I am NOT counting Innosilicon in that, they appear to have dropped the A3 for some reason - likely relating to inadaquate efficiency if it was going to be comparable to the BW.COM LK1401 chip).

 The "apparent" monopoly was all about BitMain getting to market first - and Caanan killed it with their Avalon 721 release (and now there seems to be a wave of BitFury machines FINALLY showing up for public sale to add to the "overdue" competition).

 The others (BW.COM and one I've recently become aware of but am not allowed to talk about) don't appear to be interested in selling their chips or miners to outside customers (or ONLY to large industrial-scale customers perhaps in the case of BW.COM).

 Same chip running at a higher operating voltage, thus the reduced efficiency.

 Up side, it SHOULD allow better overclocking at more reliability *IF* you can keep the bloody things cool enough, as they're not pushing the "bottom end" of where the chip will run at all (which seems to be a lot of the issue with the S9).

 Actually, the majority of them are - but there seems to be more PPD being done for some sort of reward (via CureCoin/FoldingCoin or for EVGA Rewards) than for free in recent times.

 CURECOIN folders, however, with very few exceptions (EdOkkada for example apparently donates all of his coin recieved, but my research shows he's not exactly poor) are in fact folding for profit, or at least for enough $$ to pay the electric bill.

 R9 285 was one of the VERY FEW actual new GPU chips AMD added vs the HD 7xxx series to the R9 2xx line.

 It has very little relation to the R9 280x or R9 290 at all other than process and timeframe of release - it's actually more of a R9 3xx precursor, as it supported one generation newer version of GCN than most of the R9 2xx series cards.

 $1 / hour is an INSANE expectation for any GPU on any coin.

 I don't believe any of the current ASIC units manage that on a single unit - despite MUCH higher front end cost.


 As far as GPUs go, I'm pretty sure the Titan X Pascal on ZEC makes the more per day - at ballpark $2/day for a $1200 card.

Seasonic X series, SilverStone (any of their Gold models), EVGA G2 series for me.

 Enermax has been iffy on the few I've had, one died outright another is flaky 3'd seems to be very solid (the solid one is one of their Platinum models other two were lower-end).

 Corsair varies a LOT, seems to depend on the specific model and who's MAKING that model for them and I gave up trying to keep track on them years ago.

 PC Power and Cooling USED to be good when they made their own, but they've gone to junk since OCZ bought them out.

 Keep in mind that the top-end 3xx (and 2xx) cards have 384 bit (280x/380x not sure on the 280/380 non-X) or even 512 bit (290/390 AND UP) wide memory access, which makes their somewhat slower memory clocks give significantly more memory bandwidth than the 256 bit wide memory on the RX 470/480.
 This isn't as critical on ZEC which doesn't appear to be as memory-hard as ETH, but it still matters.

 Core clock speeds on the 4xx also didn't increase all that much over the high-end 2xx/3xx series cards - AMD seems to have aimed more at dropping power consumption with VERY good success on these MAINSTREAM cards - while the core count on the RX 470 is the SAME as the R9 280x/380x (2048) and the RX 480 has FEWER cores (2304) than the R9 290/390 (2560) or the 290x/390x (2816).

 Expecting the RX 480 MAINSTREAM card to OUTperform the one generation old top-of-the-line R9 390X is just WRONG, given the actual specs on the cards - the clockrate improvement isn't enough to outweight the lower core count, and the memory bandwidth just isn't there at all comparatively.

 Keep in mind that AMD started near the MIDpoint on performance (and a much lower price point) on their new generation - until they release a potential RX 490 or higher, the older cards are going to remain the performance champs (at the cost of HUGE electric usage).

 This is actually some bad news for NVidia, as the midrange AMDs are arguing pretty well against higher-end NVidia cards at a much lower price point for MOST usage....

 That was a very few very early R9 290 units that were actually R9 290X GPUs with the extra CUs locked in the BIOS.

 The R9 390X and R9 290X used the same GPU, but the newer card had BIOS updates and faster RAM (and sometimes more ram).
 There should be cases where a 390X BIOS will work on a 290X, particularly if it's the same manufacturer and same "model", but there is no guarentee.

 MSI Afterburner, set up a custom fan profile.
 Also a very good choice under WIndows to handle overclocking, undervolting, and setting power limit.

 BTC took a short-term hit from the Chinese Central Bank (which is part of their government) announcing an investigation into the big Chinese exchanges for alleged and suspected market manipulation and other such issues - Chinese investers panic for a bit, but seem to have recovered since.

 Price is STILL higher than it was a month ago, even at the low point of the dump it only got down *TO* right arouns the price 2 months back.

 I strongly suspect once someone points out how much foreign exchange comes INTO the country due to the sales of Bitmain alone, they'll back off on any worries about foreign exchange flight due to Bitcoin.