There are plenty of places in the USA you can get power for less than 10c / KWH.

 There are a few you can get under 5 even as a small miner.

 There are 2 areas you can get under 3 as a "home or VERY small business" miner, and another one next to those at a little over 4.


 That's ALL UP costs - keep in mind that there are some power companies *coughALLIANTcoughENERGYcough* where you end up paying more on the final bill for "surcharges and fees" than you pay on the base rate.


 THe problem with solar energy is 2fold.

 (1) The sun only shines part of the day, you have to have VERY LARGE battery banks OR a "grid tie" arrangement to keep the miners going 24/7
 (2) UP FRONT COST - when you amortise that over the lifetime of the gear, the end result tends to be a VERY VERY HIGH cost per actual killowatt generated.

 Keep in mind the solar panels are rated at their PEAK power output, with a high amount of sunlight feeding into them - their AVERAGE output is quite a bit lower over the course of a day, commonly 30-40% of that peak (less if you don't set them on a tracking mount, more if you do) and then you lose even more on days that are cloudy, rainy, or anything else that obscures the Sun for any part of the day.


 Similar issues apply to Wind power - you're going to get output at night, but even in places with a high "average" wind speed (NW Iowa for example, from personal experience) you still end up with periods of "not enough wind to turn the generator", others of "not enough wind to get full output from the generator", and sometimes "so much wind that the blades have to be feathered or the whole windmill turned out of the wind to avoid damaging or even destroying the blades and little-to-no output from the generator".
 You're not reliant on the sun, but the wind is even LESS predictable and a lot MORE variable on a shorter-term basis.

My long-time "router" for my mining (and everything else) was an old AMD K6-450 based Slackware LINUX box - which had more CPU horsepower than a lot of the current router "appliances".

 Currently use a Netgear "Blue Box" appliance unit - I've had VERY good results with Netgear professional line equipment over the years, NEVER had one die in less than 15 years of usage (and some over 20 STILL RUNNING).

 I don't do wifi - PERIOD. Security is a joke, reliability is poor, speed isn't really an issue but wifi is still trying to catch up with Gigabit Ethernet that's 15+ years old, dropped packets are a way of life which causes issues, etc ad nausium.
 IMO wifi is just junk that should only be used when you need a net connection to gear that *MUST BE PORTABLE*.

 If you plan to sell off your miners (I've eventually done so on ALL of the ASIC I've owned that I'm not currrently running, as well as many of my computers, and plan to do so on my A2s eventually), you can legitimately treat the miners themselves as "inventory" - makes them MUCH easier to deal with on a tax basis and is arguably MORE accurate how their drop in value over time ends up impacting a business.

Still wondering if anyone has tried A4s on LiteGuardian.

It took a lot of digging but I did eventually find a working link to The Stilt bios for download - last year.
No idea if it's still up or not though - the link I found refered back to his thread on the LiteCoin forums but I don't think there was a FORWARD link anywhere to the working download site.

 I made a point of downloading ALL of them at that time, and tossed them on a USB flash drive - if I can figure out how to get a FTP server working through my current firewall appliance I'll look into putting them up for download.

 Silentarmy seems to be getting competative figures now, I'll be testing that out on a couple rigs today.
 I don't understand why Claymore is so insistant on pushing Windows and ignoring LINUX, I suspect that more mining rigs run LINUX than run WIndows.

It's very easy to set up autostart AFTER Xwindows is running if you use the XFCE desktop.
XFCE has a specific menu to control auto-starting stuff.

1) Get the power second connector set up. There is a significant chance you can damage your motherboard if you don't do so and you push teh card hard enough, IF it will fire up at all with a power connector missing.

 2) You need to update your xorg.conf for the second card.

 3) Do NOT try to SLI the cards, it does not help with mining and in some cases can HURT hashrate.



 the lspci trick is vender-neutral, works on amd nvidia intel and older stuff.

Excluding the Pentium III and Athlon chips that left the silicon unprotected by a heat spreader, I've pretty much never had a motherboard outlast the CPU on it (and I HAVE had a few CPUs outlive 2 motherboards and still be running on the 3'd MB when I finally scrapped the machine for being too old).

 I've had a LOT of CPUs survive 20 years of operation.

 The trick is PROPER COOLING - if you don't let them get hot, they run for a long long time.

For those with the R9 290 or R9 290x, in at least some cases (non-Reference card designs are said to not always work), flashing TheStilt bios should work just as well for ZEC as it did for Scrypt or ETH.

 I did but none of the LINUX ZCash miners are worth using at this point as Etherium and XMR are BOTH more profitable for my setups currently.

The terra cotta stuff works, but it NOT intended to cool a room with a lot of airflow like mining gear would need.
For THAT level of cooling you need a full-on evaporative cooler - though there are folks that have videos showing how to "roll your own" evap cooling.

For your farm size, you'll likely need more than one evap unit, unless you go with a LARGE commercial unit.

 Can't upgrade, no LINUX version and *ALL* of my AMD based machines are LINUX (as are some of the NVidia based machines, and I intend to get ALL of my miner machines moved to LINUX over the next couple months or less).


 Up side - with so much hashrate moved over to ZEC, along with a bit more "profit-chasing" and bouncing around, ETH profitability is quite a bit higher than 2 weeks back.

5-6 cents per Curecoin the last month most of the time - which is a major improvement over 3c/curecoin 2 months back.

 Still waiting for LINUX, as *ALL* of my AMD-based machines are LINUX and I refuse to waste money switching them to Windows.
 I'm trying to move ALL of my machines to LINUX from Windows except the gaming-specific ones, have ZERO interest in regressing to an OS that is much less reliable and stable.

I wonder if that's why a lot of folks are having "crash" "instability" and "just don't WORK" issues with the 375.70 drivers?

 I did pretty well (as did everyone else) on those contracts BitMain was offering for a while.

 Not HUGE profits, and not up to their claims, but definitely profitable.

Avalon 721 has been annnounced - and it looks like that 1000 watt PS would work on it.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1673843.0

 Dunno why they changed their naming though.

 

 I'd be happier with them if they were a match per TH vs the S9 rather than targeting the R4 as their price match.

 The "smaller" power footprint though is a good thing, and will help them sell quite a few miners.


 Bitmain is only selling the R1 and the S7-LN <edit> on newegg and is sold out on the S7-LN already </edit> and those for a "limited time" and at a bit high pricing - I'd guess they're hoping for some "impulse buying" to clean out their stocks of those older units.



 5% difficulty is a bit on the high side at this point I'd say, unless Bitmain drastically drops the price on the S9/R4 or gets someone that WILL compete with them on pricing (Avalon has never bothered, but they do tend to provide higher quality gear).

 XMR or ZEC are still CPU mineable.
 Forget ETH/ETC on a CPU, they've been taken over bigtime by GPUs.

 Intel integrated graphics continues to be a pretty sad joke - AMD's 3-gen old A10s (like my A10-5700s) are STILL better overall performance than anything Intel has released to date, and the most recent Skylake stuff on the GPU side seems to be LOWER performance overall than the previous generation Haswell managed (though the CPU side got a good bit better at the top end).