S9 batch hashrates have actually bounced around a bit - mostly 11.73 and 12.83 or something like that.
 Seems like Bitmain had to start testing the chips individually before binning them for various clock speeds and resulting various hashrates.

A2's, Alcheminers, and especially Titans won't "flush out" for quite a while for those of us with VERY CHEAP electric - I've already RUN those numbers for my A2 farm and I update occasionally to account for price variation.
 I haven't bothered running the numers for "update the firmware to one of the varients that let me run the thing in even more efficient mode" yet as I suspect there isn't a lot efficiency gain available past the "non-turbo" setting of the stock firmware.

Folks mining with A2s/Alcheminers at "average US rates" will get flushed pretty fast, but if you're at 5c/KWH or less you've got a LOT of space for maintaining profitable mining.

 Gridseeds, on the other hand, are ALREADY very marginal to losing money at 5c/KWH - won't take much to start flushing those.
 Zeus, Silverfish, etc, fall somewhere inbetween depending on the specific miner.


 The joker in the pack is "when will the S9 get COMPETITION" - if it's in the next month or two, that will probably put a significant crimp on A4 sales.

I would ignore that so-called "worst case scenario" as it is completely IGNORING how quantum computers actually work to date.

Gee, what ever happened to "miners in May"?

Quantum computing does NOT do well on linear computations, such as ANY cryptocoin algorythm uses.

 The strength of quantum computing is in calculations with MANY VARIABLES in use at the SAME time.

 This has been discussed before.

The NVidia Pascal cards had a short run as "much better than AMD on certain specific algorythms" when they were released, but as of RIGHT NOW it's pretty much a tossup on mining efficiency between the two on a hash/watts basis - but AMD wins on a hash/$ basis since the release of the RX480.

 There is at least one exception out there, but it's not particularly profitable - certainly not even close to ETH/ETC profitability levels.

7c/KWH is on the VERY HIGH side for a major farm operation.
5x/KWH is kinda marginal long-term.

 Most of the MAJOR farms I am aware of are in the *UNDER* 3c/KWH range.


 CA has large areas that are good for evap, but they're pretty much all in the southern half - Mohave desert and south, specifically including the Imperial Valley and San Diego County (except Palomar) in my experience.
 San Fran bay area is a very poor evap cooling area, too humid too much of the time.


 If you have plenty of space between the cards and good airflow into them, optimally in an open-design no case setup, multi-fan works better for cooling.
 Blower is intended more for tight spacing setups IN a case.


 Innosilicon A2 (and Lketc Dragon A1, SAME basic design) units are rock solid - it remains to be seen if the upcomming A4 units are as solid and reliable.
 Bitmain Antminer stuff *can* be reliable, but the S7 and S9 don't appear to be as well designed for reliability as the S5 and earlier units were.
 GPU based gear varies - if you set it up well, it CAN be rock solid reliable as well, but cooling is VERY critical.


 Define "dirt cheap" warehouses - $1/foot, 50c/foot, 20c/foot?

 In addition to the power availability, you also have to factor in cost to COOL - or cost to move massive quantities of air and just live with the ambient temperature, likely BOTH. Misting systems, like any evap system, REQUIRES large amounts of airflow to be effective.

 BAD idea, that SATA connector and the circuit in the PS it is connected to likely is NOT rated for the kind of power draw that needs 16AWG wire.

 But that would EXPOSE their "ASIC" scam claims!

That evens out though, DAG file size increase affects everyone more-or-less evenly 'till the "too big for 2GB cards" point hits.

It's NOT an ASIC at THAT power consumption for THAT wattage.

 From the pictures and the specs, it looks like a custom RX480-based 6 card with risers setup - and the price is in line for that.

 It's NOT an ASIC which makes it a scam on it's claims - but it might be REAL.

NewEgg had some pre-built systems designed to mine Litecoin (Scrypt) with GPUs, but they've sold out on those - the last few sold at a discount to the value of the GPUs+PS alone, so those of us that managed to grab one or more got a good deal.

 3x R9 280X Gigabyte Windforce cards, Evermax Platinum PS, high-end case though the fans were kinda disappointing (turns out up to 3x 120mm or 140mm Deltas fit in the front though for some SERIOUS airflow). I swapped 3x R9 290s into the system and it's been ROCK SOLID since I got the cards upgraded with TheStilt bios on all of them.

Generally though, you ARE going to pay a premium for ANY pre-built system - sometimes a LARGE one.

 I'm pretty sure most 7970 were at least 3GB cards though?

 2GB versions will get to be worthless on ETH in a few months, but anything with more RAM should be no problem for the remaining POW time of ETH.

 GPU-Z appears to only look at power draw via the PCI-E power connector(s) on the cards - which leaves out 60-80 watts drawn via the actual PCI-E SLOT by each card.

"asciminer" does NOT make the Baikal miner - at best, they might be a dealer selling it.

ETC and ETH use the same software, the only difference is the pool or the wallet you use that software with.

The Baikal appears to be legit, quite a few reports of them "in the wild" around.
It does NOT mine ETH/ETC, it is for X11 (and possibly some of the other X13/15/etc type stuff I forget offhand on those - but I don't think it supports NON-X type algorythms).

 With *3* different companies all comming to market making X11 miners within about a 2 month period though, it's VERY iffy if any of them will ever achieve ROI on any X11-based coin (DASH is about the only one with significant market presence).

 In theory, the manufacturer will sell *1* unit to an individual at $450ish + shipping, but I've never found a link anywhere to actually DO that.


 There are *ZERO* reputable reports of any ETH/ETC ASIC miner - and every one I've ever seen a posting about was an OBVIOUS scam to date.
 Given the very short timeframe involved before ETH (and probably ETC?) moves to POS and ends all mining, I doubt that even a LEGIT ASIC would ever make back what you had to pay for it.


 Given some of the extravagent claims made, I have some serious doubts about how legitimate that asciminermarket site is.

XUbuntu 14.04, IMO - since you need X to mine at all and XFCE is a lot lover overhead and works infinitely better than that Trinity junk Ubuntu uses for it's default desktop.

1.5mm conductors should be plenty even at 120v.

I suspect that add on aliexpress was a PREORDER for the A4 - some of the EARLY info out of Innosilicon was estimating performance might be in that range.

 If they had gone with the old A2 form factor, and put enough chips into such a large box running at one of the more efficient points the chip is capable of, they potentially still COULD get to 480MH/s at 1200 watts ballpark - but the price from Innosilicon would probably be closer to $5000/unit for such a unit due to the MUCH higher chipcount.

So-called "USB risers" don't actually use the USB protocal, so that concept is totally impractical.

 They just "merge" signaling so that a USB-type CABLE can be used to transfer data.