11+ cents/KWH? You will not make NEARLY enough to get back your investment on anything currently available, and anything but an S7/Avalon6/BEleven is probably going to LOSE you money outright (those 3 units will be profitably, but probably NOT profitable enough to make back what you'll pay for them before THEY become unprofitable).


 IMO wait for the 14/16nm full custom miners to start showing up, THEN crunch the numbers on those to see if they're worth the risk of buying.


 Better option (if available for you) - move somewhere with VERY VERY cheap electric, THEN look at the 14/16nm gear.

Hmm, looks like my machine with the triple GTX950s aren't so bad after all on Ethereum.

 Only about 10MH/s per card but each card is eating LESS than 100 watts - looked at them with GPU-Z today and they're around 75% of TDP (TDP is only about 110 watts for these cards as I recall) - and even though the entire machine is FAR from optimal for mining (the A10-7860K is TDP 65 watts by itself but I suspect the way I'm pushing the GPU for RC5 work it's pulling more like 80-90 PLUS the motherboard and HDs) it's still only eating about 350 TOTAL watts when mining.


 8-)



 I can use that machine for other things, but forget trying to game on it while mining, TOO much other stuff going on. It DOES work for web browsing, though, with some noticeable but not horrible delays loading pages/updating.

That's probably the fan connection.
Overclocking is just a matter of setting up the right string in the configuration for your miner - but IMO it's a VERY VERY bad idea unless you have a very COLD room to run them in, the PS circuitry for them is very very marginal even at their "stock" clock - and realistically, that "stock" clock was a noticeable overclock to start with compared to the GC3355 "orb" units Gridseed made before they started making the GC3355 "blade" units.

 The mining chip ITSELF has plenty of headroom, it's the buck convertor stuff that gets easily overloaded and dies. Helps a LOT to put heatsinks on the critical parts, though.

152nm?

 Didn't think ANYONE still had that ancient of a process node available.

 On the plus side, definitely a cheap-to-design-for node, makes it a lot easier for the "consortium" to make a profit on the things and perhaps do a "next gen" machine a year or two down the road on a more efficient process node.


 Weren't the original GC3355 on a 55nm process node?
 What where the first ASIC for Bitcoin on for a process node?

I wouldn't build any new rigs just ethereum mining.

Existing rigs repurposed would be fine (Hi Phil).

If you're building a rig for something else (like I did this past week) running it as an ethereum miner for a while to defray PART of the cost is a usefull thought.

The way the price keeps drifting down and the diff keeps climbing makes achieving ROI on a new-built rig look pretty iffy at this point.

Right now, Ethereum is probably your most profitable coin with that card.

 Your cgminer issue might be bad configuration, or wrong driver(s) - I don't remember if cgminer supports OpenCL offhand (forget AMD Stream, AMD themselves dropped all Stream support almost 3 years back for ANY, and almost 4 for XP).

 You might need a different cgminer version for that matter, some of them were fairly specialised....

 Ah, but Bitcoin is pretty much ZERO return the last few years for GPU mining - ASIC got too efficient and powerfull too long ago  for SHA256.

 How many PPD are you averaging and how many Curecoin per day on average do you generate with that rig?

My guess is that the A4 units will come out at around $2500, though I'd actually prefer you to be right and they show up closer to $4000 (fewer sold = less hashrate increase for a while = my A2s pay off more before they hit unprofitable).


 I do love how I can just ignore my A2s for literally months at a time (I've got one that's been up for 4 MONTHS right now no issues - reconfigured my home to "summer mode" this week, and moved the other A2 units, so they've "only" been up for a few days as of right now - they HAD been up for the same 4ish months prior to my moving them) and they just keep hashing.....

Started mining Ethereum on my new machine - it was designed for combined RC5 (A10 GPU) / Mersenne Primes (A10 CPUs) / Folding@home (3 x GTX 950) work but I decided to repurpose the GTXs to mining for a while to help pay for part of the cost of the rig while Ethereum is profitable.

 Depending on what happens to DASH with the new but VERY LIMITED IN NUMBERS so far ASIC rig for X11, I might switch over to DASH mining for a short while once Ethereum becomes unprofitable or goes PoS and can't be mined.

 Once Ethereum and DASH are no longer profitable or barely break-even at best, I'll switch the GTXes back over to F@H and generate a few Curecoin while I'm at it.


 No, it's nowhere near an "optimal" mining rig - it's a "use what I got while it CAN mine effectively" rig.

 8-)



I'm learning to like the EVGA PrecisionX utility. Tried MSI's Afterburner, but couldn't even READ the bloody display on the thing due to excessive use of tiny dark fonts on a near-black background, and a VERY PITA method for switching between vidcards (on my machine it was showing the A10 as the first *5* GPUs somehow, THEN the 3 GTX950s, then the A10 a couple MORE times - and very ANTI-INTUITIVE and mildly PITA method to switch between GPUs, as well as a notable less friendly UI in general).

 I remember using some other utility on a couple of my 7750s at one point (probably something Sapphire put on one of their driver discs) that I also kinda liked, but don't remember if it worked as well - and all the 7750s are in Linux boxes now so they're all about aticonfig any more....

127.0.0.1 is your "localhost" address, ANY machine should respond to that port by default but only to requests from itself.

192.168.1.100 looks like your actual IPv4 address, and tells me you're behind a NAT firewall/router setup somewhere (very common in the last 20 years or so, as IPv4 addresses would have run out a few years ago if it wasn't for NAT/privatenets becomming widespread).

Seems a bit high for a GTX 950, I paid $139 (and change? can't remember offhand) each for my EVGAs BEFORE any rebate/etc type offer at Newegg less than 2 weeks back.

 I think they had a rebate offer on them, but I've never had anything but ISSUES with any rebate offer so I just ignore the things any more - at best, I'd have gotten one rebate out of 3 cards bought 'cause EVERY rebate offer I've seen limits you to "one per household" or some such.

It will probably draw most of the 12V from the PIC-E 6-pin and the EPS 8 pin connectors.

 The primary reason for the 24-pin connector is a way to short the power-good leads, either directly or via a switch, to turn the PS on.
 
I'm shocked it would try to draw ANY 12V from the 24-pin connector, but the U3s are pretty low power consumption.

FPGA might be doable in the timeframe Ethereum has left before it goes PoS - ASIC forget it.

The closest to a profitable USB-based Bitcoin miner would be Sidehack's "Gekko" stick - and THAT stick has never been profitable enough to achieve ROI unless you have free electric.

 It's probably the best USB-based Bitcoin miner in existance, though - and a TON more efficient than any GPU is at Bitcoin mining - I suspect it hashes more than ANY GPU can manage while just sipping at power....


 GPUs for altcoin mining belongs over there -------------------------> "Altcoin Mining" forum - and yes, there are SOME coins that are profitable for GPU mining if your electric isn't way expen$ive, but none that look like VERY good long-term ROI bets. Most of us that are profiting off Ethereum either already had older GPU rigs we could repurpose, got into it VERY early, or have other plans for the hardware once Ethereum becomes unprofitable.

Most Gold-rated power supplies are between 1-2% more efficient running from 220v vs 110v.

 The S7 does NOT use that exact of power draw - they vary quite a bit depending on the batch and individual units WITHIN a batch will vary, as well as if you're overclocking them and how much (or underclocking them 'cause it's too HOT and how much).

 Also, Bitmain seems to have done a lot of "cut and paste" on their specs for the various S7 batches, batches that SHOULD have had different power consumption 'cause they changed the number of chips on each hashboard were SPECIFIED identically in a couple cases. I'd take ANY Bitmain spec on S7 power draw with about a POUND of salt.

 Dualminer made small USB boards based on Gridseed chips, to my knowlage, for mining SHA256 and Scrypt with.

 They seem to be a reputable dealer/small manufacturer, but they're ONLY a dealer/distributor for the X11 machine.

 The thread should be moved to "altcoin mining" though.


 SFARDS does not appear to have anything to do with this X11 machine.


 X11 was intended to be "ASIC resistant" not "ASIC proof".
 I am a bit supprised there's enough interest left in X11 coins to justify the investment in a ASIC for them - Cleverhash couldn't get it done last year.
 I'm guessing THIS miner probably runs on older, CHEAPER TO DEVELOP, semiconductor technology than recent Bitcoin and the Innosilicon A4 chips use - perhaps as high as 55nm?

The ATX 24-pin connector as I recall only has a couple of +12 leads. Best to ignore it for powering miners, it's mostly about older voltages like +5 and +3.3 and such that USED to be used to power CPUs (and RAM and motherboard chipsets, it is definitely still used for parts of the motherboard chipsets and I *think* it might still be used to power RAM).

 Because for some folks with VERY VERY cheap electric, it IS still profitable - and even with average electric costs, a S7 is profitable - just not profitable ENOUGH to have a reasonable probability to make back your investment into it.



 
 And the 7750 has even less memory, which seems to affect Ethereum quite a bit. Guess I'll leave them pushing RC5.

There is nothing preventing Bitcoin from dropping below the "cost of mining it" - quite a few folks still run old miners that cost MORE to make Bitcoins than their cost, though the LARGE farms aren't wasting money doing that.


 If Bitcoin price dropped through the floor again, what would happen would be a lot of folks turning miners off - and that's likely to happen to a noticeable degree as of the halfing by folks with non-FREE electric running S5/SP20E generation gear and older as they'll be VERY unprofitable at that point unless Bitcoin price almost doubles vs. diff increases in the meantime.

 Even with CHEAP electric, S5s are getting really marginal even now, and SP20Es aren't a LOT better off (though they can undervolt to STAY somewhat more profitable easier than a S5 can).




 After review of the OP, I note that they're talking about the cost of running a bloody NEPTUNE - which is what, 2 or 3 generations OUTDATED by Bitcoin mining gear standards now? No WONDER they think the cost and the price are related, their COST is probably 3-4 TIMES what current miners cost for the same hash power.

I'm in A2 miners, not Alchminers - but from the reviews I've seen the two were very similar on efficiency, depending on how hard you pushed each one more than anything else.

 Titans do beat both on efficiency - but the A2 was definitely a TON more reliable, and from what I've seen the Alcheminer was probably more reliable as well (Titans have been widely reported to have cores die a LOT).