Many variables, the units themselves vary a bit, temperature has a large effect, etc.

Power consumption vs. clock speed is pretty much flat.

 The exact halving time/date isn't known 'till it happens, but currently looks to be somewhere mid-July.

 Massive difficulty increases will move that forward, small ones will move it back, but not a ton at this point since we're getting fairly close to the time.

 Immersion cooling, I presume, to get that high.

 Going by Newegg pricing from when you COULD get that CPU, you can get an H81 for less than $20?

 Your CPU *ALONE* costs almost as much as the UD3 motherboard - which is a fairly expensive motherboard by AMD motherboard standards.


 P.S. Newegg lists that motherboard as having been around $60 - but "not available".

 Curecoin I'm familier with, and might actually start mining eventually "just because".

 What's the 3'd such coin?



 X11 coins can be mined for a profit if you have fairly low electric cost and an efficient setup. Haven't paid attention to anything else for a long time, as way too many of the "other than Scrypt/SHA256/X11" coins are fairly hard to find reliable exchanges for.

Given the cost of ANY Intel CPU, I can't see how anyone can recommend Intel-based motherboards for miners.

 Definitely go AMD.

 Gigabite has a new revision of their Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 board out, which is a good thing as the old version had gotten to be a pain to find in stock anywhere for a while.

 Oil will stay low and keep dropping as long as
 (1) China economy continues it's recession/implosion
 (2) OPEC keeps putting pressure on higher-cost producers in an attemt to drive them out of the market
      (which will FAIL long-term no matter what but might succeed for a few years 'cause they'll just ressurect when pricing gets high enough again).

 Oil pricing might get a LOT lower for a while if the Chinese economy starts dragging other world economies down with it.

 I wouldn't plan on oil prices rising for a year or two at least, then it'll take some time after that for them to climb again.

Given how little yuan is used outside of China, I don't see a "digitalised yuan" type currentcy being any real competition for Bitcoin.

 On the other hand, it does represent a strong INDIRECT endorsement of Bitcoin technology - as long as the Chinese don't decide to make competition with THEIR OFFICIAL digital currency illegal at some future point.

 More like $0.03 from comments I've seen, and at least one small area in the USA that can match that (for now).


 I am anticipating the next generation gear (14/16nm full custom) will start arriving before the halfing.
 BitFury is talking April, but I suspect Innosilicon might beat them to the punch.
 BW.com missed the boat with their B-Eleven NON-full-custom 14nm design, unless it shows up before the end of the month and significantly beats the S7 on price.

Might want to clarify your question, as stated it makes you appear to be asking where the biggest mining FARM is at?

Weren't you folks claiming more like 130-140 GH / chip with a heatsink?

 Or is that specific to a fan-cooled heatsink setup (I notice no apparent fan blowing on that HUGE heatsink in your second video)?

Serious overkill on that heatsink for 11 watts.
Still, not too bad of performance.

I'm not worried about the GH / Chip stuff, Bitfury has always prefered the 'small chip" approach.
It's not far different from the current Bitmain 1385 on GH/chip after factoring the node shrink.


It's also a positive for using a new process node, tends to increase yield some.

It's the law of compound interest in a different application.
5% interest for 14 years appx doubles your money, if compounded at least annually.

Zeus didn't have the fire issues. That was mostly the KnC Neptune and to a lesser degree the Titans, though the Titans involved seemed to usually be overclocked to achieve fire and major meltdown.

 I'm not in the market for ANY current scrypt miner - got nice reliable A2s already.
 Some issues with Zoomhash when I bought them, but the issues have been very nicely resolved.

AMD is better at some things, Nvidia better at others - and details of who is better at what changes sometimes.

 AMD for example has ALWAYS rocked RC5 (distributed.net project), while Nvidia has tended to usually be quite a bit better at Folding@home, just for 2 examples I'm directly familier with.

 Mining has varied - simpler algorythms like SHA256 were AMD ruled, more complex stuff like X11 has bounced around some with each new generation release between the 2 manufacturers.


 What has ALWAYS been constant is that Intel graphics are very very very low performance and that has carried over into GPU computational projects when Intel finally was able to start supporting such.
 8-O

Definitely true for Bitmain.
Appears to be true for BW.com/LKetc.
Definitely true for KnC.
Definite true to some degree for BitFury, though they seem more inclined to sell chips to large farm operators for THEM to build the actual miners with.
Does not appear to be true for Innosilicon.
Sorta-true for Zoomhash - they farm then sell on at least some of the gear they sell, even though they don't actually manufacture it.
Probably sorta-true for some of the other bigger gear dealers but I have no direct info in those cases.

Most of the large farms are not actual chip makers though - but even THOSE would likely get some big discounts on their equipment in bulk purchaces.

More that the others are too small a market for anyone to have ever bothered making an ASIC for them (though X11/X13/X15 had a company called Cleverhash doing development work on such a miner, they apparently never got the funding to finalise and produce their design).

 For SHA256 and Scrypt, ASIC are the ONLY viable options.

 For everything else, GPU mining should still be viable, though it won't be big profit at best.

 The Zeus models, when they finally showed up, were INFERIOR to the Innosilicon A2 by quite a bit - and didn't stack up any better vs the Alcheminer or KnC Titan when those showed up.
 There's a reason Zeus folded it's "making miners" tent, they flat out couldn't compete effectively enough to sell enough product to make back their development costs (though they got tapped by Innosilicon to produce some A2-based hardware for a while).

In theory, probably yes.

 In practice, most post-Scrypt algorythms seem to require more RAM than FPGAs have available.

 It would take modification to the FIRMWARE IN THE FPGA ITSELF, not just modification to cgminer, to do so.

Avarage cost for the big farms has always been quite a bit LOWER than average price, with the exception of a couple of very early farms that have probably sold out or shut down by now (like the Polish megafarm that was trying to sell of large quantities of 55nm Bitfury gear a couple of months back or so).

 Very few large farms TODAY are paying more than about 3c/KWH for their electric, which keeps their production costs quite a bit lower than the large majority of "home" miners.


 The bulks of Bitcoin mining is done by large farms, which has been true for a while though I can't say HOW long that's been true. I'd guess "3-4 years ago" would be the timeframe that the large farms started mining more than half of all Bitcoin mined.

 Block reward halfs next summer, probably sometime near mid-July. It will then half again about 4 years later - it will take decades for the last Bitcoin to be mined.


 No, but it's not going to be an issue quite that soon. It will start being an issue somewhere in the 2020s, when the halfings get the block reward down a lot closer to or under 1 BTC/block - IF bitcoin survives that long (I think it probably will).