Question: current state of the art in FPGA mining?

[periata]

I've been meaning to get hold of an FPGA development board for a while -- I have a few projects that would need one, and I've outlevelled stuff I can do with CPLDs -- and was just wondering what kind of returns I can expect from them.  Ideally I'd like the purchase to be self-financing.

I see some posts that talk about figures (e.g. 80 Mh/s for boards based on a Cyclove IV 115, like the DE2-115) but (1) they're all quite old and (2) the posts that talk about the board I'm most likely to get, the DE0-nano, are quite self contradictory.  I've seen figures from 10 to 75 (!) quoted for it.  So, anyone want to tell me what is actually currently achievable?

[naiqus]

Ztex？ There are a few other FPGA devices faster than what you mentioned.

[lostmach]

FPGA seem to have more interest again (because of the lack of ASICs availability), still FPGA are surprisingly hard to find. FPGA are expensive for what you get, $800-$900 for something that pulls 800Mh/s. The advantage is the low power required.

If you already work in FPGA development t would be a fun side project. But I wouldn't expect miracles at this point if you need to buy a bunch of hardware.

The open source FPGA dev thread is cool to read through. They have a lot of code up on github.

[periata]

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff to read.  Was hoping somebody could fill me in on the outcome of it all, as there's way too much to take in easily.  For the sake of clarity, I'll be being the FPGA board for another project, but was just hoping to use mining to finance it, so, yeah I'm aware this stuff can be expensive. I've been drooling over some of the big PCI-e cards for years, but can't justify that kind of budget.