Cough cough... BS.
Have a look at the the 100's of failures and long response times for RMA.
Avoid BFL like the plague. Best solution.
[–]rockkit 38 points 7 months ago
Doing business with Butterfly Labs is like dating a hot girl with a heroin habit.
Everything starts off well, then they...
1) Borrow thousands of dollars from you 2) Promise to pay you back 'in two weeks' for an entire year 3) Sleep around with other guys (
https://products.butterflylabs.com/65nm-asic-bitcoin-mining-chip.html) 4) Then show up at your door one night saying they'll pay you ten times the original money back if you can just loan them another four thousand dollars for a couple of months.
Anyone can get suckered once, but if you loan them more money after seeing what happened the first time, you're a fucking idiot.
THE ASIC
It took BFL 14 months from when they started taking pre-orders for their ASIC line to when they finally started shipping them in any kind of volume to real customers. In terms of actual ASICs shipped (Jalapenos take one chip, Singles take 12 chips, Mini Rigs take hundreds of chips), they're still less than 10% through their backlog.
http://bfl.ptz.ro/During this epic delay, two of BFL's competitors (Avalon and ASIC Miner) got their designs finished in less than half the time, then flooded the market with ASICs, absolutely crushing BFL.
http://thegenesisblock.com/asicminer-usb-bitcoin-miner-price-drops-80-to-0-175-btc/ http://launch.avalon-asics.com/Avalon and ASIC Miner both have 28nm designs in progress. At least three new companies have also entered the ASIC market, and all of them claim to have 28nm designs in progress. One of these companies has substantial Silicon Valley venture capital behind it and former Intel chip designers on its team
http://www.cointerra.com/team/And another has already demonstrated a working prototype
http://www.coindesk.com/a-look-inside-kncminer/What this means is, from a "getting the ASIC built" perspective, its almost guaranteed that another company will be shipping 28nm products before BFL. Its very likely that another company will ship 4 to 6 months ahead of BFL, negating a huge portion of the BFL units' ROI.
THE HARDWARE
Butterfly Labs sucks at making hardware. Their designs look beautiful in promo photos, but the actual build quality is terrible. Users have been experiencing major reliability issues in production.
http://buttcoin.org/butterfly-labs-mini-rig-is-a-huge-broken-unstable-piece-of-shit https://forums.butterflylabs.com/jalapeno-single-sc-support/4275-another-jalapeno-fan-failure.html https://forums.butterflylabs.com/jalapeno-single-sc-support/4238-jale-dead.html https://forums.butterflylabs.com/jalapeno-single-sc-support/4201-design-flaw-heatsink-allows-chips-exposed.html https://forums.butterflylabs.com/jalapeno-single-sc-support/4288-singles-arrived-doa-psu-some-dead-fans.htmlThe fact that people are reporting significant amounts of "DOA" (dead on arrival) hardware means BFL probably isn't testing units before they ship them out.
BFL has consistently demonstrated utter incompetence throughout their hardware design process.
Right out of the gate, BFL's ASICs ended up using 3 times their projected power draw, forcing a complete redesign of all of BFL's boards.
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/692-bfl-asic-status-3.html#post43041 https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/692-bfl-asic-status-3.html#post30481Following this, had show-stopping problems with signal routing, voltage regulators, cooling, and practically every other subsystem in the design. Since all the design work was done by off-shore contractors, this caused massive delays in reaching a working prototype; and many of these problems would never have happened in the first place if they had used more skilled designers.
When BFL finally did get their hardware into production, they regularly ran-out of critical parts like circuit boards and power supplies. This caused major delays in getting units to customers.
BFL claims their new 28nm card will have a power draw of 350 Watts, which puts it squarely in AMD 6990 territory.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/03/08/amd-radeon-hd-6990-review/9In case you're new to Bitcoin mining, 6990's run at pretty much the thermal limit for a PCI card. They come with scary warnings about damaging your system's motherboard and power supply, and have a dedicated "all bets are off if you flip this" switch on the back of the board used to enable "full power" mode. The 6990 was a difficult project even for AMD, and has had significant problems with reliability, especially in bitcoin mining applications.
The fact that BFL is planning to build hardware that runs at this temperature and power density is, frankly, terrifying.
A PCI card is a very different environment than an external box that plugs in via USB. They'll be up against all sorts of nasty power, signal timing, and compatibility issues. If a card fails hard, it could easily take-out the motherboard, and destroy other cards plugged in to it.
Its highly likely the finished product won't have anywhere near the hashing power BFL claims it will, and its almost guaranteed that BFL will run into epic delays during design and manufacturing, just like last time.
OVERALL
Within the next few months, there will be plenty of better, cheaper, 28nm ASIC mining rigs. They'll be real hardware that actually exists, and they'll ship on reasonable schedules.
Save yourself a world of hurt and don't send BFL your money.
