Personal Experiences with BFL BitForce?

[etotheipi]

I have searched the forum and found a couple threads with about 2000 posts and a lot of yelling, but I didn't have the patience to dig into it to find anyone who said they've actually purchased and tested a BitForce Single. 

I was thinking that I could sell a few of my power-hungry GPUs and replace them with a BitForce single, but the specs seem too good to be true.  Does it really achieve the stated performance?  830 MHash/s with 80W power consumption, for $600...? 

Also, how difficult is it to get setup and grinding in Linux?

[1714956466]

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[1714956466]

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[rjk]

I have searched the forum and found a couple threads with about 2000 posts and a lot of yelling, but I didn't have the patience to dig into it to find anyone who said they've actually purchased and tested a BitForce Single. 

I was thinking that I could sell a few of my power-hungry GPUs and replace them with a BitForce single, but the specs seem too good to be true.  Does it really achieve the stated performance?  830 MHash/s with 80W power consumption, for $600...? 

Also, how difficult is it to get setup and grinding in Linux?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77796.0 <-- the wait list

I have one, but I haven't used it in linux. Basically the current downside is the ship time, which is quite a bit more than they say. You may want to lock this and dig some more, otherwise this will just become another one of those threads with 2k posts and mostly yelling. There is a lot of info although most of it sucks.

[etotheipi]

I have searched the forum and found a couple threads with about 2000 posts and a lot of yelling, but I didn't have the patience to dig into it to find anyone who said they've actually purchased and tested a BitForce Single. 

I was thinking that I could sell a few of my power-hungry GPUs and replace them with a BitForce single, but the specs seem too good to be true.  Does it really achieve the stated performance?  830 MHash/s with 80W power consumption, for $600...? 

Also, how difficult is it to get setup and grinding in Linux?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77796.0 <-- the wait list

I have one, but I haven't used it in linux. Basically the current downside is the ship time, which is quite a bit more than they say. You may want to lock this and dig some more, otherwise this will just become another one of those threads with 2k posts and mostly yelling. There is a lot of info although most of it sucks.

Dig where?  I searching the mining forum for "BitForce" and found like 6 threads, all mostly useless.   The technical discussion and regular discussion forums were also quite useless.

That wait-time is definitely unappealing.

[rjk]

Use search terms like BFL and/or Single as well as mini-rig. Also, forum search sucks, maybe try google with the site: parameter or look in the dedicated FPGA section (within Hardware) for individual thread titles that look promising.

[Phraust]

From what I've seen, they work well in linux. I've gotten mine working in Ubuntu and ArchLinux (they show up as USB Serial Ports, something along the line of /dev/ttyUSB0 .  Plug that into cgminer and you are golden.  A couple of caveats though:

1.  I'm using a pretty fresh install of ubuntu, so your mileage may vary, but I find I have to sudo cgminer to get it to see em.

2.  I've used Ubuntu through parallels on a mac, and ArchLinux on a Seagate Dockstart (ARM), so while they do work, it may take a little fudging here and there.  Sadly, I don't have a sane pc to test them on.

** Edit **

Forgot to say that yes, they do work as advertised.  With the extra firmwares out there, I've messed around a bit by reflashing them up to 896, and have slowly down-flashed the ones that operated poorly to slower speeds.  Two are down at 816 firmwares, two at 832, four at 872 and two at 896.  They are running in a pretty hot environment though, so when I move them somewhere cooler I should see even better performance.

Wait totally sucks.

[galambo]

I have yet to see any indication that these products actually exist.

[rjk]

I have yet to see any indication that these products actually exist.

That's because you are a stupid fuckup that is running around with his hands over his ears and eyes shouting "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA" in order to drown out all the real actual evidence that they do, in fact, exist. There are photographs all over the forum from many different users, and I know of at least four videos of these things on the interwebs.

[galambo]

I have yet to see any indication that these products actually exist.

That's because you are a stupid fuckup that is running around with his hands over his ears and eyes shouting "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA" in order to drown out all the real actual evidence that they do, in fact, exist. There are photographs all over the forum from many different users, and I know of at least four videos of these things on the interwebs.

I have yet to see any indication that these products actually exist.

[etotheipi]

I have yet to see any indication that these products actually exist.

That's because you are a stupid fuckup that is running around with his hands over his ears and eyes shouting "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA" in order to drown out all the real actual evidence that they do, in fact, exist. There are photographs all over the forum from many different users, and I know of at least four videos of these things on the interwebs.

While I do think that galambo's statement is silly -- there appears to be plenty of evidence they exist, but not much evidence as to their quality -- I do think your reaction is clearly incendiary and the kind of response that will cause a thread to spiral out of control...

So I just figured that searching a forum does not search the sub-forums.  WTF?  So now that I can search for "BitForce" on the "Hardware" and "FPGA" forums, I have what I was looking for.  So I am locking this thread to prevent this from becoming another slugfest like the other threads!