Topic: Antminer L3 - 250mh - 400watt Scrypt miner coming soon - page 46. (Read 137431 times)

 The article is nothing more than ignorance and FUD.

 T9 mines faster for the same reason that pushing the voltage on the Spondoolies SP20E higher let it mine faster (with same number of chips instead of a few less, granted, but SAME idea).

 T9 is a string design like recent other BitMain miners.
 Fewer chips per string = more voltage per chip (and more power draw with lower efficiency).
 Higher voltage on chip = can clock chip faster at same reliability as long as you can keep the chip cool enough.
 Higher clock per chip = higher hashrate per chip.

 This is NOT new news, this is NOT complicate or secret, if the moron that wrote that article had bothered doing ANY research they would have quickly found out that the entire reason for the difference in T9 specs vs the T9 is TRIVIAL EASY to figure out and no "secret" at all.

Well put!

Thanks for the infos man, that was very informative, and your points make alot of sense. This said i find the short warranty and the "long game" a bit hard to mix in my mind, if the miners were 2 years warranty i would sign up right now, what's making me afraid is investing into something that could fail before i break even ;(, but maybe someday when i'm more mature in this world of mining, i will take the ASIC step

Unfortunately I dont have the answer you are looking for, but I have been in the litecoin community since the GPU days, and what I do know is that litecoin has consistently been the most stable and profitable coin in all of crypto currencies. Other altcoins and have come and gone, they go through their spikes and dumps, and litecoin has always stayed in the sidelines returning the same profit day in/out.

Like others have mentioned its definitely the long game with litecoin. Yea you can be more profitable putting your money elsewhere right now, but in the long run I have made more gains with litecoin than any other crypto. The second main reason is im constrained by power capacity (have about 10kw dedicated to mining), and currently the L3 cant be matched by any other form of hardware in terms of $mined/watt, be it asic or GPU.

For example and S9 can put out 19 cents of revenue per month per watt, the most profitable GPU algo (zcash currently) 28 cents per watt, and the L3 is now at 34 cents per watt.

So you can see where the true value of scrypt mining lies...for the home miner that is constrained by power (both capacity and price), it cannot be beat. This is the reason I have always been a proponet of scrypt/litecoin for home miners (and is the reason I started my whole scrypt USB stick project...which I hope to continue with a new version on the current generation of scrypt asics). Of course all this comes with a trade off and thats with a higher upfront cost, which again is not for everyone.

So it again it comes down to your individual needs...are you a huge farm with massive capacity and low electricity price? Go with a Bitcoin miner...do you want quick ROI and high resell value go with GPU algos...are you a home miner with high electricity and want to play the long game? Go with L3. But dont make a decision based on a simple ROI calculator and do your research.

Thx for the calculator, very useful, well this one show infinite ROI, sadly i think with ASIC as i stated before, it's either you buy it just to have one, but it's lost money, or you can invest half a million $ and make real money lol.

This calculator does account for difficulty.
http://www.vnbitcoin.org/litecoincalculator.php

you cant calculate diff increases really, unless you wanted to just add a static per week number. Theres too many variables and machines being developed that we dont even know when dif is gonna flatline or spike, so IMO, dif is impossible to calculate unless you add a static number per week. add 1-2% every 2 weeks maybe?
that calculator will be the closest you will find, as the rest are normal mining variables impossible to precalculate.


yes, most that dont have huge resources or cheap power, i think have been doing that for over a year now, choosing buying coins over ASIC mining ;p 
Lucky you already understand that there's more to it than profit   its about the EXPERIENCE, about being a PART of it, and of course about Decentralization and network security

Well a sane person would look at these numbers and just invest in the coins and call it a day... But I have never been accused of being sane so I am covered...

If there is any hope of this playing out in favor of the miner it will be a long game now.  It probably does make more sense to just sink the money into the coins and hold it, but what fun would that be?  Miss out on the daily mining drama?  LOL

But this calculator doesn't count the increase of difficulty, and it's the crucial thing for ROI. 1y of ROI is fine, but with ASIC you find it to be more like 2+ years.

the best ROI calculator will be what Jstefanop posted earlier in the thread, as, as he stated also at the same time, https://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/calculator  is still using 50LTC as a block reward ;p
https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/ltc?HashingPower=250&HashingUnit=MH%2Fs&PowerConsumption=400&CostPerkWh=.01

keep in mind theres alot of variables, but the bottom line IMO is : Mining is a long game now, EXPECT a year+ ROI unless you have "free" power ;p

Seems you are quite knowledgeable on those units, have you already calculated ROI with increasing difficulties & stuff and can give us an approximation of the true ROI ? i find it hard to calculate for ASIC based miners, i use this calc : https://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/calculator, with 1% increased difficulty, but aside if you don't pay for electricity you don't seems to get ROI like ever and even it take 2+ years. So am i doing it wrong or is there some sort of secret to find those device to be profitable, like only doing alt-coin ? I was told this calc may not be accurate either. What do you think ?


Thanks for your review man

I wish I could say I am a fan of Bitmain products... But that would be a lie.  Having owned the A4's before jumping into the L3's I can say that the build quality seems to be better on the A4's.  Inno did a good job and appeared to use rugged well made stuff to build their miners.  They are heavy, and ruggedly made.  Even the heat sinks on the boards are massive.  After that experience with the A4 you have an expectation of something similar with the L3 miner, but it isn't built nearly as ruggedly as the A4 sadly.

The L3 it is a small miner in dimensions compared to an S9 or and A4.  It is pretty light weight.  It has the same looking controller board that the other Bitmain products has and it uses the same GUI.  Boot times are also longer like the rest of the Bitmain products.  The A4 boots much faster and starts mining faster than the L3 or other Bitmain products.  The heat sinks on the boards look like the same tiny heat sinks used on the R4 and S9 miners.  

So far I have only tested the L3's on multicoin pools at Prohashing and now for a short while on Zpool.ca.  Overall with the proper settings on Prohashing it seems to be working pretty well.  For some reason the L3 doesn't seem too crazy about Zpool.ca.  Maybe it just needs to run and it will average out between the high and low hash rate swings.  Or it may need some specific settings to get the best performance out of Zpool.ca.  I really just don't like to see 500mhs only mining at 200mhs or less even if it is for a short while.  Of course I love it when it zooms to almost 700mhs, but hey that's how I roll! LOL  

So far it looks like power draw is consistent.  Power use climbs as the ambient temps climb and the fan runs faster.  And as I just reported the power use drops as the ambient temps drop and the fan speeds dropped.  In either case even  when the fan is running at higher speeds it does not ever really get "loud".  I would say noise from the miner is on par with a GPU rig.  So not loud at all really.  

At this point I have to say this miner hits it's target.  It hashes pretty close to advertised rates, power consumption appears to line up with the advertised consumption figures, it is quieter than I thought it would be, and is small and easy to find space for it.  You could run this miner in your home and not have to worry about crazy loud miners like the S9 or A4.  

My only concern at the moment is Bitmain's horrible track record for reliability.  This miner is doing everything I could have asked for so far in my testing.  I want to try mining on Nicehash, and over on Litecoinpool to compare performance, but so far it has done very well and I am pretty happy with the L3.  

Now hoping that they will hold together and we don't have more Bitmain hardware issues that seem to be plaguing the rest of their product lines.  I saw yet more reported failures out of the box for the latest batches of the R4's just today.  It does not give me any confidence at all when Bitmain is still shipping trash like this.  

So far I love the L3.      

So seems like my deal will go through with them, but they wont be able to send out my shipment until the first week of feb. As soon as I have the final numbers per unit and the freight shipping cost from them ill open up another thread for a group buy-in. It will most likely be conducted in a similar fashion to my USB scrypt stick pre order (except you wont have to wait months for these . All BTC will be pooled in a public address that I will send directly to bitmain, they'll pallet drop ship all the units to me in NY, and ill simply slap a shipment label on them and send them out to you guys.

I know some of you guys have PMed me already, but ill start putting a serious list together with the number of units you guys are interested in so if you haven't already shoot me a PM with the number you want (figure around $1600 each unit).

Can you speak about the "felt" quality of this miner ? like are the parts seems to be of high quality & such ? power draw stable, mining stable ? I know it's bitmain so they're known to do good miners, but just to get an idea.

Well it doesn't look like the L3 likes zpool.ca too much.  Lots of swinging HIGH and then LOW in the hash rate.  I added the d=65536 back to the settings and restarted hoping that might level things out, but it doesn't look like it.  So maybe Crackfoo can chime in here and make some suggestions.  I am going to move these back over to Prohashing for now.  

I saw some comments that the NH rate of return was the same as the earnings seen on PH.  So I might even try that tomorrow.  For now zpool.ca wild swings in hash rate have me questioning the results so I will be waiting to hear from Crackfoo to give this another try.

UPDATE:  Just checked the cooler night time temps where I have the miners.  The power use dropped down to 372 watts at this time.  So power draw may drop some more yet as it is still quite "comfortable" temperature wise.  So power consumptions is really good with this miner.  I would imagine during the summer temps the draw will probably top 400 watts but it looks like the power consumption figures provided for this miner were pretty accurate.

Found this as an aside....just me wondering about what it going on with difficulty for LTC and other scrypt (likely) ..Saw this article...This may be the next direction in mass
that bitmain goes...scrypt miners.

Anyway I watched the home bitcoin miners (at least at the 10c kwh rate) implode in 2014 with massive dump of equipment. As I had xfered my BTC KNC Neptune ASIC miner
(lifetime due to above of 5 months) to a KNC Titan Scrypt miner (waited till nov 2014 to get such) This looks awful familiar

Then I saw this article

https://news.bitcoin.com/chinese-bitcoin-miner-might-be-trying-to-corner-asic-chip-market/

Ack!

Think I'm gonna wait on these...this looks a lot like it could be the demise of home mining for scrypt miners...at least at these ltc to btc ratios and or prices for LTC as
an example.

Anyway I get 14.17 months at flat difficulty on the L3 yet....but then again at 400 watts you could maybe play the long game on these with heat in winter etc....a couple
years.

But price of LTC say and pow scrypt coins. With the additional Bitmain putting them out like toasters...too many variables for me to put my toe in the pool yet (I'll crack i always crack
all them nice 'whirly' fan noises and blinking LED's etc......but maybe I can resist till

Wow - it is as quiet as my 10 GPUs rig!

Super!

Originally the A4 announcement was in line with the numbers from the L3.  The A4 chip testing seemed to indicate they would be able to hash at these rates for a lot less power.  Then something was lost in translation as they bundled chips on the boards.  I don't know where the disconnect is, but it is clear they missed the mark pretty badly.  The A4 should be hashing like this and consuming this little power.  I think that is up to Inno to figure it out and get it fixed. 

I sill cannot get over 384watts.  It is pretty impressive.  I just moved them over to Zpool.ca to see how they hash there.  It was looking pretty good on Prohashing.  I will let it run for 24 hours on zpool.ca and compare the numbers and earnings. 

I sold my A4's as soon as I got wind of the L3's.  I like the A4's, they are well built, but they still have to get the bugs worked out of those miners.  Right now it looks like these L3's rated at 250mhs actually deliver more real hash rate on the pool for me than the A4's did on multicoin pools.  The L3's start off strong and continues to hash well.  My A4's would trail off and stabilize well below what I thought it should be.  And 1070w vs 384w? No contest.  The L3's if they prove to hold up and be reliable are the new gold standard in Scrypt mining.

 

I may get mine updated to batch 3 then sell them off, even at a small loss sell 3 get 2 maybe I don't know. I just find it interesting that there was that much of a breakthrough.

And you can carry on a conversation in the same room... No hearing loss required with the L3. LOL  

I changed the diff setting on the L3's to vardiff and they seem to be hashing a little bit better.  So the only setting I needed on Prohashing was the h=3.  So far so good.  The L3 hashes better than my A4's did for me.  So I am pretty happy about that.