Looks like Bittware reduced their standard warranty for the "crypto" models. I believe they typically have 1 yr mfg warranty on their products. Kind of disappointing the warranty was reduced that much for a $6k product.
Yes, a 90-day warranty raises a LOT of concerns. Has Bittware done stress testing and has some reason to believe the failure rate ramps up after that timeframe? I could understand a 90-day warranty on support issues with a 1-year hardware warranty.
I was in the process of arranging my finances to purchase a few cards, but if the manufacturer has that little confidence in their product, they're sending me a message I can't ignore. Even the Chinese manufacturers (with their notorious quality) give 180-day warranties.
Just for some background, we have been shipping this board for 1.5 years now, and have had almost no field failures. It has gone through full validation, including thermals. We manufacture in the US using a Tier 1 contract manufacturer. Our standard warranty is 1 year, we have some products with 3 year warranties, and some customers who pay for extended warranties. We also generally provide unlimited support, as our normal customer is one who buys 10s or 100s (or even 1000s) of boards. We have been building high reliability boards for decades, with one of our boards being used as part of the traction control system on the TGV (and all Alstom train and subway cars) for well over 10 years.
When this mining opportunity came up, we looked for ways to provide a deep discount as we know this community is very cost sensitive. We also have concerns with the way that these boards will be used for mining, mostly from an ESD point of view. Our normal customers install these boards in servers, and are in properly controlled environments with ESD protection taken very seriously. So we lowered the warranty to reduce cost, and for fear of the boards being abused. Perhaps we went too far lowering it to 30 days. We also limited support, however, our normal support includes helping people develop their FPGA code on our board. In this case you are using code already developed.
Note that we do have onboard monitoring for temperature, voltage, and current, with thresholds set to shut down the board if it appears to be entering a situation that would cause damage. We provide a utility (console and GUI versions) that you can use to talk to this onboard controller via the USB and see what is going on with all the sensors. Unlike GPUs and CPUs, FPGAs have no inherent thermal throttling, unless the FPGA developer builds that into their logic, which is very rarely done. FPGAs also burn more power as they get hotter, so from a power efficiency point of view, it is better to keep them cool.
As for cost we presented, while I know it seems steep for this community, this is deeply discounted from our standard price, taking into account the reduced warranty and support.
From what I can tell, Xilinx has a 90 day warranty on their devkits, which is what the VCU1525 is. I'm not sure how long they will sustain that low cost, we know of smaller board manufacturers that pay more than that for just the VU9P chip itself.
and some are just insanely big. 
