Topic: FPGA life expectancy? (Read 5201 times)

True.

For now tho, i decided to build on the GPU cluster for the next additional 3500W (25A circuits only as it's industrial location).
Also on this 2nd location electricity is billed annually so i can utilize the best possible BTC sell rate to cover that by choosing my time of the year to sell (when i think it's highest).

Another important pro for Icarus is that it is open source.

Cool, sold me on Icarus

Also decided i will re-arrange my GPU cluster to my 2nd location by fall, which needs heating 7-8months of a year, means getting some electrics installed tho. But that is "free power" in the sense that the location does need heating. We spent some 500€ heating the place late november to mid february even tho heat was rarely needed because it's so friggin' cold there.
Thanks to taxes etc. heating on heating diesel and electricity cost pretty much the same, very marginal difference.

Chip's speed is not the only difference.
Icarus also uses "Industrial" grade Spartans, rated up to +100 °C

I own Icarus and ZTEX boards and both are worth their money. Keep in mind that Icarus uses only SG2 chips. You compare a tuned Lancer Evolution with a Porsche. Like others wrote, a question of preference.

What kind of "performance guarantee" do you mean? X6500 boards (if properly cooled) run fine at 400MH/s, with the new firmware probably even more.
The Icarus boards are factory-programmed for 380MH/s and seem to still have some issues at 400MH/s.

Just an another example how chinese made stuff can be of amazing value
But yeah, one could use that board for something else too

ngzhang offers great customer support and Icarus boards have the highest resale value compared to X6500 because there are many available IO pins (80-100+), not to mention chip interconnection paths.
Also his design uses 100% solid state capacitors which is good for longevity.

* I'm not implying that X6500 is bad, just pointed some pros of Icarus.

Mostly personal preference. That's why looks to me by far superior
Actually i mean more like "so far", kind of language barrier going on there.

Z-Tex tho is expensive per Mhash, far too expensive.
X6500 is retailed by Cablesaurus and i dislike cablesaurus too much for their insane markups, but more the reason was package contents are not listed (no idea does it even include power adapter, and can i get it with euro plug)

Icarus comes with best performance guarantee too, and dunno, i somehow like to buy stuff from china Some of chinese stuff is just awesome value, tho sometimes you get total garbage. In some things tho they price themselves out of the game, being greedy and all that stuff, but that usually happens only with outsourcing, the reason for outsourcing is lower cost, and they expect you to still pay almost same rate as a local guy without language barrier, high education and higher quality of work.
Developers are paid 70-120$ a week generally in China but the outsourcing companies are asking for 1125$+ for junior developer a week. Local junior developer costs half of that (straight out of school or still at school) here at Finland. Tho, if that junior developer has even 1-2 years of work experience salary is easily doubled up at times.

I'd really like to get few BFL Singles, but the customer service totally sucks, the insane shipping costs (basicly a markup, nothing else), and their intention to significantly raise prices (likely pricing themselves out of the game) makes me not to want to put significant effort in using BFL Singles. (Developing cluster cooling, automation if needed, racking/stacking, things which are specific to BFL Singles and not easy to adapt to other FPGA miners)
Just something puts me seriously off about them, they feel arrogant.
No other company has issues on shipping to non-PP registered shipping address neither, so that puts me off as well.
Also the fact i have to likely wait 3months for delivery....

Just out of curiosity, how do you come to that conclusion?
What are the cons of X6500 and ztex?

yeah sounds a bit like electronics skills come in handy with FPGAs to keep them working, and AC not a bad idea.
Was thinking of installing to my office 1kW AC unit, afaik those small ones too get upto 1:3 efficiency ... I could keep the FPGAs churning happily @ 17C ambient all summer through.
GPUs not so much, but i got another location which is 900m3 of poorly insulated space to dissipate heat into ... Before even installing exhaust and intake duct fans.

Problem is electricity costs here 0.19$/kWh, but on 2nd location it's billed only once a year so i can choose the best time to sell BTCs to cover that. Trouble is, i've had now 2 GPUs fail within a week...
Even before using GPUs for BTC i've had several fail on me, so i'm starting to think the average lifetime expectancy might be quite a bit lower than generally thought for GPUs.

FPGAs are OC'd to their very edge for mining purposes as well...
Top that of that BFL wants over 80$ for shipping for each one .. Ridiculous - and even tho i have warehouse to have shipped to @ States, there is no method for me to use that address as Paypal doesn't accept foreign shipping addresses ...

So i'm stuck with Icarus/X6500/Z-Tex as my FPGA options, from which Icarus looks to me by far superior.
Tho, i can probably offset some of the acquirement cost by MFG'ng stackable casings for them with optimized cooling But no way knowing before i have enough to properly test and design the casing.

Only double for 10C? I don't know much about caps but my gut thinks it would increase life by more than double.

Hopefully they are not like those infamous caps in the iMac-G5

In distributed computing there are some ppl that have some 10 years old or older CPU wich crunch 24/24 and they still work without problems. Sure, now they are mostly useless but they still work.

Its hard to predict a payoff period because the price of bitcoin is so unstable. If the price goes up your payoff period goes down but if the price goes down your payoff period goes up. You also have to factor in difficulty if difficulty goes up your payoff period goes up if it goes down your payoff period goes down..... and there is absolutely no way to know what these values are going to be so I'd say plan for the worst.

In other words the life expectancy is anything between 3months and 10years, and no one has nfi.

Thing is i'm trying to decide to invest between 7970s and FPGAs, and it all depends upon which i can expect to utilize longer ... The payoff period in any case is going to be a long one, thanks to high electricity prices (0.19$/kWh)

The hours is at max rated temp. Rule of thumb is that for every 10 °C lower it doubles the life expectancy.

I noticed the big 330uf capacitors on the x6500 are only rated for 2000 hours which is about 2 months and 3 weeks my guess is they would last a whole lot longer though.....

Stock clock for chip mfg.  If the FPGA based miner manufacturer (like Butterfly) has run the chip beyond manufacturer specs it is in effect overclocked and all bets are off on that ten year life.   

Mining is a 24/7 task ... Does not relate what's the MTBF in the regular user usage and what is it in 24/7 100% utilization.

GPUs can last way longer than that, but generally people would throw them away after 5 yrs.
I've yet to have a GPU fail on me besides the fan, which is no big deal.