I do not agree with Antminer S2's pricing - page 2.

whonesta

sr. member

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Quote from: crazyates on March 30, 2014, 11:49:10 AM

You're missing 2 things.

1) When the S2 was announced, Ant S1s were 0.98BTC, and the coinbase price was $634. This made the cost of buying 1TH/s of S1s almost $3200. Now you still had to spend a few hundred in PSUs, but you were hashing within a few days. The point is that upgrading only cost an extra $400, and you could cut your power consumption in half.

The power supply being included made the S2 a no-brainer for me. The power of running 5 * S1 = 2,000 watts for 1 TH/s performance. Using off the shelf AX1200 @ well north of 80% it would require 2 or an additional $500... 500 - 400 (above price diff) = $100 cheaper to buy S2.

That being said, if supply of S2's does not increase I will be building another 3600 watt DC bus..

crazyates

legendary

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You're missing 2 things.

1) When the S2 was announced, Ant S1s were 0.98BTC, and the coinbase price was $634. This made the cost of buying 1TH/s of S1s almost $3200. Now you still had to spend a few hundred in PSUs, but you were hashing within a few days. The point is that upgrading only cost an extra $400, and you could cut your power consumption in half.

2) The chips in the S2 aren't "underpowered". The reality is that Bitmain is using the same chips in the S2 as what they've already been using the in S1. The difference is that the S1 chips were set at max voltage and max clocks, for max performance. The S2 chips are set at the lowest voltage, with a much lower clock rate, for max power efficiency.

Here are the chip ranges:

The S1 uses 8 banks of 8 chips (total=64 chips) at 2.8GHs/chip for 179.2GH/s. The S2 probably uses somewhere in the range of 600-650 chips at 1.6GHs/chip for a total of 1TH/s.

It's theoretically possible to take an S2, and increase the chip voltage and clock speeds to higher, but IDK if the boards can handle it, nor if the PSU it comes with can handle it. You could probably OC to 1.2 or more pretty easily, tho.

black3000gt

newbie

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Quote from: kthejung on March 30, 2014, 11:30:54 AM

Quote from: Threader on March 30, 2014, 11:24:48 AM

money talks so walk away and spend elsewhere. Do you think Bitmain really cares about your personal rationalizations. 2 pre-order batches are fully sold out. The next ones will as well.

You are right, i.e. Butterfly Labs is a successful company regardless of the actual value of their products, due to their hardware sales.

You are comparing apples and oranges when comparing bfl to bitmain. Bitmain in my opinion is the best hardware manufacturer and bfl might be the worst.

kthejung

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Quote from: Threader on March 30, 2014, 11:24:48 AM

money talks so walk away and spend elsewhere. Do you think Bitmain really cares about your personal rationalizations. 2 pre-order batches are fully sold out. The next ones will as well.

You are right, i.e. Butterfly Labs is a successful company regardless of the actual value of their products, due to their amount of hardware sales.

black3000gt

newbie

Activity: 47

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Apparently not many people agree since they sold out the first 2 batches in like 2 hours. I agree the price is steep, but the demand is there. You get to a point where you need to scale to stay in the mining game. You will run a lot more hash for the kw. On a 20 amp circuit you can run 2th with the s2 as oppose to 800gh of s1's.

Threader

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money talks so walk away and spend elsewhere. Do you think Bitmain really cares about your personal rationalizations. 2 pre-order batches are fully sold out. The next ones will as well.

kthejung

full member

Activity: 210

Merit: 100

So... Bitmain wants $3600 for the Antminer S2. This is taking into consideration that the same 1 T/H performance can be bought for $2,000(at time of this writing, from Bitmain) in 5 Antminer S1's. Sure, the S2 uses half the electricity, but that still does not justify the $1,600 higher price tag. 5 S1's use about $200 in electricity per month so S1's, being half that, would only save $100 per month for electricity. That means that the S2 would have to run for 16 months to make up for the initial price difference. I heard someone mention that the S2 may be seriously underpowered and is much more powerful than advertised. Is this true? Otherwise, the S2's pricing makes no sense.

added: ...unless the price of Bitcoin increases drastically and electrical efficiency becomes that much more important...

Topic: I do not agree with Antminer S2's pricing - page 2. (Read 7634 times)