Topic: I want to start mining. What's the best Hardware I should purchase? (Read 1475 times)

Better to buy BTC directly, or you can buy some S3 miners, if you want to try mining.

If you have enough to spend on the bill then you have enough to buy BTC. Because you're not gonna mine the same amount of BTC with any hardware you buy, in addition to the headache of flaky hardwares.

You should only consider what's shipping.

1/ Do the math. Work out the kW usage and costs of the various miners available, sticking with recommended manufacturers that gives you the best hash rate to power ratio
2/ Factor in the need for cooling. At the very least heat extraction from the server room.
3/ Factor in the various configurations of miners. Some come as complete units, others need a controller and/or proxy, and/or need a separate power supply.
4/ Factor in noise. The higher the hashing speed the more noisy the miners tend to be. Spondooley for example may make your lounge area unlivable. Noise will determine location on some machines, that and heat issues. Noise can also come from cooling if you are using extractors. Look at noise dampening tech for extractor fans, insulated ducting etc.
4/ Most of the more reputable manufacturers only accept bitcoin as payment, so if you intend to purchase a miner from them your first stop once deciding what you want to buy, is in most cases to buy some bitcoin. That means signing up an account with whatever service is selling/trading bitcoin, or if theres an ATM in your area or other means of acquiring bitcoin.
5/ Factor in import costs depending on which country you live in, or whether or not you are importing from overseas or purchasing within your country. Many countries have tax and import fees added at the border.
6/ Most reliable miners have How To's in the Hardware forum. Once you have your miners, search the hardware forum for the correlating miner and follow the setup instructions
7/ Sign up at a pool and point the mining addresses of your miners at the pool or pools
8/ Get a bitcoin wallet and withdraw any mined bitcoin to your wallet.
9/ Keep track of the difficulty @ http://nextdifficulty.com The difficulty typically rises about 5 to 15% every two weeks.
10/ Mine until the cost of mining meets the value of bitcoins mined ( probably within a month or two )
11/ Then join the rest of us in this forum who have become cynical and grumpy, and come moan about how fucked bitcoin mining is

Good luck and see you back here in a couple of months.

buy an s-3 for around 250-300 usd and mine.   worst case you lose 200-300 usd.

The best hardware to buy now? Well, that's an easy answer! Buy a time machine and go back at least a year. That's the last time hardware made any sense to buy.

Once you have your time machine, then buy a bunch of Bitfury rigs and KNC Jupiters. Use Wire or Credit Card payments or exchange dollars for BTC when possible. You'll want to hang onto your Bitcoin because they're going to $1100 by Thanksgiving 2013. If you go back further, buy a shitload of batch 1 Avalons. Do NOT buy from any other Avalon batches and DON'T preorder any BFL products. And stay far away from BitcoinASIC, lol.

Since you have such an awesome time machine, go back even further! Mortgage your house and buy a bunch of >$1.00 bitcoins. Then go back further still and kill Hitler and tell JFK to ride through Dallas in a bulletproof limo!  

Any other homework you'd like us to do for you?

Kidding aside, though, getting into Bitcoin mining right now - if you're hoping to make a quick profit - is probably ill-advised unless you can splurge on a whole warehouse and negotiate (near-)free power and all that.

So that'll be your first step: determine if you really want to get into mining at all, or would rather just buy the coins directly.

Assuming you do want to mine, second step: determine if you want to mine Bitcoin, or some altcoin(s)? (in which case, this is the wrong forum section)

Assuming it's still mining Bitcoin, third step: check out what's currently powerful and on offer.  AsicMiner Block Erupter Tube/Prisma, Antminer S2/S3/S4 / Spondoolies Tech SP20/SP30/SP35 are some of the names you'd probably want to check into.  The latter models tend to be more powerful, but sometimes you can find good deals on the lower-end models that make them competitive with the later models.  Other hardware is in the pipeline, but is anybody's guess as to when they'll be readily available.

After realizing that it is indeed ill-advised to get into mining right now, fourth step: Go back to Steps 1 and 2.

If you're thinking "to heck with quick profits, I want to mine Bitcoin!", fifth step: Do you still want to go big?  If so, back to Step 3.  Otherwise, check out smaller miners - while more expensive in terms of $/Ghash, at least you won't break the bank acquiring them.  There's plenty of smaller miners out there and plenty 'used' for sale that people are dumping.

If you're thinking "I still want to go big! (but not warehouse big)", sixth step: just read the particular product's official product page and/or forum thread.  They usually include some information on how to set them up, get them running, etc.  If you're lucky, Dogie wrote a guide for it.  If you're unlucky, you may have to wade through posts for details.

There's also cloud mining, but hit the Search field for that stuff.. YMMV with experiences there.

I have stable electricity and I have enough to spend on the bills. How do I go about this? What hardware should I buy? And how do I start mining with it?