Regarding this post, it is very misleading:
1. Assuming you buy a HD7970 at $500 each, it does not mean 4 GPUs = $2000. At best you need a $250 motherboard + $100 of other components, and a $250 power supply to run 4 GPUs per system, so 4 GPUs become more like $2600. So for hardware alone at $15300 you are looking at most 24 GPUs which will give just under 17GH/s assuming you overclock them a bit, which bring to problems 2 ...
7970s are basically at the $400 mark now if you know where to look. I dont know what kind of miners you build, but $250 motherboards seem kind of excessive. You can easily build a 1200W system for $400 without GPUs. So the $2000 estimate is correct.
2. With that many GPUs you are looking at atleast 6000watts of heat, so you will have to allocate an entire room and maybe install an air conditioning unit, which raises the cost even higher. Personally I don't have a spare room in London, if I did I could rent it out for atleast $140 per week.
Why would you install an A/C unit for this? Just vent all the air outside.
3. With 6000 watts power consumption you really need free electricity to make any decent profit, if any profit at all, assuming your sockets can handle that much load.
Actually revenue from mining is something like 3x what the electricity cost is right now (@ 11c/kwh). I'll let you do the math on this one.
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You forgot the SMALL factor of paying for electricity of 9 x quad 7970 Rigs for a straight year.
at 700MH/s for each card, you're not talking about a lot of undervolting. Each of those cards will pull ~250Watt at those speeds, is that correct? That means prolly around 1.2KW for each rig?
1.2KW * 9 rigs = 10.8KW
10.8KW * 24 hours in day = 259.2 KWh
259.2KWh * 11cents/KWh = 28.51 $ a day
$28 * 365 days = 10,406 USD.
Even if you have "free electicity", someone is paying that 10k in electricity costs...
Actually "free electricity" is possible with no one else burdening the cost by installing solar panels. Obviously a large investment initially, but you get free power into perpetuity.
Let's entertain the cost of power however. You are roughly correct in terms of most of the numbers. However, I hope to god if you're paying for 9kW of power you're not doing it at residential rates, It's more like 7c/kwh here at most. Which turns out to be $6622.
The BFL mini-rig, even if you could get it to qualify for the same rates as the GPUs cost $735.84.
I also noticed that I made an error and typed $8000 for GPU depreciation instead of $7000 like I originally intended. So I will revise my original estimates:
25GH/s for a year in GPUs for $13600 (7000+6600). If bitcoin goes belly-up you can recoup your investment for $11000.
vs
25GH/s into perpetuity for $16000 (15300+700). If bitcoin goes belly-up you recoup your investment for $0.