Topic: The Chili – 30+GH/s BFL based Bitcoin Miner Assembly - page 71. (Read 137978 times)

They are better but they are crazy expensive and believed not to be worth the money, though extensive testing hasn't been done. The 11W/mK has been confirmed to work well though, so I'm going with that.


I'm going with a Hyper 212 Evo because the GPU coolers, although probably a bit better, are not worth the extra money IMHO. The cheapest place I could find one on the net was from bitcoinstore.com which obviously has the advantage of paying in BTC!

https://www.bitcoinstore.com/cooler-master-hyper-212-evo-rr-212e-20pk-r2-cooling-fan-heatsink.html

This is confirmed to be compatible with the boards and performs well with the 11 W/mk TIM.


I believe you will. I have just asked above for one of them to confirm it's the standard USB-mini cables they take. I'll be surprised if it's not, but I'm going to wait before ordering a ton of the wrong cables!

Haha totally missed this post, thanks for the update, and for the BFL joke! Very impressive timeline by the way, hats-off to you guys all round!

Could you just confirm that they take standard mini-USB cables like the OEM BFL stuff - got to order a bunch and don't want to get the wrong ones!

Thanks!  I'm in Texas, so that's great news for me.

I was looking over the thermal pads on FrozenCPU and I noticed there are pads that are rated 17.0 W/mK vs 11 W/mK.  I assume they are better, but I don't really have any experience with thermal pads.  Anybody have any thoughts?

Also, what CPU fans are you guys going with?

Last question - will I need to round up USB cables?

Thanks for the update.  How many boards are currently queued for production this week?

Texas

Great to hear that Friday is the goal date.  Where are they being assembled/tested/shipped from?

I know, and very impressive looking stuff too! Total pros, both of them!

Sorry, didn't realize you were talking about real chips. I'm just glad someone got the board working.

^^ See what I mean?!  

Still have 48 chips left for sale from my 128 chip buy.

PM me if you are interested.

They are BTC5.5 for 16 chips or BTC15.5 for all 48.

They are in Canadian Customs at the moment, will be released today or tomorrow.

Thanks,
af_newbie

Nobody is even buying chips that are in hand for reasonable money, trust me, nobody is going to buy your chip credits. I don't say this to be mean but to manage your expectations, sorry.

This is not an necessarily an exhaustive list, but it's a start. You will need:

A host computer
Mining software
An internet connection(!)
A PSU
A USB cable
A cooler (CPU or GPU - see above for ones that are compatible)
TIM (or grease if you're feeling lucky - again, see above)

Things you will NOT need:

A PCI slot on a mobo!

These boards have PCI shaped slots and brackets to help with mounting them, but they do not communicate via PCI, they are USB just like the BFL units!

That's all I can think of for now, but I've probably missed stuff!

EDIT: Required software is vanilla cgminer by the way.

Great. Now that there's actual demand for the chips..... I have 100 chip credits for sale. PM me if you're interested.

For folks getting boards potentially this coming weekend... what do we need to have in place to be ready to run the units?

Can we just plug them into empty PCIe slots and go to town? What specifically do we need for cooling? Do we need to buy brackets from somewhere for mounting?

I'd like to get whatever is needed on order to be ready for a fun weekend of playing with a new toy.

Although we cannot commit with 100% certainty, we are expecting to ship everyone's boards by Friday, Oct. 11.  (that's 2013 for the BFL fans out there.  )

The biggest risk to the schedule at the moment is how long it will take to program and test all of the boards.  We have a team lined up to do this but given that doing 100's of boards is VERY different than doing 1 or 2, we don't really know how long this will take.  We have solid estimates but they are only estimates.  If we start to fall behind on the first day, we'll add more people and a second shift if necessary.

This is true but that calculator will be pretty accurate up to Feb of next year when it should start to level off so if you can't ROI by Feb of next year then I don't see a point in a purchase at this time.  I'm sitting out of Asics until then, way too many pre-orders going around and nobody really knows what this difficulty is going to skyrocket to.

This prob won't break even but it's on time so far, so it's only right that I paid for 2 boards that I ordered from MrTeal last June. Hope assembly starts at 3rd Oct, time is money

^^ This.

At some point, the network hashing rate growth will slow down.  Even if BTC is $1000/BTC because there's only so much electric power on the planet.  That said, I expect in some point in the future, hashing ASICs will move to the next processing node (20nm?  14nm) and we'll get even more GH / J than we do now. 

But the real point is that it cannot grow exponentially forever.  Even the sun itself wouldn't have enough power at some point.

Fair enough, message MrTeal/ChipGeek if you want to know how long after assembly to expect delivery, but the OP implies that is price dependent, and it's also somewhat moot as you don't have any chips.

$300 for assembly is very cheap, and this includes all the R&D they did, which is not cheap, so this really is a hell of a bargain on the board front (IMHO).

The last thing I am here to do is defend BFL for a minute, don't get me wrong. My only points are:

1) I am doing anyone who wants to buy chips now and doesn't want to wait 100 days a favour by selling to them, pretty much by definition. If they don't want to buy then they won't, but if they do then they will surely appreciate the opportunity. But as I said, people can take it or leave it, I'm quite happy either way. But I'm trying to give people an opportunity the wouldn't otherwise have, not shove my loss onto people.

2) You and everyone else would do well to take that calculator's results with a pinch of salt. Or, more accurately, think about what you're putting in, and know how far down plot the results stay meaningful. If you fast forward those calculations a year or so more, you'd find that every clock cycle on earth would have to be mining bitcoins, and would be drawing all the power being generated worldwide. In the short term that calculator is a very useful tool, but people need to use their discretion to decide when that short term usefullness breaks down and starts spouting meaningless drivel. Not not many people seem able to do this. I'm not saying these chips are great value, or that they'll ever pay for themselves completely, but you need to have a careful look at the maths behind things...

I did, it says assembly begins Oct. 7, doesn't mention how long assembly will take.  I think my point is pretty valid.  I apologize to OP for the devolution of this thread.  I think $300 is a fair price for assembly/parts.  I just think the way BFL priced the chips and the lead time has hindered the project irreparably and these will have limited prospects as investments.  Don't get me wrong I think the same thing of all asics on the market that are in stock, they are just priced too high for ROI.  Again if you'd rather hash these boards yourself then do that, you aren't doing anyone a favor trying to sell chips unless they really want one as a novelty.