Quote from: MaGNeT on April 07, 2013, 07:35:52 PM

Quote from: ryantc on April 07, 2013, 05:17:01 PM

Quote from: MaGNeT on April 07, 2013, 12:25:34 PM

Work in progress:

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r254/MaGNeT76/hetframeisklaar_zps154ffbdc.jpg

Now waiting for the 2x HD7970 cards

that's a good design, I am thinking something like this, my previous design isn't that stable for the "second floor" cars.

I had some materials laying around, so the design was based on "hmm, what's in stock?" Grin

And to think that I received a bit of mockery at the time for my aluminium and wooden crazy-rigs... I never set fire to anything in the end, even with the 12-GPU wooden shelf rig (the second - long since dismantled - only had Cool

pulling its power from a single household supply...
http://www.catfish.sh/bitcoin/shelf-rig-mk2/13-early-shelf-rig-power-1.jpg

This was run non-stop, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for getting on for a year IIRC. Didn't ever turn the central heating on during the 2011/2012 winter - I even had to keep the bedroom windows open to let some heat out in December. Noisy, unpleasantly hot, and eventually unprofitable (until the recent insanity began).

Now I'm virtually all FPGAs and am desperate to get more hashrate (I'm a committed, but very small, miner), but FPGAs are expensive and only compete with GPUs on power consumption - in my experience (best hash per £ GPUs, so 5770, 5830, 5850, 6950 all with special tweaks; and a combination of Ztex's 1.15d and 1.15x FPGAs, so all Spartan-6 units).

I lost out on bASIC Tom even though I considered my due diligence pretty good; he had a record of delivering and didn't send off my risk analyst radar like BFL did. And whilst Avalon *have* delivered ASICs, I can't take days off work glued to my computer, propped up on amphetamines and repeatedly hitting ⌘R on the slim chance that I'll get onto the order webpage - and even then needing the luck to be able to actually *pay* and get a guaranteed build slot. I fear now is far too late anyway and Avalon have already sold their entire short production run, so it's 'start the process again'. I wouldn't be surprised if BFL go the same way, since there are too many rumours of chips not making the cut, and like Avalon they would only have a very limited number of discrete chips to package and test. With all the pre-orders, I'm sure I've missed the boat Sad

Sure, I have the option to spend another £5k on 25 of Stefan's wonderful little boards and build another cool looking rig. It will be ultra-efficient and use little power. But, like the current one, it only has around 5 GH/sec. The ASIC devices are looking like around 50 GH/sec for something around £1k to (probably) £4k. I had a paid-for ASIC order in along with the other early adopters, but unluckily my order was with Tom and not Avalon. So if the ASIC boat has gone, with terahashes of power in various states of assembly at BFL and Avalon (et al) already earmarked for customers, buying as many FPGAs as possible *now* doesn't sound like it'll ever pay off Sad

And that's even if I could get the FPGAs in the first place. Perhaps I should sell my existing FPGA rig for Bitcoins and simply invest (buy and hold only)...

Anyway back on topic, aluminium and wood with upright GPUs on PCIe extender risers (daisychained!) has proven over a year or so (IME) to be the best 'cheap' design. No ducted air analysis, no dead spots, easy to keep cool with a single desk fan, components accessible. Paradoxically, it's quieter than a game-boy-spec-extreEEEMEEE!!!!11! case with clever fans and also the best orientation for the GPUs. Here's one I made earlier (August 2011):

http://www.catfish.sh/bitcoin/open-frame-mk2/mk2-complete-light.jpg

...and what it evolved into (half of which is still running as I type...):

http://www.catfish.sh/bitcoin/open-frame-mk3/slots-full-above.jpg