Here are my ASIC findings:- LA3M miner ordered and paid with BTC on 18 of February. Quick replies from Jack on sales related questions, but poor English. Had no experience with support related questions
- Miner shipped on 24 of February and delivered on 27 February, have to pay 125USD import tax on the package
- Sturdy and solid packaging, unlikely to get damaged in shipping. Hardware feels of decent quality.
- Some power cables are US some are EU, therefore you need some adapters. In total you need 4 sockets and an ethernet cable.
- Easy assembly, takes an hour to get up and running
- You can access the controller via its ip-address on your network. I used Angry IP scanner to find it (Mac).
- Software offers you insight in actual hashing speed and setting a pool for both BTC and Scrypt. Make sure you set a BTC pool even if you dont use it otherwise the software will not start.
- Software is buggy but gets the job done. Offers basic over clock features for scrypt mining.
- With basic over clocking 10 units (which is 1 miner) gives you around 3.5MH/s
- Unit takes around 5 to 10 minutes to boot up before it starts mining
- Heat and noise is low compared to GPU mining
Concerns- No failover pool can be added, therefore you can only add one pool add a time. This makes it impossible to lease your rig. You have no settings you can tweak except the pool and mining speed.
- The hardware offers the option to mine both BTC and Scrypt at the same time. However, when mining both the speed of scrypt decreases by 50% and becomes unstable. Therefore you only use this product to mine Scrypt.
- The 10 units give different speeds all the time, in general each unit creates 300-400kh (without BTC enabled). Some give you double digit speeds, some triple digit speeds. They do not give you the same speed all the time.
- When mining on coin-switching pools such as Middlecoin or Wafflepool the hash rate drops to 2Mh/s. When mining a single coin, for instance LTC, it goes back up to 4Mh/s
VerdictIn general the product is good as advertised, it get the job done, however at this point I will not invest more. The product is too immature, and the firmware/software is too buggy and lacks features. A lot of problems can be solved by better software but since this is not available of accessible for us we have to wait for this. Only the supplier can update these devices. According to screenshots this new software is already created but not available for us buyers. At this point in time we dont have any timeframe when the new software will be available, but this would definitely improve the products value.[/list]
As an owner of the 3MH/10-miner set I would agree with your assessment 100%. I will not be buying anymore of these devices until the new firmware is released and it has been clearly and factually demonstrated as being stable and usable. At the prices these are currently selling for we should not be getting "beta" hardware/software. To make matters worse the firmware is all closed-source, so all the really smart guys on this forum can't even help out to fix these problems. This is perhaps the most disappointing because the community is READY and BEGGING to help out and improve the software, but can't because of closed-source. This is a real shame in my opinion...
. I'm pretty sure LightningASIC is just running cpuminer and has built a simple web frontend around it.