So - I've been under a rock for a while, but just realized that I have three L3+ units in storage. At the time I stopped mining because they were worthless -- but now it seems they can make a profit.
Question is I see many options for firmware for these units. One from the manufacturer to make it an L3++. It supposedly saves electricity?
Any advice on legit firmwares for these units? I upgraded to L3++ and I have not checked the power usage, but seems to work normally.
Thanks and I guess I am back into this hobby. I've always used litecoinpool.org -- they same to pay the best (although it would be nice to receive DOGE coin paid out separately from LTC).
I briefly tried Hive OS, and it did a nice job of optimizing the frequency and voltage (per chip), but their management software is not very intuitive and they didn't provide much support in figuring out how to make sure the pools get set to what I wanted (they seemed to flip back to a default). So I dropped out of that and switched to Blissz. If you look around, you can likely find a copy of it (it's no longer supported, as far as I can tell, and it doesn't collect the dev fee). There was a dispute about the GPL and not exposing the source code. Anyway ... it provides access to frequency and voltage per board in an L3+, so I was able to do some optimization on my own. It's a little cumbersome, but once you've got the info you can set for max hash rate or max efficiency (within reason). You can find this elsewhere, but key things are MH/sec/W and HW err rate. I try to keep the latter under about 1%, based upon what I've read. Then I also use the 24 hour hashrate reported by litecoinpool.org to validate what I see on the Miner Status page.
The reported watts tracks well with the wattmeters I'm using, so I don't think you need to factor in power supply efficiency.