Quote from: antares on February 03, 2012, 05:17:32 PM

Quote from: us11csalyer on February 03, 2012, 04:09:51 PM

I been looking at FPGA mining because of the cost of electricity and Dec 2012. Well I figure why not just keep going the GPU route? Why not power your mining rigs with wind/solar power? Sure there is a nice little start up cost; however, going green for your home means you qualify for tax credit. So for us with a set goal in mind for our desired hashing power wind/solar makes sense. Instead of investing in FPGA the offset cost between GPU and FPGA can be spent on going green. So you get same energy cost if you were running FPGA and you get the cheap hashing power of GPU.

So assuming 36 6870 for 10Gh/s
11,500 cost of PC hardware (not solar/wind hardware)
5 dollars a coins

By Dec 2012 You could very well be in profit assuming you sale coins above 5 dollars. Also after you're ready to stop mining or bitcoin goes under you still have green energy to keep your bill down, PCs, GPUs that can be sold, no trying to find a use for your FPGAs, and the warm feeling of going green.

There's other reasons NOT to go green. Besides the fact that it is way more expensive to get the green energy in the first place, and that it has an undetermined ROI, you should also consider that FPGAs have a HUGE benefit when compared to GPUs:
HEAT!

While going green sounds nice for smaller arrays, I have to keep the windows open for my 5 GH/s rig(this is january, -5° C), otherwise 2 of the cards hit a 100C. Besides, GPUs make lots of noise, which is another excellent reason to switch to FPGAs. My point is, that you can easily deploy FPGA's with about 10x the hashing power at the same electrical cost, without most of the heat, without almost all of the noise(since FPGAs can be cooled with lower-rpm fans that do make less noise), and at a ROI of 5-10 months. after that point you make decent profits.

You have to be pretty aggressive to get a ROI on a solar panel or some wind power generator in less than a year, and green energy, that isnt that green btw(considering that the CO2 bilance for producing a solar panel alone exceeds the CO2 balance for creating that same energy with coal or gas), doesnt solve the essential problems of mining and living in coexistance: Heat, maintenance and noise.

I have to admit though, that we did never turn on even one of our heaters since we installed the last 2 GH/s.

Yeah. Considering that FPGA are less likely to die than your GPUs and you got a clear winner. FPGA FTW !