Post
Topic
Board Hardware
Re: ANTMINER S3 Discussion and Support Thread.
by
Count_Frackula
on 15/09/2014, 19:10:23 UTC
ANTMINER S3+ -B9 sales open, shipping starts on Sept. 18th  Smiley

Price:      0.58 BTC
Total disappointment. Will skip this batch at this price.
Total agreement.

and wait for what exactly? this is basically in-stock

You could order a tube at .96 BTC per 1 TH/s Or, this costs 1.28 BTC per 1 TH/s (both are similarly overclockable so I am just comparing stock clocks).  The tube is in stock and is only 3/4 of the price of the S3.  These are nice, but not worth the 33% extra cost.  Maybe 10% at most.  The tube is a much better deal.

Assembled tube is $400 plus shipping, so $430-440.
So, both cost approximately the same $/Gh ($0.55/Gh for not overclocked tube and $0.554/Gh for overclocked S3).
Tube deployment costs $34/mo more than of S3 (tube not overclocked, S3 overclocked) per deployed Th if you plug in $0.12/kw electricity cost.
The difference would be even bigger if you overclock the tube.
In addition, S3 has a solid resale market (important!) and known reliability and ease of use.
I say, advantage to Bitmain, unless you are very technically adept and will assemble tube yourself and use it only a couple of mo.

They were selling tubes for .8 each a few days ago, but it looks like CanaryInTheMine is out of stock.  It was a hard choice for me to wait until B9, and order 3 S3s instead of two Tubes, but I'd rather go with something that has more proven reliability/resale.  The fact that S3s consume less power too was a big selling point for me.  That, and I'm familiar with the web interface, which makes deployment easier.