What would be the reason that one would purchase this unit over the S9? Reliability is much better or so I have read, but power consumption is not. Would it be the fact that bitmain is not months behind and paying the scalper prices on ebay is absurd? Not trying to start anything here. Just attempting to confirm what I believe the reasons are based on my research. All in all given the retail pricing of both units wouldn't the S9 be the better machine 9 (not considering reliability).
Well with Bitmain where you have to pay 3 months in advance for an S9 ... that's 3 months of lost mining ... which is a VERY long time.
If instead you can get a miner much faster ... then that also needs to be factored in.
At the moment neither of them can supply miners quickly, but a few months back most people ignored the fact you could get an A7 when you couldn't get an S9.
We'll see what happens when the A8 is released ...
Then of course, as mentioned above, the RMA on an S9 is pretty much a joke ... so you gotta hope your S9 never fails ...
I ordered two S9 in the beginning of November and they arrived today. I was totally not prepared as everyone says two months out and even the details on the order page said it would be from the January lot. So now I am rush shipping power supplies to make use of miners that arrived over a month early.