Steambizzle...

Thank you immensely for all the work and frustration and suffering you have had to go through in organizing this group buy.

If I got the miner today it would only be churning out like $3 a day, with that number dropping by ~20% every couple weeks. At this point, I believe the most prudent thing to do is accept a chip refund as long as they are being offered, as the chips I ordered are rapidly approaching uselessness at this point. So that is what I have done.

However-- I am definitely interested in the fabled 55nm gen-2 chip-- and hopefully you will be offering assembly of miners using the new technology, so I am staying invested in my assembly/shipping in the hopes that at least a portion it can be used toward assembly and shipment of a generation 2 product in the (hopefully near) future.


I know you and your team busted your asses to have everything ready to go, expecting the possibility of having 30-40k chips show up at your door only to be left dangling in the breeze when *nothing* showed up, meanwhile bills still have to be paid, people still have to be paid, and development is ongoing on the board design. I get that most of the monies you collected for assembly and shipment have already been invested into the infrastructure to make this all happen to begin with, and the possibility of 100% refunds just isn't there. I understand this, it was a risk I accepted going in.

While a lot of us feel pretty royally screwed-- you were the one who took the worst of it, and I believe you have done everything you can to make all your group buyers whole again in this whole debacle, and I really hope we can actually see some hashpower rolling off your assembly line soon

That was an easy fix before it was butchered and had the pads ripped off..

It's hard to look at.

I would guess your options are to

1. Try to get a repair from BFL
2. try to solder wires to where the usb pins go to-- onto the side of whatever tiny SMD resistor or cap... not going to be fun.

It would depend on how badly the previous owner abused it. How hard was it OC? Did it run @ 85ºC 24x7 for 6 months?

It might be fine, or it might give you trouble down the road. I would think that if the card was used in mining and worked well at full stress and didn't crash, then it's a good card. The prev owner just did some aggressive burn-in testing on it

As long as it wasn't chronically overheating or stressed too hard and the electronics are all intact and the price is right, go for it.

Show me any other investment opportunity where you get 95% of your money back when it goes south.

This thread has been an interesting read.

I'm in Batch 4 and a month late and counting. With difficulty spiraling upward out of control, all hope for ROI is lost-- but I knew that was a possibility going in.  I bought several video cards just a couple months before ASICs annihilated GPU mining-- but at least I was able to mine LTC to eventually scrape up enough BTC to break even, less what I spent on this group buy.

Knowing the history of Avalon (mining with customer units before shipping them, etc) I was prepared for this eventuality, and I'm glad I only went in for 16 chips and full assembly. Total setback like $300-- which is a chunk of change, for sure-- but even if I finally do get a working miner, and difficulty is over 100M and it takes me 2 years to ROI-- I don't care.

For me it's about the hobby and the promise of what BTC *could* be.


I know a lot of people are in way deeper than I am, and I really do sympathize. Some undoubtedly saw huge dollar signs and invested heavily in vaporware. Investing in what they wanted to be real instead of what actually was real.

Much like "real" currency, only those with resources and power will have all the resources and power, and we little guys can't even begin to piss at the same trough as the big boys when it comes to hashing power. It's a nuclear arms race, and we all lost the second we didn't have an Avalon cluster back when difficulty was sub-10M.

I'm not going to speculate and toss out numbers I think people should get for refunds-- I just wanted to comment here and state that even though I'm pretty disappointed in how this all went down, I've come this far, and the money is already spent. I'll just wait for my chips and miner to come in. If nothing else, it will be an interesting coffee table piece.

Of course. They want to bleed you dry on interest.

Cool. Got my order in.

#100000066

Execute order sixty-six!

I followed this guide myself and it was brilliant. The previous owner of my 5970 had removed the heatsink to replace the fan, and didn't re-pad. It was a total mess. Shredded/missing pads. Bad job on the thermal compound on the GPUs.... nasty. The card was hot and unstable which led me down this path to begin with.

I used the 1 and 0.5 mm Fujipoly pads from frozencpu on all the various points and just ic diamond on the gpus. Been running the card at a tiny little OC  735/1100 with temps at 70ºC for weeks now.

I really *REALLY* dig this project. Looks awesome, and I hope I can scrape enough coin together to join up a group buy if we get a run of these manufactured.

Hope to join you at the grown-ups table soon

Salutations!

Welcome.

I just got two 7870s online, together hashing a little over 800MH/s

I'm in the process of selling my GTX670 to hopefully turn it into a couple 5870's to expand my operation.

Basically, from there, I'll be looking to add hardware with 1/2 my earnings and sock away the rest until GPU mining becomes obsolete and I have to switch to LTC or buy ASICs.


The hard part is going to be explaining the pile of open-frame PCs with 4 video cards in the server room at work...

Hi.

I just started my own meager mining operation a few weeks ago. This is all really cool and fascinating to me.

I noticed that also.

I've just been doing google searches referencing bitcointalk and it's working out ok.