I like this! I think I should mount my FPGAs on the wall, too, but they'll be a terrible heating unit.

I hope you don't live somewhere where earthquakes are common!

Wait, what? Isn't that a single FPGA? Or is that just what you got for those lucky 5 minutes? If so, that's a little misleading, no?

Love your photos, The-Real-Link. What kind of camera do you have? Clearly no cell phone pics for you!

Answered in: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.msg638478#msg638478

Summary: our bulk prices are yet to be published. But, even our single quantity is better than your 100 if you optimistically assume we will get close to the performance you are getting eventually: $1.53/MH at 380 MH/s.

True, but like I said before, that isn't the hardware that's giving the higher hashrates. I'm confident that it's just a matter of time before we get similar hashrates on our board. Unfortunately, our focus these past weeks is on getting the hardware built instead of on code. That should change soon.

As for bulk pricing, we've already provided bulk quotes to inquiring minds via PM, but I'll publish a price scale very soon.

EDIT: Also, even if we assume that the X6500 will never reach higher than 250 MH/s, we still have the ztex board beat in $/MH, in small quantities at least:

X6500: $580 / 250MH/s = $2.32/MH (with early payment discount, it's $2.24/MH)
ZTEX: $460 / 190 MH/s = $2.42/MH

If you're not so pessimistic, and assume that we will reach the same hashrate, that would be 380 MH/s, or $1.52/MH.

Sorry for the off-topic! I hope to make an on-topic post here very soon, when I get a few more X6500 boards here.

How about dry ice?

I think it's time to update those calculations with our newer performance figures. As of the last few weeks, I've been running all of these boards at 180 MHz, or 360 MH/s per X6500. In the last couple days, I've been experimenting with 200 MHz, which seems to not work reliably with every board (some handle it fine as is). On one board that was having trouble, I removed the heatsinks and replaced the thermal tape with thermal epoxy. After that it has been running perfectly at 200 MHz. Power usage measured at the wall with a Kill-a-watt (before the 80 Plus Bronze PSU) is roughly 20 W (still need to measure this carefully at the board).

Assuming that switching to thermal epoxy will work well for the rest of them, let's say each X6500 will do 400 MH/s. This gives, for the 25 unit system, 10 GH/s instead of the 6.6 GH/s I calculated before. The price is still the same, so the cost/performance is reduced to only 1.358 $/MH/s.

Not too shabby, right?  

It's brand new, only mined about 300 shares on it so far.

250 MH/s and 17 W. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.msg584606#msg584606

Cost for you to build this system today:

16 X6500s at $550 each: $8800
Power supply (I used this one): $65
4 120 mm fans at $15 each: $60
Various Molex splitters and adapters: $20
16 USB cables: $50
USB hubs: $30

Total: $9025 / 4.2 GH/s or 2.12 $/MH

A lot of those extra things you probably have sitting around already, or you could find better deals.

The next price break above that is at 25 units. You could still run that many boards off of a single supply (400W) so your overhead cost would only be slightly higher.

25 X6500s at $535 each: $13,375
Power supply: $65
Fans: $90
Various Molex splitters and adapters: $30
25 USB cables: $75
USB hubs: $40

Total: $13,675 / 6.6 GH/s or 2.05 $/MH

You will also need a host computer to run the system, but you most likely already have that and the performance requirements on that computer are quite low.

Note that those $/MH are based on 266 MH/s for each X6500. I have every reason to believe that we will reach higher hashrates with improvements to the software and firmware in the future.

Looks great ngzhang! Can't wait to hear the price.

catfish: to compare to ztex, our dual FPGA boards are $560 each, or $280 per FPGA. His boards are $460 each with one FPGA. That's a big difference, eh?

It really just comes down to the design of the board that you prefer, though. I think all these boards look awesome, and it's great that people have some options, depending on their needs!

Thanks, and no the OS seems to handle it fine. The worst I've seen is that the bus is a bit bogged down, but that could probably be fixed by polling the FPGAs for nonces a little less often.


Yes! This system is built using the boards that we (fpgamining.com) designed, produced, and are currently selling. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.0

An honest review of this type of system should probably be written by someone other than me, since I'm far from impartial. Hopefully some of our customers will write about their experiences. I'll also try to write up some of the things I learned, so that others can learn from my mistakes.

The price is $580 per board at single quantity. There are bulk pricing discounts, though, which you can find in that thread.

It's an FPGA miner. There are two FPGAs on the board (Spartan 6 LX150-3) and they communicate with the computer over USB. We designed this board and will be selling it very soon.


Good questions!

1. The basic board is $610 $580, including heatsinks. You need only a USB mini B cable and a spare Molex "peripheral" power connector, or a basic AC adapter (aka wall wart). The boards along with cables and power supplies will be for sale on Cablesaurus.com.
2. Running the software is as easy as running phoenix or similar mining software. You just have to download the code and plug it in. Right now, the software isn't as slick as phoenix or especially GUI miner, but that should get better with time.
3. You only need an expensive software license if you want to develop new VHDL/Verilog code. The Xilinx software will synthesize the source code into a "bitstream" that is loaded onto the FPGA. The bitstream is the equivalent of a binary for a computer. As long as someone else will build the bitstream for you (we will), you have no need for the expensive software.

The best place for information is the thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.0

Here it is, 16 x X6500 FPGA Miners for theoretically 4.2 GH/s. With rejects, it looks more like 3.8 GH/s. 258 W measured at the wall.




This whole system is quiet. I have 4 120 mm fans cooling the whole thing. They're all running at full speed, but could probably even be slowed down a bit.

Yeah, it looks like the Mt Gox API was down for a bit. I'm thinking about switching to a different exchange, or maybe even making it an average of a few. Any suggestions of which one(s) I should use?

It would also be possible to let the user specify the exchange to use when generating the image.

Thoughts?

We're still mining, but it's definitely getting close to the "not-worth-it" point. One issue is that each payment needs to be over 0.00005430 BTC for the client to send it, and with the shares spread out over so many people, the payment per account is tiny until it has been mining for months. I made a payment today almost 3 months since the last one and there will still some accounts that were under that limit. I had to manually remove those and will need to carry over the unpaid earnings for the next payment... an extra pain in the neck for me.

So, my plan at the moment is to just continue letting the FPGAs do their thing, and checking on the earnings occasionally. When it's enough for the majority of shareholders to receive a payment, I'll make one. I'll keep an eye on the difficulty/price ratio and not mine when the cost of power outweighs the earnings. At that point, we should discuss selling the boards off. Thoughts on that plan?

Today's payment txid: 986d9a5048e9b29ed4af96c3868f981955e645b9529c3ff93e511751480a91b0

Payment time:

txid: 2487f5d874a344c4c77f3578634c6e659b52f18213f369e6b8d37a9b015dbab1

Sorry, I don't seem to be getting notifications from the forum these days, so I didn't see your reply. What kind of stuff would you be interested in helping with? Design? Backend? DB? The site is Python/Flask/MongoDB. The biggest thing to figure out right now is how to restructure the DB for pooled work. I have a basic idea down for using user accounts for requestors (each account maintaining a balance to pay PPS rewards, spread over all outstanding requests from a given user). Miners don't need accounts, but I'd like to copy the Eligius model to let a miner view some stats for a given payout address. I'd also like to get a nice API up.

Structuring the DB will be a task we would need to do together, but either of the other two things could be tasks you could mostly take on yourself. Interested?

Thanks!

And, another payment:

txid: 05096425978646edb4adf6ff176eea2aa9dfd7defa18891fa77c93cc8e941af2

Sexy.