Yes, it appears I slipped in an errant "these" in my original question that did however reference ribbons. I've edited it for clarity, as I was speaking about risers in general, so sorry for the confusion. USB carries power obviously, so it's impossible to know if the 12v line is connected back without actually asking the question.

If you say so bud. Confirmation that none of the 12v lines were connected back to the motherboard would have been sufficient. I'm aware they are different products, that's exactly why I had to ask the question.

Do these allow current to flow back to the motherboard? That's an issue I've seen with a ton of these risers, which is easily resolved by modifying the ribbon. With these, I would not be able to make that modification if necessary. A ton of motherboards are being fried by the board being overloaded by current flowing back from the 12v line.

suspicious?  not for me.  more intriguing than suspicious, and this sparks my curiosity. 

i think there is a new player with new technology in play here.  Due to the supply constraints video cards, i doubt someone could have gotten this hash rate from GPU setup by dec 31 and start with such a large hash rate.  there just isn't that many video cards available from anywhere. 

if it was a botnet like a few paranoiacs were saying, there should be more fluctuations in the hash rate as unaware people turned their computers on and off.  

i believe this is the first evidence of a scrypt asic farm.  to see it on middlecoin should be no suprise to any of us here; middlecoin does outperform the others switching pools.  

we'll see others.  this is only the beginning.