Quote from: BR0KK on April 09, 2013, 09:40:43 AM

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Now I'm virtually all FPGAs and am desperate to get more hashrate (I'm a committed, but very small, miner), but FPGAs are expensive and only compete with GPUs on power consumption - in my experience (best hash per £ GPUs, so 5770, 5830, 5850, 6950 all with special tweaks; and a combination of Ztex's 1.15d and 1.15x FPGAs, so all Spartan-6 units).

I lost out on bASIC Tom even though I considered my due diligence pretty good; he had a record of delivering and didn't send off my risk analyst radar like BFL did. And whilst Avalon *have* delivered ASICs, I can't take days off work glued to my computer, propped up on amphetamines and repeatedly hitting ⌘R on the slim chance that I'll get onto the order webpage - and even then needing the luck to be able to actually *pay* and get a guaranteed build slot. I fear now is far too late anyway and Avalon have already sold their entire short production run, so it's 'start the process again'. I wouldn't be surprised if BFL go the same way, since there are too many rumours of chips not making the cut, and like Avalon they would only have a very limited number of discrete chips to package and test. With all the pre-orders, I'm sure I've missed the boat

Sure, I have the option to spend another £5k on 25 of Stefan's wonderful little boards and build another cool looking rig. It will be ultra-efficient and use little power. But, like the current one, it only has around 5 GH/sec. The ASIC devices are looking like around 50 GH/sec for something around £1k to (probably) £4k. I had a paid-for ASIC order in along with the other early adopters, but unluckily my order was with Tom and not Avalon. So if the ASIC boat has gone, with terahashes of power in various states of assembly at BFL and Avalon (et al) already earmarked for customers, buying as many FPGAs as possible *now* doesn't sound like it'll ever pay off And that's even if I could get the FPGAs in the first place. Perhaps I should sell my existing FPGA rig for Bitcoins and simply invest (buy and hold only)...

I have no stake in Asics .... i decided not to because even Avalon could have been a scam (default op). I am a small committed miner myself.On my desk i have a beautiful fpga rig (Stefan's boards, 18 Spartans) chugging away 3.9Gh/s. I feel to upgrade but that would be an investment that i can not do at the moment....

Luckily though the current exchange value my investment in this rig will pay of itself in a few month (initially calculated repayment was 4 years!).

It is a shame though that Stefan won't be stocking 1.15x for small orders. Now you would need a large order on that to get FPGA boards (I can confirm this). Checking again on the 1.15y, the product page has gone, so I am suspecting that it is either out of stock OR you need to place a large order (unless someone can confirm otherwise).

I only bought 1 1.15x to get into the grind of mining and I can see that it does bring in *some* money in despite the rise of BTC. So I am waiting on CM1 as I have very little faith that ASIC's will make it to the mainstream bitcoin mining market at least for this year.

jml

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