Hey everyone, my new 7GH/S miner from Butterfly Labs finally arrived today, so I finally got to try it out. Butterfly Labs has gotten a lot of bad rep recently because they were completely unprepared for the sheer volume of pre-orders they received for their ASIC line of products, with people having to wait six months to a year just to receive their product. A lot of people did chargebacks and threatened legal action and there was a lot of people claiming that Butterfly Labs were scammers, but I can say for a fact that they're just a horribly managed company.
Anyways, back to the product:
I ordered this thing ages ago and I had pretty much given up on it ever actually arriving, so I was pleasantly surprised when I did get it today. Unfortunately, the difficult level is much, much higher than it was when I purchased the damn thing, and it's going to take a good 2-3 months of mining to pay off the box, unless bitcoins continue to increase in value as they have been doing recently (My god, they're at around 650 USD each on Mt.Gox at the moment!). That said, the market could just as easily crash, but hey, all investments come with risks.
The box is bigger than I had expected, but it's certainly not huge. It does make a decent amount of fan noise, but nothing that's going to keep me awake at night, and it's certainly not going to stop me from leaving it running 24/7 to recoup my initial investment.
Although it took absolutely forever to get here, now that I've had a chance to use it, I feel that it is a quality product. It took me only about a minute to set up with BFG miner (mainly because I didn't know the connection information for the mining pool off by heart), and after it started running, I was quite impressed to see that my "7 GH/sec" miner actually runs at about 8 GH/sec, a nice little bonus, if I might say so myself!
So, in short, Butterfly Labs has proven to have pretty horrible customer service and an absolutely ridiculous turn-around time, but they do produce a nice product, I only wish I could have gotten it earlier. That said, I do have one gripe: I paid around $350 for this thing (I think, it was a really long time ago, after all), and now they're already taking preorders for their next line of ASIC cards, which appear to be much cheaper. Then again, THOSE probably won't come out for another year or so, at the rate that BF Labs goes!
For those of you who don't have the money to purchase expensive mining hardware (I don't really have it myself, but I figured, what the hell) and just want to play around with small amounts of bitcoins, I do have a few more links to places where you can obtain free bitcoin currency. Once again, these bitcoin faucets are linked with adf.ly, please forgive my frugality!
Link #1
Link #2
Link #3
Link #4
Anyways, back to the product:
I ordered this thing ages ago and I had pretty much given up on it ever actually arriving, so I was pleasantly surprised when I did get it today. Unfortunately, the difficult level is much, much higher than it was when I purchased the damn thing, and it's going to take a good 2-3 months of mining to pay off the box, unless bitcoins continue to increase in value as they have been doing recently (My god, they're at around 650 USD each on Mt.Gox at the moment!). That said, the market could just as easily crash, but hey, all investments come with risks.
The box is bigger than I had expected, but it's certainly not huge. It does make a decent amount of fan noise, but nothing that's going to keep me awake at night, and it's certainly not going to stop me from leaving it running 24/7 to recoup my initial investment.
Although it took absolutely forever to get here, now that I've had a chance to use it, I feel that it is a quality product. It took me only about a minute to set up with BFG miner (mainly because I didn't know the connection information for the mining pool off by heart), and after it started running, I was quite impressed to see that my "7 GH/sec" miner actually runs at about 8 GH/sec, a nice little bonus, if I might say so myself!
So, in short, Butterfly Labs has proven to have pretty horrible customer service and an absolutely ridiculous turn-around time, but they do produce a nice product, I only wish I could have gotten it earlier. That said, I do have one gripe: I paid around $350 for this thing (I think, it was a really long time ago, after all), and now they're already taking preorders for their next line of ASIC cards, which appear to be much cheaper. Then again, THOSE probably won't come out for another year or so, at the rate that BF Labs goes!
For those of you who don't have the money to purchase expensive mining hardware (I don't really have it myself, but I figured, what the hell) and just want to play around with small amounts of bitcoins, I do have a few more links to places where you can obtain free bitcoin currency. Once again, these bitcoin faucets are linked with adf.ly, please forgive my frugality!
Link #1
Link #2
Link #3
Link #4
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