FPGA

[Cheetahgod]

There is a seller on ebay selling the Sqrl Acorn CLE-215+ on ebay for $60 in sealed box. I picked one up to play around with.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/SQRL-Acorn-....c100148.m2813

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by Cheetahgod

There is a seller on ebay selling the Sqrl Acorn CLE-215+ on ebay for $60 in sealed box. I picked one up to play around with.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/SQRL-Acorn-....c100148.m2813

Why the fire sale? $330 list price http://squirrelsresearch.com/acorn-cle-215-plus/
Seems very cryptocoin oriented. What do you plan to compute with it?

[Cheetahgod]

The company shipped a bunch of these fpga miners but never provided the mining software.

[LaurV]

David used to be a member of our forum, but he disappeared some time ago.

For a while he seemed a good guy, till he went MIA.

In the past we (the forum) contributed to buy a KNL computer which he hosted for a while, supposed to be accessible by the developers here, which is now gone, and Ernst was trying desperately to get it back, if is still alive, nobody knows (I mean, the computer). I gave $250 for that, but never used the computer.

Later I bought from David a box full of used Titan cards for $1200 which he advertised on this forum, but when they arrived, all of them were totally destroyed, due to improper packing. In fact, they were just dismounted from the racks, still with all tubes, fittings, water blocks, and all the crap attached, looking like just pulled out from the sockets with a forceps, thrown in a huge carton box all together in a pile, without any separation, foam, bubble bag, NOTHING. When I took the carton box from the forwarder it was almost broken in two and bending in the middle (as it was about 80-90 cm long, and only like 20x30 wide+deep). Cards were scratching against each-other, they were only held each-other by the attached water pipes, which bent, and the water blocks from some cards were rasping the backside of the cards in front of them pulling out the transistors and memory chips from the back of the PCBA (no backplates, no bubble bags or foam separation, cards were held together only on one side, by the water pipes going in, and were free on the tree sides, like the pages of a book; imagine pulling 4 PCIe cards attached to each other, from the sockets, all together, without taking them apart one by one, throwing them in a box, and throwing also all the heavy, original air coolers on top of them, which were never used, as the cards were modified to water cooling). Then send this half way around the world, in a simple carton box, no reinforcement, no separation between cards. I made a lot of photos and documented everything from the unpacking of the box, including the handful of transistors and components recovered from the bottom of the carton box (no joke!), as many of them as could still find in the box, others were lost through the holes in the carton (I told you it was broken in the middle, like the Fedex guys carried on their shoulders like you carry a drunk guy, bent in half). David offered to return me a part of the money, and we discussed about that for a while, but at the end I gave up, because meantime (that took a while!), and luckily, working in an electronic factory where we produce high class PCBAs, meantime I was able to repair two of the cards, solder back the missing transistors and replacing the broken components, and a third is "almost" reparable, but I didn't have the balls to replace a memory chip. No, I don't mean reballing the BGA package, haha, I have new memory chips, but the one on the PCBA is cracked in a very un-convenient way and I didn't dare to desolder it yet. Another cards in the box were non-functional, they had some burned power mosfets, but we knew when we bought them, that's why he sold them to us "so cheap", because we said we can repair them (we replaced power mosfets for many Titan cards, we may make a blog about it sometime in the future...). At the end, I got 3 functional cards and the fourth repairable, so, I said, ok, that breaks to $400 for a card, at the time when a water-cooled classic Titan was like $600-$700, so I gave up in chasing the guy.

Then, the 2080 Ti's appeared, and I gave up the Titans completely, as they were SOOOO power hungry... But I still have them (in fact, I have 6, plus another 7 which I used for spare parts, beyond any hopes to be repaired, total 13, but 6 are functional, including the one with the broken memory chip, which works, boots, shows the text, but then when it switches to graphic, the screen is a random sea of flies), maybe in the future if I will invent a way to produce free electricity (or to steal it from neighbors ) then I will put them in production again.

Anyhow, keep your eyes open when dealing with these guys...
.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Later I bought from David a box full of used Titan cards for $1200 which he advertised on this forum, but when they arrived, all of them were totally destroyed, due to improper packing. In fact, they were just dismounted from the racks, still with all tubes, fittings, water blocks, and all the crap attached, looking like just pulled out from the sockets with a forceps, thrown in a huge carton box all together in a pile, without any separation, foam, bubble bag, NOTHING.

OMG that's criminal gpu abuse verging on premeditated cardicide.