takeshi7 :
This seems like a horrible value. $800 for a single GPU.
Yep, a $40 CPU with a $140 GPU. It's possible to build a system with the same specs for under $400, or one with multiple cards for $800. Or a more capable system with a proper CPU that can actually serve a purpose as a decent computer system once they discover that they'll be lucky to turn any real profit with it. Even if this system draws only 120 watts, at the current average price of electricity in the US, that would be somewhere around $140 worth of electricity used each year. Added to the initial cost of the system, one would need to recoup a fair amount of money before showing any profit.
Also, as a correction to the article, on their site they describe it as having a "1TB Hardrive", not a "1TB SSD". I'm pretty sure a huge SSD wouldn't serve any useful purpose in a dedicated mining system.
Plus, cryptomining systems tend to be bulky and gobble up a lot energy—some can consume more megajoules than mining copper, gold, platinum or rare earth oxides does—producing a lot of heat and noise.
But with Coinmine, miners won’t need to build their own mining system and can run different types of crypto networks on the same hardware.
Logically, a system with more graphics cards should require less power for a given amount of cryptocurrency mined, which is why they make those big, multi-card systems. A relatively weak, single-card mining system would probably be slightly less efficient, if anything. From an environmental standpoint, cryptocurrency-mining is not particularly good, either way.