This thread has gone a bit quite lately so I guess it's time for a bit of update.
With the recent price drops I am not earning much more that I spend in electricity and with my cheap electricity contract coming to the end 01/08/18 a and the cheapest available now being more that 10% more expensive than current I have been looking for ways to increase efficiency. I have not withdrawn any of crypto for about 4 months ( I have some spent for new miners though) and have been paying electricity from my own pocket but I cannot continue this way forever so probably looking to have least efficient miners to run on the timer only on nights with cheaper electricity, should help with cooling as well in the next weeks heat. D3 that has been low/no profit for a long time are now doing better than S9 or A3 even with only 2 boards working.
There have been several discussions about custom firmware for S9 and also A3 but there is nothing widely available. There are some people offering custom FW for S9 miner farms but with minimum qty of 100 miners. I have also this site offering S9 and A3 firmware so that you can tweak frequency and voltage for better efficiency but they are not cheap
https://goprasoft.de/produkt-kategor...iner-software/
I was also thinking about the new S9i and fixed frequency firmwares on S9, I have tried both and they do work but increasing frequency with fixed firmware do not give more hashrate and they are both the same power consumption as stock firmware.
I was wondering also if L3++ firmware will work on L3+ and while I have not tried there are other people reporting that it works just fine, power consumption is higher but fan speeds are lower. I might try it a some point myself on one of my L3+'s.
It seems my suspicion about GPUs running Tensority algorithm have come true and there are now several miners for nVidia GPU's to run it. Single GTX 1080Ti can do 1.3kH/s compared to 0.78 stock or 1.0 kH/s of B3 and at lower power consumption, I have not tried myself because mine are rented out on Equihash ATM.
In the GPU front CN Heavy for AMD Cards payout have dropped considerably, I think it had a lot to do with NiceHash introducing CN-H on their platform and increasing network hashrate. Equihash has dropped a bit as well with ASICs coming online and some coins switching to alternative algorithmds like Equihash 144,5. I have been looking to swith my Tis to 144,5 as well but MR marketplace is a bit small ATM and only mineable coins are BitcoinZ and LitecoinZ which are not profitable. BTG should be switching to Equihash 144,5 in July as well so I am monitoring demand and payouts for this algo now and ready to switch.