Antminer L3+ Efficiency The most important comparison criteria for a miner is efficiency, which measures the miner’s hashrate VS. Its power usage. Greater hashrate will get you more of a return but entails more power costs, which can end up eating your earnings. An efficient miner gets you better hashrate for less power. The Antminer L3+ boasts in a hashrate of ~504 MH/s for a power consumption of 800W. For comparison, its retired competitor, the A4 Dominator by Innosilicon was able to deliver a hashrate of 280 MH/s for 1050 watts, which is about half the hashrate for 30% more power draw. Interestingly enough, the A4+ “LTCMaster”, Innosilicon’s latest Scrypt mining ASIC, performs better than the L3+, with a hashrate of 620MH/s for a power consumption of 750W. However, the LTCMaster’s price is at least 4 times the price of the L3+, so it might take you a significant amount of time before you’ll get a positive ROI over it. Bottom line – raw hashrate doesn’t tell the full story, you need to seek efficiency. All things considered, the L3+ has an advantage compared to other Scrypt miners.
Antminer L3+ Weight and Size The L3+ shipping weight is ~5 kgs, making it fairly chunky compared to the A4+’s ~4 kgs. This difference might not look like much when sitting on the rack, however, when calculating shipping costs (especially for multiple items) this makes the L3+ significantly more expensive. The L3+ is a bit bigger (352mm*130mm*187.5mm) than the LTCMaster (350mm*125mm*155mm). This is another thing to consider when deciding how to stack your rack. Still, when taking into consideration the very uncompetitive price difference, the L3+ is still the leading choice.