I grabbed a USB asic Dash miner off ebay a little while back for around $80 and have been using it everyday. This device is really just for people that mine as a hobby and will probably only get you one or two dash per year at the current difficulty. The power usage is really amazing at only about 9 watts and is powered from the usb port. The speed is about 7.5 to 8 MH/s and with a low power Rasberry PI or a low power pc you wont pull more than 50 watts at the wall.
You can mine other x11 coins with this, but keep in mine it is limited to only x11 coins unlike some other asic miners that allow you to mine other X coins. This device beats a GPU hands down and requires a fraction of the power needed by a gpu to mine dash.
I paired the miner with a tiny liva pc as the miner controller and plan to run a modified scrypt (litecoin) miner on this controller as well.
Here is a screen shot of the miner in action on the liva pc.
If you like to mine for a hobby and find one of these on ebay cheap, it might be nice to add to your collection.
I really want to try mining an altcoin for the kicks. However the moment I see that it is more complicated than connecting a USB (for example you need a liva pc here) I tend to give up.
But your setup is by far the simplest I've seen so far. Good luck with the mining.
There are even coins you can mine with your cpu I don't recommend this because it will destroy your cpu.
but if its just for the kick and not planning on mining for a longer time you can always try it out.
However i recommend to buy special hardware for this because cpu mining is not really profitable.
I mine some cpu coins with one core on my GPU rigs, but they are intel low power processors with non-stock coolers.
I just used that pc because it is low power, it will work with any other pc including your desktop provided you have powered usb ports or a usb hub.
What range of coins can be mined with that
Pretty much any coin with the x11 algo such as Dash, Granite, Goldblocks, etc
do you think pinidea x11 is only for Windows?
No, many people also use them on linux