Bitcoin Forum

The 5800 series is highly recommended?  Why?

If I'm looking at GPU mining, what should I look for?  Stream cores?  Memory bandwidth?  etc...

What makes a GPU great at mining?  Thanks!

I strongly recommend you do a lot of research into FPGA, ASICs, profit estimates if difficulty increases by say 500%, and the 25 BTC subsidy reduction (in ~90 days).

To answer your direct question.  The 5000 series is/was preferred because its architecture is well suited for the high IntOps that are needed for mining.
In mining all that matters is number of stream processors * clock.  Bandwidth, memory, PCIe slot version, none of that matters.

Now you can't compare SP from one architecture to another (i.e. 5000 series vs 7000 series) that is one of the reasons why the 5000 series WERE in demand.  SP per SP and clock per clock they had higher performance.

Speaking as someone with over 10GH/s on quad 5970s rigs they are operating on borrowed time.   It is only a matter of time before they are no longer economically viable.  Will it be 3 months, 6 months, 9 months?  Who knows I no longer even care to speculate.  It will happen when it happens but I can be "cool" with that because my rigs were paid for a long time ago and each extra month I get is just pure profit.  Obviously 9 months is better than 3 but even if it is 1 I will be fine.

Buying GPU now could be very risky for very little potential profit.

I've invested in BFL's ASIC platform.

Thanks for giving your feedback on my question.  You wouldn't happen to have any technical doc's that explain the 5xxx arch and why that's desired for bitcoin. Just looking for a very in-depth read.  Thanks!

Any information what IntOps means?  Internal operations?

 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU#Why_are_AMD_GPUs_faster_than_Nvidia_GPUs.3F

Thank you, this will be a great start point for me.

FWIW, I bought 7950s a week ago for a large mining rig to mine litecoin.  While bitcoin may quickly move to ASIC mining, litecoin is unlikely to in the near future and has been profitable for me to mine for the past 10 months.

I'm hoarding all the LTC I can right now because I believe as soon as ASICs come to dominate bitcoin the value of LTC will increase by an order of magnitude or more.

I would think you will see the opposite. Once ASICs arrive and the bitcoin difficulty increases by an order of magnitude, if people do switch over to mining litecoins, then you will have a sudden increase of selling pressure for litecoins, driving the price down.

If this occurs, it would be wise to sell your litecoins before ASICs arrive and not after :)

Depends if people value a LTC more highly then or now. One's opinion is the gamble he decides to make.

Kind of like the question: "should I buy facebook stock now or later or never?".. nobody knows the future, one can just do their research and make the best guess available.