Bitcoin Forum

Whats the best mining graphic card at a current time?
Im planning on adding a graphic card to my pc and start mining again...
I cant decide which card to choose...from my research I have done here are the ones I consider choosing from:
5850, 5870, 5770, 5830, 5970, 7970, 6770..and I have found only 6770, 7970 online that are in stock still... :(
Please help me choose!!! :o :o :o :o :o ??? ::)

None :)

Honestly this.

If you are a hardcore gamer then buy the best AMD GPU for gaming and consider anything you get from mining as a gift.   Buying GPU for mining today is a good way to take a pile of cash and light it on fire.  You have absolutely no hope of breaking even much less showing a profit.

I can highly recommend a 7970 for gaming and it can crank out over 600MH/s when you are not playing games.
But like the last person said, buy it because it's a good gaming card, not because it can mine bitcoins.
Because in a few months when the ASIC rigs start mining the difficulty will raise so high it won't be worth mining with GPUs anymore.
However, afterwards, Folding@Home, BOINC and several other distributed computing challenges will welcome your GPU with open arms.  :)

If you want to invest in mining, the best thing to do would be to pre-order and ASIC.

Go back and read the replies to your question again. Buy the card you want for gaming. The few bitcents a day you get from mining with it are bonus. Do not buy a card specifically for mining.

As for "I have never heard of ASIC....how does that work??"...have you been living under a rock, in a cave, on Mars for the last year? Google is your friend. There is a metric shit-ton of information on bitcoin ASIC miners that are in development. Several vendors claim to have units on the cusp of being shipped.  Butterfly Labs, bASIC, Avalon... This is the Information Age, and rewards come to those who go out and seek knowledge, rather than asking for it to be handed to them.

Go forth, and bitcoinify.

You want to become rich with mining? Better inform yourself, you don't just mine with your computer and become rich lol

I'm glad there are other people saying this now, don't mine for profit you'll just lose money, Bitcoin and mining should be seen as a new currency and as a way of transferring your wealth from paper money.

Yeah, to give you an idea, I mined .061 BTC in 3 days with 2 computers LOL. It was just for fun, and it WAS FUN, but I'm not planning on mining any more without ASIC or at least some extremely cheap FPGA's.
I don't pay for electricity at my office so I'm not really losing anything, but I don't like burning out my GPU's for no reason.

Probably just sell stuff for BTC for awhile.

The real question is when do the graphics cards for mining look attractive again.  If BTC still proceeds to increase substantially then the cost of the mining rigs become worth it again.  After all the asics have yet to be delivered

I'd say when ample time has passed with ASICs being a no-show. At this point I wouldn't feel comfortable investing in a new GPU rig solely for mining BTC. I prefer FPGA anyway due to the reduced size and power requirements.

It seems you have your mind made up so maybe you should just build a rig but the honest answer is never.

There are plenty of idle mining rigs out there.  Rigs run hard so they have little resale value and due to electrical costs are unprofitable at the current (price/difficulty ratio).  That ratio tends to be pretty stable so if price rises some marginal rigs will come online raising difficulty, if price falls then some barely profitable rigs will turn off lowering difficulty.   While price may rise a lot it unlikely that will make it suddenly attractive for new rigs.

An example of this ratio:
http://www.bitcoinx.com/charts1/chart_large_log.png

You will note that for more than a year despite massive swings in price and difficulty miners have earned (gross) roughly $2 to $4 per GH/s per day. The reality is that the capital cost will takes months (probably 6-9 or more) to recover at this earning rates.  Even if ASICs are delayed say 3 months you would still lose a significant portion of the investment gamble.  

To build a new rig now is essentially just gambling.  I mean if you want to gamble then gamble but you probably will have more fun playing satoshi dice.

7990

Watch out! Many of the big ASIC developers may be scams, and you won't get your preorder money back. When ASICs do come out to the general public, if ever, then buy one. Don't preorder, they have pushed back release dates for Butterflylabs like a million times.

I see bASIC was listed as a choice for an ASIC, so let me echo what everyone else is saying:

Most guys who preordered ASICs got scammed.

bASIC has folded. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=138663.0) Not everyone has received their money back. Nobody even has an ASIC, not from any company yet.

If you think BTC is a good choice, look for a bitcoin exchange and convert your USD directly to BTC.

Buy 7950 or 7970, best buy atm

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison)

Forgive me sir, I am new, and literally only discovered Bitcoin a few days ago.

I heard, however, that one distributor, Avalon, have sent out their first 300 units a few days ago?  Has no-one received theirs yet?

No one.

I haven't really followed the supposed shipping of Test units to Jeff and the Bitcoin foundation in the last week so i am still in speculation mode. I've wanted to get a jump on the ASIC market but sadly adopted Bitcoins too late and cannot afford to lose money on a pre-order for a ASIC unit. But with the way most of the companies say they will be shipping (from what ive seen) is in small batches of 200-300 at a time(one day in the future...maybe), so i feel like if I dont pre-order, by the time I get an ASIC i may barely break even and make enough $ for cigarettes and MAYBE my private VPN bill every month. BFL's site etc looks the most promising info and design wise but seems to have the most negative feedback on their release push backs, Avalon seems iffy as they haven't provided much if any information regarding this boards and I'm too tired this morning to even recall the others I've looked into, BFL was looking the best on my budget.

Can anyone give me a breakdown on who may ACTUALLY be legit with some proof and not just a bunch of FUD? (fear, uncertainty, doubt)

Also, does anyone have a rough idea of how much FPGA boards may have gone down in price since ASIC tech has "supposedly" come closer to being a reality? And if so does anyone have suggestions on a reasonable and economically good choice for a FPGA board? If so that suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

My VPN only takes BTC so i would at least like to have some sort of mining to simply pay those 5 btc a month without having to order a bunch of rely on my old ATI's and setting up a a large-er piece of garbage mining rig that eats more power than it makes btc.

Anywho, Thanks in Advance

Not enough CAPS and !!!s and ???s

In my opinion, no.

Like you I'm new to this and I've been looking into ASIC.  I've come across the big three and all three of them are not simply missing ship schedules but doing so in particularly shady ways.  Rather than clear, concise information about where the product is and where people's money is you get these weird blog entries and thread responses that oft-times sound more like zen koans than an actual business answer.  So I don't trust the businesses themselves simply because they aren't acting like businesses.  Now... who else might actually provide any "proof"?  I can't think of anyone.

Does that mean I'm out of the ASIC game?  No.  I might yet even pre-order and if I do it'll likely be BFL.  But my assumption is that anything I pre-order with them is simply throwing money away so it'll be some small amount I can afford to lose.  Honestly, if I was going to drop non-trivial money I'd want to fly out and visit BFL in person at this point.  I can't think of anything else they might do other than actually ship some product that would count as proof.

Sorry, but the "fear", "uncertainty", and "doubt" in this case is all very well placed and it wasn't put there by me.  Should FUD be enough reason to not move forward?  Not necessarily but it sure as heck ought to be a reason to move forward cautiously.  Look at it this way, you were never going to get wealthy using ASIC miners anyway despite the garbage spewed by "profitability calculators" such as this one:  http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

So far as I have seen from most of those services, they only CPU mine and not GPU mine. But then again they too might have changed their ways and learned a few things :P.

They are just buying time until their shipment gets "stolen" by Somalian pirates or some other nonsense so they can try and get more money from idiots.

Or "Insert random BS excuse here"

When you look at this link: https://bitclockers.com/miningcalculator

GPU's won't stand a chance fighting ASICs, and 600K chips have been ordered to avalon.

That's around 170 TH/s added to the network!

Im currently mining LTC on a  OC'ed 5970. Max Hashrate is at 800. Card has a high power consumption, so i would not reccommend it.

I'm making about 1 BTC every 5 days at 10.1, even with difficulty increasing I figure I still have a couple months to pull nearly 1BTC a week.

My rig would not quite pay for itself then, but only $500 shy. More importantly I got bitcoins that may or may not go up in value!

I have free power and a place to run it, though. If you don't I wouldn't bother.

7950, 7970, 7990

I recommend 7970 or - as a budget solution - used 5870.