Bitcoin Forum

From what I've read, BTC mining is being dominated by better hardware than GPUs, so you need top notch stuff to be able to make profit there. I'm toying with the idea of building a litecoin miner, but I have no idea about specs or profitability. I don't know what's underpowered for mining: all I know is gaming graphics and I've learned how useless my Nvidia card is :)
This is a budget miner I put together, is it even a question? Is the wattage too low? Is the GPU shit?
I read in some article that mobo, CPU, ram, and HDD don't really matter much. So I put really cheap stuff in.

-XFX Radeon HD 6870
-700W PSU
--
-AMD Sempron 145 CPU
-Biostar A780L3B mobo

-For OS, you can use Linux right?

I'm not looking to make insane profits- if I can pay back the price of the rig I would be happy. I got some advice in a different thread, but I still don't fully understand the dynamics.

Lastly, is taking a gamble and starting in LTC too risky?


In summary, I am a complete cryptocurrency noob who wants to get into this stuff because it seems awesome and I might be able to make a slight profit.

I've got a 6870, and it mined about two LTC/day before the difficulty went up very recently. Maybe 1.5 now. That's about $4.5/day at current rates (which are currently falling).

It's all very uncertain, so don't expect to get a positive return on your investment. You might. You might not. It's a gamble, and calculating the odds is nearly impossible :)

As for your other questions: the wattage is fine, the other hardware isn't important, Linux is fine.

Thanks for replying. I guess I'll think it over- I probably wont have the cash for a little while and who knows what will happen by then!