Bitcoin Forum

1. I am currently in college, so I get "free" electricity, basically unlimited electricity that I'm paying for anyways
2. I started mining today on my laptop which has a 6490 that gets 30 mhash/s
3. I plugged it into this calculator http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator and it tells me I get almost $10 a month
4. I then plugged in 1000 mhash/s and I jizzed in my pants
5. Is a 1 ghash/s rig viable to run in a college dorm? sound, heat, price, method?

quite viable in fact

How high could I go in my dorm without melting and going deaf?
I have over $25k rotting in the bank making .84% annual interest.
What is the average cost to ghash/s ratio?

say you have 1 electric circuit for your room at 120V @15Amp that's 1800W, less ligth and fridge and other, see what you have left ?

For the machine 85W for a minimum AMD cpu and mobo + the watts rating of your graphics cards.

say if nothing else, 2 rigs of 900W each so a CPU-MOBO and a few 7970 and a few fans.

for 25K$ you could fill you electric Watts allowance with ASIC LOL

there's no asics that are actually shipping though, all i saw was the avalon ones that sell for over 10k and are sold out

Keep in mind that your income will quickly decline as all those asics come online. Bitcoins' appreciation might help lessen the impact somewhat. Play around with the difficulty and the rate based on what you think might happen. I think buying btc and waiting for asics is the better choice, but that's just my guess.

+1

Once those things hit, the day of the current gfx cards will be over. You will still use them for the other cryptocurrencies. In fact I am using mine on LTC. Trading them for BTC @ a higher return than if I had my machines mining BTC.

I reckon those ASIC machines will ship, but the question is when. I was about to order 2 of the 60Gh/s machines, but they went and doubled the price and reduced the Gh/s to 50!

I guess a current investor who wants to mine has to just think:
are those ASIC machines real?
When will they ship?
If I invest in a rig with normal gfx cards, how long will they be able to work for me, before ASICs make them null and void ?

You could also buy shares of ASICMINER and profit off of their asic operation, but that adds another layer of risk. Is nice to have those coins earning a return rather than just sitting in cold storage though.

Very viable, up front cost would be 400 to 1200$ depending on what parts you get.

My machine is 900Ghash on bitcoins and cost me about 450$, keep in mind that I got lucky on buying used parts for cheap.
My Radeon 6950's cost me 110 each, the other radeon 6570/5570 I had already.
The motherboard/cpu I bought used with the 6950's (from same guy) cost me 120$ and has 6PCIE slots.

I made a post with details on my machine and experience.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=170401.0


Regarding mining for bitcoins or litecoins, Chuksta is right on the money !

so

You have to shop around for parts at a good price.
You either go with a motherboard with multiple pcie slots and have a mix of cost effective fair cards or you can have a 2 pcie slot motherboard and put in 2 higher end cards.

The easier hash target for a PC that doesn't cost too much is 700Ghash. bitcoin or 850Khash Litecoin.
Any 2 pcie slot motherboard, any cpu, 2x 5850, 6950, 6870...

You are going to kill your laptop
Yes a 1gh with free electricity is very viable, Should you build one? Not unless you already have some spare parts, and can get cheap GPU's

Yeah after a day of laptop mining and seeing my .002 bitcoin profit, fuck this shit.
What gpus should I get based only on mhash/s to $ ratio? I see lots of people use 5850s.
If I get 4x5850s, would I need a big ass fan to blow them and what size power would I need?

I ran a configuration similar to this a few years ago. I had a hard time getting 4 of them to run on a single box. It was very unstable. So I limited the rig to 3 cards, and moved the other card to another box and bought two more cards. Both rigs ran caseless because the heat was so intense. Had a large fan blowing on them running in the basement. Normally the temp down there was around 60F. The mining operation pushed the temp up close to 90F. When I would open the door to the basement, the heat would waft up. It sucked having to go down stairs to restart a frozen machine. Good thing I had ssh setup and could otherwise manage them remotely.

Power supply... for 3x5850, I used this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153106