Bitcoin Forum

I would totally post this in the hardware section of the mining forum, but alas, I'm a "noob".  Anyways, I'm not looking to make a TON of money off of this like I know a lot of people are.  I don't really care that buying coins and waiting is easier, I'd like to get started mining.  I'm in 10th grade and being homeschooled, and my dad saw bitcoin mining and was like "Hey!  This is a good economics class combined with computer engineering I could do, get over here and check this out Dan!"  So I've been doing my research, and it looks like the 7870's are the most Mhash/s/j (How much processing power you get per unit of power, pretty much, because watts is joules/second), clocking in at like 3.1 or something crazy (Far above anything else on the wiki).  Anyways, I already have 2 custom computers built and on my desktop, one for my server and one for personal stuff like gaming and schoolwork.  Currently, between both of them, I can get like 140 mhash/s so that's nice.  At the current rate connected to a pool I'm getting ~$1.40/day, which spanned over a year is $511.  At that rate, assuming income stays level, I'm making more than it costs me to run my computers for the year (Fantastic!).  I'd need to do a lot of case shuffling and hard drive juggling to get everything working, but I do have a few questions that I have not been able to figure out:
1---Is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sapphire-DL-DVI-I-SL-DVI-D-PCI-Express-11199-19-20G/dp/B00A2J4ROE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1365388618&sr=8-2&keywords=Sapphire+Radeon+HD+7870+XT">this</a>  GPU compatible with <a href="http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4015#sp">this</a> motherboard?

2---The value of bitcoins seems to be following an exponential growth formula, now is it going to hit a cap, keep going up exponentially, or fall back down and essentially collapse inward.  I'm very worried about spending 900-1000 bucks on hardware and then watch the entire thing come collapsing down on top of me.  I'm in high school, I don't have a job, I need to be worried, lol.  My "Backup plan" if all this does happen to not become profitable is to re-sell all of my cards on ebay, and come out of it with two better computers.

3---How long do you think the GPU's will work?  I've seen tons of posts about the rumored ASIC units, but I have yet to see one working...seriously guys, where are they if they are so good, and why are more not being produced?


That's all, thanks for any and all answers:)

1) YES, every PCIe graphic card card is compatible with any modern motherboard , the difficulty is many graphics cards on the same mobo. You sould try to find a 7870 MYSt with the Tahiti LE instead.

2) ??? difficulty will explode so revenue will drop if the price does not skyrocket again.

3) I say a mont or 2 before you have to change to LTC

so would it be, in theory, worth it to mine litecoin and just trade it over for bitcoins?

yes

I agree with this as well. BTC are much harder to get than LTC because of the rise of ASICs and FPGAs. LTC mining facors consumer grade hardware, although the price of them is still very low by comparison, but will hopefully rise soon.