Bitcoin Forum

im new to the digital currency scene. Im very interested in bitcoins and litecoins. I know about bitcoins a couple of months ago and how foolish of me not to invest in it.

Anyways, im interested in bitcoins now. this is my setup:
AMD Phenom II X2 550 3.1GHz (unlocked the 2 cores so bascially a quad core at 3.1Ghz)
4GB RAM
9800GT

Im actually thinking of setting up a bitcoin rig, which has 2x 7850's but im really unsure about how much power that will use and what power supply i should buy (e.g. 600W or a 700W etc). Ive seen some videos on youtube about mining using the 7850 and this guy was mining using 2 7850's and he total power was about 850W which is pretty crazy (he did overclock and things like that). Im planning to mine on stock hardware meaning no overclocking so how much power in total do you guys think that will take?


So should I go for that rig with 2x 7850's or is there a better rig I can come up with that will use less power? (My budget is about £400. This includes the power supply, cpu, ram etc). Also, would it be better if I just buy the bitcoins directly rather than mining them?

Also, I saw a ASIC bitcoin miner on a website (forgot the website name but it'll be on my history) which mines at 38GH/s, uses 300W and costs $800. Does this seem a bit too farfetched because it does to me. And i plugged in the values to this calculator:
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
and it says i'd get a profit of 3328$ in the first 12 months(my price per kWh is £0.16 :O

So in my situation, which would be the best bet? Mine through GPU, ASIC hardware or just simply buy the bitcoins?

GPU's are useless for bitcoins now, but could be used for scrypt currencies like Litecoin.

I'm quite sceptical about ASIC's as well.. There is so much of them coming, bitcoin difficulty will raise through the ceiling when everyone has a brand new ASIC at the same time. :) It might work for a few weeks but the difficulty will probably increase so quickly that you will never get enough money to cover the hardware costs.

^^^ Yes.

GPU mining, as mentioned by Zuikkis, is irrelevant now for Bitcoin mining. Do not spend your hard earned money on GPUs unless you plan on mining LTC or another alt coin. However, even LTC will likely be seeing ASICs arrive in the first half of next year, so time is somewhat limited here too.

Investing in ASICs is extremely risky. There are more scam ASIC sites than there are legit. Browse through the Mining subforums to get a grasp on who are more reliable. -in any case, buying now is extremely risky as we don't know how high or fast difficulty will be rising in the next 3-6 months. (ie., it's going to rocket out of the atmosphere)

Buy bitcoins only if you think they'll go up. It could well go up to 2k USD by the end of 2014 or earlier, it is an unknown. However if bitcoin drops to 500 USD, you'll kick yourself twice.

If you are into bitcoins to make some profit maybe get into trading. Or if you want to get in the technology your other option would be to wait 3 to 6 months until the miners using latest asic technology are not too expensive to produce and are more mature.