Bitcoin Forum

currently mining(second day) on slush's pool.  are there any prefered pools?  want to maximize efficiency. 

Head on over to the mining section and the beginners guide. Inside there is a listing of pools with their information linked. All you have to do is check out their viewer ratings (such as positive posts on their thread) and make the personal decision to which you'd like to be with. I'm with slush now and it puts out some continuous numbers so no problems there, but feel free to explore around and check the site to each pool.

will do.  great excuse to upgrade my 5750 to a 6970 ^.^ should be here tuesday.

p2pool.  support a decentralized bitcoin.  might not be best for a 2 day old noob.  In the meantime bitminter has no fee, is hop proof, offers merged mining and pays out all transaction fees.   Still keep p2pool in mind we need to keep Bitcoin decentralized.

good info.  since bitcoin mining is an investment, anything we can do to help it thrive would be in our best interest.

p2pool the best now!!!  ;)

Upgrade? Surely you mean support?
Use both cards for mining, a highly overclocked 5750 will net you up to 200MHash/s.
That's 40-something per cent of what you might squeeze out of that 6970, surely nothing to scoff at.

Do keep in mind that even those two cards working together might barely make up for the electricity the rig using.
A single card really won't be able to do much - even amortize the power usage of the mining rig let alone earn you some money.

As I already told you (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66452.msg771509#msg771509) a PSU upgrade does seem warranted.
Aim for a 650W unit for those two cards (or 750W to allow future GPU upgrades) - these PSU sizes are still relatively cheap.


0% fee only pools: (do note that Slush (http://mining.bitcoin.cz/) is not free - they do take a percentage of your rewards)

P2pool (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool) being pretty well represented here (a bit overrepresented actually), why don't you give Eclipse (https://eclipsemc.com/) a try?
It's an excellent hop-proof DGM payout scheme pool.
Please note that Double Geometric Method (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=39497.0) means that your revenue is offset in time: you will earn slightly less than expected on your first day but when you stop mining, you will still earn bitcoins for a few rounds.

As DAT said, BitMinter (https://bitminter.com/) is a great choice as well - as long as you don't mind the variation. This pool offers a proprietary, very easy, Java-based miner you can launch with a single click at the website.

Eligius (http://eligius.st/wiki/index.php/Eligius_mining_pool) is a SMPPS pool totally unaffected by either pool hoppers or block length variation.

Ozcoin and MtRed are also good pools I have used with no fees.

thanks to share the pools

bitclockers.com 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66026.0

I have had no complaints with BTC Guild.

We like Pool-x

Hello fellow Noob i am am using BitMinter which seems to be a good choice for beginners (as others have said) and has a very simple UI. I will be switching over to P2pool after reading up on it more.