Bitcoin Forum

Right now newegg has 5830 on sale for $100 shipped to US, is it worth investing in 3 of them for mining? Or would I do better off trying to get 2 5870 at roughly $200 each.

go for the compromise: 5850, best MH/$ ratio. 5830 is ok, but you can't overclock it as much (in terms of %)

I have an overclocked xfx 5830 running at 302.5 MHash/s and the best I've seen reported for a 5830 is 312 Mhash/s. For the price they're good cards, but they'll take a little overclocking and work to get the best rate.

My card runs on Windows 7 x64 with the 11.4 drivers and 2.4 OpenCL SDK. It's overclocked to 974/335MHz (core/mem) @stock voltage and runs at ~70-80 degrees C @66% fan. It's next to a Geforce 260 running at 60 degrees C and the computer is in a pretty cold room. I use Pheonix with the phatk kernel to mine using the parameters AGGRESSION=12, BFI_INT, VECTORS, and FASTLOOP=false. It earns about 1BTC/24hrs at the current difficulty. Measured wattage of the system is 235W with the 5830 idle and 405W with the 5830 at full load.

Hope this helps your comparison.

the way the market is right now, i'd buy any 58xx i could get my hands on.  accept no backorders - they most likely won't be filled.

I would have agreed with you two weeks ago, but nowadays, it's about impossible to find a 5850 at a reasonable price...

5830 = 300MH/s for $109
5850 = 370MH/s for $187

Yeah... pretty easy call right there, unless you're running out of space.

The one downside is that the 5830 actually consumes more electricity than the 5850, so that should be taken into consideration if you live in CA.

Well I've got free electricity, so that won't be an issue. Just heat that will bother me, I'll have to look into getting a few waterblocks for them if I end up getting them.

Thanks guys!