Just FYI regarding pipe tobacco; its actually not so much a matter of price. Taxes are surprisingly low on it here; 50g of some of the better pipe tobacco like Alsbo Black costs like 6 euro. 50g lasts me a week or more and Im a pretty hardcore pipe smoker. Problem is that its pretty damn hard to find.

color of tubing is probably from the flash. Turn it off, turn more indirect lights on.

Be very careful with that, to check the specs of those old 300W PSUs. Many will only offer 10A or sometimes even less on the +12V rail!

Guess Im too late anyway, but out of curiousity, what was the price?

Havent read the entire thread, but isnt 750W a bit low? That CPU alone at that clock could be pulling 150-160W at stock voltage (and possibly considerably more if you overvolted it). Add the motherboard, RAM, water pump, fans, and you are probably >200W, leaving 550W for the three cards. YOu dont mention overclocking the GPUs, but even at stock speeds thats cutting it close IMO.

Consider the opposite for a second; Imagine downloading a miner app and letting it run for a few hours on a typical PC would actually have earned you more than a totally trivial amount of coins (or equivalent in $). How weird would that be? Obviously you'd go out and buy more hardware and multiply your earnings. And so would everyone else in the world.  Surely that would seem fishy no?

Well, thats more or less what happened this spring and summer. Unfortunately, you are late . Since the amount of bitcoins to be mined per day is fixed, the more people start mining, the less they will earn and its obvious at this point profits are going to be minuscule and for most people, non existent. The only way to make more money on mining than it costs in electricity is buying the right hardware and having very cheap electricity. Even under those circumstances, dont quit your daytime job .

Just noticed block 213 got confirmed and paid out instantly?

You could take it apart and check for visual damage. If a VRM has blown, I suspect youd see that. Whether that is reparable or not, I would imagine there is a fair chance the PCB is damaged too but not sure. I also suspect you'll have a hard time finding replacement components, but it doesnt hurt looking.

reflowing is baking them in an oven. It helps if there are hair fractures in the solder or underfil.  But thats usually only the case on certain nVidia cards and a result of thermal cycling, not something Id expect from an ATI card that has been mining.
My guess is that you burnt out VRMs

And what about the client? It could be coincidence of course, but it seems our luck turned sour around the time of the last update. Might be worth double checking what client the miners are using that have been finding blocks lately.

Just how exactly did you manage to (half) kill 4 5970s?

Any chance you can do pipe tobacco?
WO Larsen?

Dont get me wrong; I dont like raining on someone's parade, and its a kinda neat retro box for anyone ever having had a C64 back in the days, but  the price/features is just ridiculous. To give you some sense of that, your commodore is equivalent to this box. Add Ram and a HDD and you are looking at ~$300 instead of $999. It really does make a Mac Mini (which has far superior specs) look like the bargain of century. And it really isnt.

Its rather clear whats going on. We are averaging over 3 million shares per block for quite some time now. Not sure what the statistical chances are over the last 11 blocks, but its definitely extremely unlucky. I suspect many worry there is something wrong with the pool or miner, or at least do like I started doing and spread their luck a bit by mining part time for bitminter and part time in a bigger pool.

OH and one more thing; as Kano mentioned, try another USB stick.
Linuxcoin does a good job of minimizing disk IO, but running any OS from a cheap USB stick (which usually have poor or no wear leveling) risks ruining the stick rather quickly. I have a big pile of no name 2GB USB sticks to prove that

Is this a dedicated mining rig? If so, depending on the amount of ram and presence or absence of a hdd, you probably dont want to install a full fledged ubuntu on it. Its possible to remove unwanted apps of course (through ubuntu software center) but the thing to understand here is that a distribution is the combination of the OS + desktop + collection of apps. Thats what sets one distribution apart from the other. You are better off picking a distribution that already eliminated the things you dont need for mining, like linuxcoin or bamt.

That said, having those apps installed really shoudnt matter unless you are short on diskspace or ram. If you are having stability issues, removing apps isnt going to help, since you most likely have a hardware issue (or rare, but it happens, hardware thats not properly supported by the kernel, like a buggy ACPI bios).


If your hardware is ok and properly supported, xubuntu is just as stable as linuxcoin, ubuntu or any other linux distro. Ive had linuxcoin run for months with zero issues.

The CPU usage bug is not in Linux, its in the AMD drivers, and the same problem occurs on Windows. Older versions of the AMD drivers do not have it (11.4 and older I think) and the latest version (11.11) apparently fixes it for most, but not all people. Different distro's come with different default drivers, or default to different drivers in the case of ubuntu. Im not sure which one comes with Linuxcoin, but I dont have the cpu bug with it. Nor did I have it with (x)ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10. I do have it with (l/x/k)ubuntu 11.x after installing the recommended AMD driver. I have not tied the latest AMD driver on it yet.

Which is a good reason to alert people that the software is potentially unwanted (like AVG does), but its not a good reason to say cgminer is  malware or a trojan, because it clearly isnt.  Its like saying any SMPT server is malware because botnets abuse them.

Did 2 months and 8 days pass already 

For 1 BTC you can buy 1000 pokerchips at https://sealswithclubs.org/

PhysX is an API, just like bullet, havoc etc. It can run on either CPU or GPU, its up to the developer. Its also an open API, if AMD wanted, they could implement it, but they chose not as nVidia owns the IP and somewhat understandably, AMD dont want to support that. But there are hacks around to enable physx on ATI cards.