Hey guys...


I have three 5830s running in a antec 1200 case  on a evga s58 sli mobo.

Since I can't fit another card in the case the way the mobo is set up.... what is the currently cheapest
way to run 4 5830s or 5850s ceaseless..... I'm thinking of doing on in the garage with a boxfan on it....
figured go with the sempron chip.. but do I really need a $200 mobo everyone has been saying this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130274


Isn't there a mobo at under $100 that could do the job?  Also can someone explain pci extenders and link to a good source for them?


What would it cost at current prices to build the cheapest mining rig.  I would be running win 7 64 bit ultimate
because I don't really know the linux Ubuntu  world.

40 5830s?  IN how many rigs?

Someone needs to do this in a real time local level.  Like a bitcoin grubhub.  You go online... you send the bitcins, someone delivers your food.

I am in NYC if someone wants to get this going.

The 6870s both the full card and the 6870m are much slower than the 5870s series....   just because a card has a higher number does not mean it is 'better'

So for that card you are probably getting the best you can on a laptop which is usually about half what you would get on a desktop...
you might be able to tweak by running AOCLBF 1.74 and running the phoenix phatk mod... but 6870s are just not as optimized for hashing as they are for games.



https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Not if you are getting most of the hardware or have most of it already.

I have one very large antec 1200 case that has 4 pce slots so I am working on getting three 5830s running in there...
I was going to do 4 but they would be spaced too close together and prob run too hot... currently I have a 4850 x2 and a 5830 extreme in there... if anything though this cases airflow is excellent even with 5 hard drives in there and 3 cards
temps are staying nice running at full steam....

so... that's not a big expense.  I might get a very good deal on a bunch of used 5850s and since I won't be able to fit more than
3 cards in my existing system that I actually use... I was wondering the cheapest route to get them going.

All flat out buying new rigs at this time might not be a great idea.. I'm pumping out between 750 to 1000 mhash
and only pulling in about .5 to 1 bitcoin a day....  but I find it fascinating.. so we'll see.

Plus I use the current system for HD video editing so the eyefinity comes in handy.

This thread is not true at all.  Laptops GPUs use considerably less power than full cards, so as long as you have a
good laptop (very recent) with a high end ati mobility chip, you can get some good results.

I have an msi GX660r that has a 5870m chip, and it gets between 192 to 200 mhash a second! (after some tweaks) this is
a considerable amount so why not have it going when I'm not using it... like over night.. it ads quite an amount of shares and
is far more efficient that some of the major graphics cards in the 4800 series (better than my monster 4850 X2 which is the size of a boat and only get 150mhash but sucks power down like jughead does hamburgers and shakes).

That being said, the msi I have has very good cooling with multiple fans and even a fan turbo button. Many laptops have extreme issues with heat.  I have left the laptop running stable now for a few days and it's considerably added to my shares
without using that much power as a desktop.  So if you have a 58xxm or higher it's probably worth it... other than that... probably not.

 

I am doing this same setup. What mobo did you use and did they all fir or did you use extenders and what was the total cast of your rig including the antec power supply mobo, cards and mem....?

Thanks

If you are using a guiminer or aoclbf you have to make sure not to mess with it after you change your settings in trixx and hit apply, just hit GO or START MINING.... and thing else well set the clocks back to stock.

4850 X2
5830 Extreme  
5870

 

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- Blackout

Let me out! Out I say! Been a good week of mining and bitcoin research and ready to get in deeper.

May the Thrice Great Okapi bless you.

- Blackout

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I put a dvi to vga adapter on it and that worked. Getting 330 mhash with this card it's great.. getting rid of the 4850 x2 and getting another  5830 or 5850.  I would only use the crossfire if I wanted to do a graphic application or games.... (rendering in after effects... photoshoping a massive full hd.. or plugins that can use the gpu).  I would turn off the cross fire if mining.
So I'll probably have one card miningg 24/7 then the other mining at a low aggression.  I may do a dedicated rig I'm not sure yet.

I know I have heard that this is possible.... does anyone know how to do it?  I currently
have a ati HD 4850 X2 (monster of a card) as my main GPU...  It performs amazingly on almost anything I throw at it but it's not great for mining.  Only 75mhash per core so 150mhash... for this huge boat that's depressing.

My motherboard is a EVGA x58 sli w 12 gigs ram  900 wat power supply... plenty of cooling...

Just got a saphire extreme 5830 today.... I didn't realize it also is a dual slot card. Chucked it in just to see what would happen since I already had catalyst 11.5 on my Win 7 64bit rig..  The system booted up...said your device drivers have been installed correctly...  it powered up.. 5830s fans going... computer is fine using my main 4850 x2 as my normal display...  and I can see the 5830 in the device manager and it says it's working fine.. but in catalyst it shows the 4850 x2 as enabled in crossfire mode, and it shows the 5830 but says it's disabled.

I loaded up the Phoenix GUI (AOCLBF 1.74) miner and can get my 4850 x2 working... and I see (ATI Radeon 5800 series) in the cards in the tabs on the top and can mess with the clock speed and ect, but when I go to add client 3, it doesn't see the card and allow me to select it in the OpenCL Device drop down box.

Is there a way to make this work? I know somewhere I read you could just use the 5830 as a miner and leave your other card as your display device but now I can't find it.

I'm probably getting another 5830 and then I'll just pull the 4850 x2 out and crossfire the two 5830s... but for now I'd like to get the card mining since it pulls another 300mhash till I get the next card.

PS: under the 5800 tab it says Adapter index 0.  OS index 2
is this something I could enter into the manual setting to get the card mining? Or do I need to run something from a command line prompt?

Any help getting this working is appreciated.

- Blackout

Just ordered two 5830s....  now... should I replace my 4850 x2... or add the 5830s as miners and leave the 4850 x2 as my main editng / gaming / compression card. In reading up... the 4850 x2 is a better gaming card even though older...   would crossfired 5830s beat it?

I keep reading that an older SDK 2.1 is better... now there is SDK 2.4 in the latest catalyst drivers...

Question... HOW do I know which SDK I am running and how do I change it or roll back to an older one?

I'm running catalyst 11.5 on my 4850 x2 (very good gaming card... poor mining card)

I have two 5830s on the way.... then I even have my little laptop going with a 5870m.. surprisingly pulling about 160mhash

So all together I should be at about 1000mhash soon without spending any more than the two 5830s which were cheap...   will two crossfired 5830s outperform a 4850 x2 in other tasks... games... HD video editing + encoding... because then I might ditch the 4850 x2 (it's huge) and just put 4 5830s in my antec 1200. Plenty of cooling and power already in there.

Thanks,

- Blackout

I'm in New York in a basement studio so yeah the machines do get a little hot but I pay a flat fee and don't have an electricity bill so that's a good thing (for now, my landlords 93!).  But I have a little portable air conditioner that keeps things fairly decent but I can see the summer sucking and the winter being decent.

I've been mining on bitcoinpool.com

It has been going up and down and I have been considering other options?  Can any of you direct me or advice as to how to gauge the different pools and their trustworthiness / lack there off... I need to at least have a backup pool because bitcoinpool.cm seems to be getting attacked and has been down a lot.

Also I have yet to find a fully understandable guide on solo mining.  If I want to solo mine and I'm pumping out 1000mh /sec how long before I get some coin and how does it work?  Is there a definitive guide somewhere?
Do you need to be pumping out some insane 4000mh to even bother?



I just bit the bullet and ordered a 5830 for $130 you can't go wrong it gets 300mhash a sec.... with my other cards that will bring me up t about 750mhash.  I'll toy with it and see if I am going to invest more or not.

All guidance and comments and pointers are deeply appreciated.

- Blackout

Thanks for the replies guys.  I was hoping one of you was going to tell me some great secret and that I was all wrong but you're pretty much verifying what I was thinking.

I wouldn't invest in a new rig.  I have two machines here... one is a huge full tower in an antex 1200 case with plenty of fans and that's always on anyway. I do HD editing on it and stream a radio and tv station and the 4850 x2 was more than enough for that when I bought it over a year and a half ago. I realize how fast tech is outdated but my 3.2 i7 (overclicked from 2.7) has stayed pretty much great for a year and a half now you still can't get much better. If I wanted to really try a go at mining I would just take out the 4850 x2 (which is getting about 150 mhash) and throw in three 5830s or 5850s... that would not be a big investment and would prob bring me up to about a 1000mhash when not using my machine and probably massively speed up my video encoding too so it would actually be a useful investment.

Even my little laptop with a 5870m beats out the 4850 x2... it's getting 150mhash a sec.

I'm thinking along the lines some have you have said.  I have this huge tower machine on anyway, why not let the graphics cards mine when I'm asleep / not using it. If I make some bitcoins and they go up.. it was a fun experiment.. if the whole thing gets corrupted and falls apart... I haven't really lost anything as I have upgraded my computer equipment. I don't know enough or have enough trust / knowledge to put money into buying them yet.

 I have two more pci-e slots open.. weird thing is I have a evga x58 mobo which was meant for chaining nvidia cards but I always like ati video cards better and now it seems this proves they are better.  So if I ditch the 4850 x2.. I could at least get $100 to $125 bucks for it.. That gets me a 5830 or I throw a few more dollars and get a 5850... then I'd only be spending about $300 two by two more cards.. as I already have the tower, massive 1000 watt power supply, fans mobo.. ect...  I don't THINK I'll have a problem using crossfire with this x58 mobo but I may have to look inot that as it was made for invida cards but has been working fine with my 4850 x2.

Then I have a super video editing gaming HD audio mixing machine from hell that can also pump out some bitcoins ...
 
What's your thoughts on that?  I'm still trying to understand the difference between solo mining and pool mining and if the pools are trustworthy and the various mining software.  So far the  GUIMiner has worked better for me than the phoenix command line interface as that things keeps dropping / disconnecting.

I am currently mining on bitcoinpool.com it seemed the fairest of what I looked through and fees are optional not mandatory.... is there a index / reference of what is considered the safest / honest / most reliable pool?
How much time would I need solo mining if I was going at 1000mhash to get any return? Not sure how to solo mine yet still reading up on that.

So far from two nights of half assed stop and start mining and toying with different miners I have .2 bitcoins... wooopedy I'm rich!


 
I am getting a lot of discrepancies in efficiency from what is showing on my  GUIMiner and what is showing up on bitcoinpool... they are listing my efficiency at 50% when it was at 85%....  I show 28 dropped blocks out of 2000+.  They are saying :

Requested Shares:    4366
Submitted Shares:    2052

Why would one get this huge discrepancy? Is it from stopping and starting mining am I throwing out huge chunks of shares they sent?  I don't see big fail or rejected rates on my screens.

- Blackout

I honestly don't even remember how I stumbled upon it but I did, and have been fascinated by the bitcoin concept and story so far.
It seems that the people who adopted very early could really do something with this, but now even very fast computers are only producing marginal amounts.

I am seeing it as a fun experiment, and started mining yesterday.  I have a pretty decent rig - Quad core i7 in an antex 1200 case with a ati 4850 x2.... but I could not get both of the cards running using the manual command line prompt phoenix.... and when I did get one gpu core running it was slow.  I finally found GUIMiner and it's pumping out about 142 Mhash from my 4850 x2 and then surprisingly, my laptop is beating my desktop.. I ave a msi gx 660 with a 5870m and that's pumping out about 150 mhash so I am getting
around 300mhash per second while still having the computers fairly usable.

Still.... it seems we have passed the bubble of opportunity for single mining so you have to join a pool and time verses hardware and electricity are not looking amazing.   I don't know if I would put money into actually buying bitcoins though seeing as how volatile they are.  Now when they were 60 cents each or less and the difficulty level was low is seemed very exciting, but now sitting at around $15 (give or take) with a massively increasing difficulty level is it really worth it to go out and buy these insane rigs?

The only advantage I can see in buying the rigs and mining is that at least you purchased some physical hardware and sure it depreciates the moment you bought it but you still have some useful equipment where as if you just buy some bitcoins as an investment you co0uld be screwed and have nada to show for it...  it seems quite difficult to get the damn things in and out of USD.....  you have to register on weird sites you don't know and hope they are trustworthy and then buy linden dollars and sell those and finally get out paypal to your paypal debt card? What a pain in the ##&^...

Still the idea intrigues me so I am playing with it just to see if I can mine 1 bitcoin in a few days since my computers are always on anyway (I'm an actor, writer director / editor... always working on stuff) and I am a massive freedom person... so knowing what I do about our current destroyed monetary system, I at least like this idea.

It seems to have some major flaws though and looks like at will reach the peak bubble very soon where it won't be profitable to mine because you'd have to spend a insane amount in graphics cards, electricity, fans, air conditioning.... ect to generate a fraction of  a coin where people were generating 30 on the same computer power just a year or so ago.

Thoughts?

- Blackout