with riser cables, you aren't going to be able to mount it with the case closed. case in point, my dual rig: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7216.msg225758#msg225758

agreed,
the old pci has a shared bandwidth of 1 gbit/s while pcie 1x is 4 gbit/s per slot. The idea with the old pci was wide bandwidth but slow clock and pcie is narrow bandwidth but very fast clock. same idea as PATA vs SATA. They do make adaptors, but not only would mounting be an issue, who knows how many cards you could put on a motherboard. Say for 3 cards, you only have 1 gbit/s for all of them. The same set up with pcie and all cards running at 1x, you have 12 gbit/s total and 4 gbit/s for each. If you run into trouble with them, there isn't much support for that kind of thing other than the company you bought it from. Really, you are better off buying a new motherboard with the money you would spend on adapters.

dude, ebay two of them and buy a graphics card.

lol that's a long time. Does the temperature ever move from 120C? You may have a broken temperature sensor. Try touching the hard drive. If it's too hot to leave your finger on it, then you should get some air moving on it. As for your other parts, you really should get a fan for them. I'm used to idle temps 25C-20C  lower than your idle.  My load temps are generally less than 60C, except the GPU - mine maxes just below 70C.

If you don't have any fans, then you need to buy some! This is a fan i've had my eye on if I needed to get one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835168006. Seriously though, how long have you been running your hard drive at this temp?

heh heh heh

I've seen some people people push the 300 MH mark, but you have to overclock past 875 and I'm not sure if we are comfortable doing so. Right now we are running these flags on phoenix miner: -k phatk VECTORS BFI_INT AGGRESSION=12 DEVICE=0 FASTLOOP=false WORKSIZE=128 with sdk 2.4. What are you running?

I just got this picture from my friend and felt the need to post it. This is our first rig. This is a really old (beige) case so we had some holes to cut for it would work for its unintended purpose. We cut out a hole in the bottom so the gpu fan can breathe, a hole in the back since there wasn't one there, a hole to allow the power supply to fit, another for its cables to reach, and a hole in front to make that fan's life easier. The wood blocks were so that air could come up from the bottom hole, but I don't think this will be upright anymore.

Right now my friend is working on getting the second gpu working. About to try jumping the pcie x1 pins (edit: success!). Both cards are 5830's. The computer on the right is a single rig with another 5830 and we have a fourth card in my friend's desktop. Dedicated ones are overclocked to 875/700 (we're using linux. Can't seem to go any lower on RAM, but we're satisfied where we are right now) and are getting 265 Mhash/s each. When this one goes online we should be getting just over 1 Ghash/s!

Yeah, I have a friend who gpu mined on his imac while we were getting started mining. About two days later I come to his house and point out a blue vertical line on the same computer's monitor. We immediately stopped, but the damage had been done. Not worth it for the ~35 Mhash/s.

I'm running ubuntu 11.04 so I'd have to use wine with those utilities and i'm not sure if I want to trust wine with overclocking.

But how are you guys getting such low memory clocks? I can't go below 600mhz on my sapphire without it crashing and displaying stripes on the screen.

In order to get 300 Mhash/s out of the 5830, you have to overclock it past 900Mhz. This involves flashing the graphics card's BIOS which can be risky. It will also shorten the life of your card if you don't have the proper cooling. I'm getting 265 Mhash/s out of my 5830's with the same overclock. You should use the phoenix miner with the phatk kernel. It's designed for the 58xx series and will give you a few more Mhash/s. I can't remember all of my flags so i'll get back to you on that.

I've also had problems with the sdk 2.1 and haven't been able to get it to work. I'm using 2.4 right now, but 2.1 will give you a nice boost in hashes if it works.

I'm going to assume this is a dedicated mining rig. For mining, you don't need more than 1 gig of ram.

Good luck finding 5830's cheaply. For now you may want to get 5770's if this is your first rig or 5850, 5870 if you can snag them on a good deal.

With the psu, I completely agree. Get at least a 1000W one from a decent brand like pc power and cooling. they have a good deal on newegg for $150 last time i checked

With the motherboard, look at the details page and look for the number of pcie x16 slots and pcie x1 slots. or just look at the picture and count. There is a guy in the forums who sells 1x to 16x extender cables. or go his website https://cablesaurus.com/

And no, a case is not necessary. Its a running joke that pizza cases are used as cases for rigs to save money. personally, I've

That case ins't going to work for a quad rig, the sapphire 5830's take up two slots each. The case has seven slots and you need eight. Really, you don't need a case, it would save you the $170 if you just left it in the open.

The motherboard, as someone else said (i think in the other thread) can only take three graphics cards without using pcie risers or extender cables. This guy sells them http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=6128.0

Also, in the other thread, you said that you have spare hard drives. Use those. Save money.

With ram, the one you listed is total overkill. All you need is a single, cheap 1GB stick. I got 4 x 1GB sticks off eBay for 13 USD.

I don't have an issue with the power supply, but for the price you are paying for the corsair you might want to look into PC power and cooling. They're pretty good.

The goal with building a mining rig is to spend as little money on parts that don't contribute to hash/s eg. ram, cpu, hdd, case, and most money should be spent on graphics cards, motherboards, and psu (you don't want to kill your investment with a crappy one).

FYI: tigerdirect has your mobo for $20 cheaper: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/search.asp?keywords=890FXA-GD70

As far as putting different cards in the same motherboard, I'm pretty sure it's ok. I don't remember hearing otherwise. I can't say from experience since I just use the same card.

For a comparison of performance and estimates on how much you can expect from your cards with various overclocks and mining programs, checkout the wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

Personally, I'm going to switch to the 5770's from the 5830's since the world's cheap supply of them has ended. At least untill AMD announces their new card.

Of those eight options, I'm going to build a rig with six 5770's probably in a week or two. I'm a college student, so I can't foot the bill of some nicer cards. That should have a return on investment in about two - three weeks.

Also if you really want to hardcore, you should look into these: http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=6128.0. using these will allow you to have six cards in that one motherboard. As a plus, you can space the cards out more and get better airflow and cooling. Just note that if you do this with higher power graphics cards, you're going to need a bigger power supply or two and mount the cards in an unconventional way.

I don't have exact numbers, but I probably got another 5-10Mhash/s out of my sapphire 5830 (currently at 265 Mhah/s) by switching to linux. I only used windows in the beginning to experiment with bitcoin mining. Linux is much easier to deploy and manage on multiple systems.

K'nex. win!

Going to order a 1x extender cable once my latest bitcoin payout is confirmed and the cable is back in stock. Depending on how the installation goes, I'll probably order four more in the next two weeks and more after that.