Thanks alot akuma, that cleared up most of my questions.  I found my manual here,   http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&m=M4A79XTD+EVO&os=29  , but I can't seem to find anything about sharing controllers or what not, just something on page 37 (2-17) about IRQ shared assignments (which shows all the PCIe devices share D with the USB controller) and then page 38 shows the slots as PCIEx16_1, x16_2, x1_1, x1_2 but nothing about what slot they are on... 

So if I'm understanding this correctly, one card in the 16x slot takes up 16 lanes?  And I know if there is 2 cards in x16 slots, they both operate at x8 or still 16 lanes right? 

I have an AMD Athlon II X4 on the way, and from what I found the motherboard offers 38 PCIe lanes (It has an AMD 790x).   So two cards an x8 is 16, and another 2 at x1 would only be 18 lanes in total, right?

It makes it seem like any x1 slots is a waste because it operates at 1/16 then.  Is there a way to see what the 7970 would hash at in a x1 slot?

It's probably due to your hashrate, 14.31 MH/s barely does anything at this difficulty.  Are you trying for bitcoins?  You may be better off mining altcoins, but those may even be slow-coming with only an integrated Intel graphics card.

I mean, you can pick up a USB Block Erupter and have 333 MH/s for less than the electricity your laptop needs.

I'm looking into building a GPU rig, already have a spare tower sitting in my other room that had a burnt out CPU.  It has an ASUS M4A79XTD EVO, with 2x PCIe 2.0 x16 and 2x PCIe x1.  Does that mean I can run 4 cards, right?  And I need to get risers (do they have to be powered?) for the 2 x1 slots also, correct?

I was just looking at upgrading the board also, since he put this together a few years ago, but if it can handle 4 I should be OK for right now.  I got a good deal on a 7970 so I'm going to make this an all-in-one mining hub to control several cubes, some GPU's, and some worthless USB sticks

Also, if I have multiple cards can I run guiminer/cgminer multiple times with parameters for litecoin and one for another scryptcoin at the same time?  Or is it all the cards at once per program?

Would be interesting to make a cryptocurrency based on GPS coordinates, that way it is limited to mobile-only devices.

I mean, until someone retrofits their ASIC or GPU farm into their van as a wardriving altcoin chugging machine.

Absolutely, just configure cgminer to point to any other SHA256 currency pool, look here https://cryptocointalk.com/forum/179-sha-256-cryptocoins/

The difficulty is lower (compared to BTC) so you can mine more of them.  Although kind of worthless, you can trade them into BTC, or just hold on and wait to see if they rise in value.  I have 5 USB erupters going on an alt coin making about 40/day just in case they rise later, won't hurt to have a stockpile!

I was about to preorder a Monarch and then stumbled on these forums... after seeing the mass amounts of complaints and extremely long time, I opted for some cubes instead.  Anybody receive their late 2013 preorders yet?