Wait a minute. I didn't see you only have a 850W power supply.

I killed my 550W power supply running a bare minimum system on one 7950. I had a 620W power supply spare and that solved the problem. My card takes 2 PCI-E connectors at the top, both were connected. My "symptoms" were:

- I could boot and run the system fine
- I could mine for about 5 seconds
- I used the "sensors" tool that comes with linux that monitors voltages and I could see right before it failed that my 12V would drop to 10 V and then the system died

According to this page

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5476/amd-radeon-7950-review/16

under load the card needs 353 Watts. So running the 3 cards alone (no motherboard and no CPU) you already need 1059 W! I'm not an expert with running 3 cards, I have never seen someone suggest such a huge CPU. Would be nice if someone can correct me.

We are already past the half way mark (11mil+ already mined). This means that we can only mine 10 million in the next 128 years.

Am I missing something? That doesn't sound right.

The "problem" and the great thing about crypto-currencies are that they are both a commodity and a currency. It depends on what you want to do. Gold is great but does not really have any growth. The price of gold (and other bullion) simply goes up because the dollar looses value. In 1902 it cost you 1 gold coin for a nice tailored suit. Today, if you shop around, you can get 1 tailored suit for... exactly 1 once of gold. So gold is great of holding it's value.

Keep in mind that while bullion is great, you cannot send gold within an hour to someone on the other side of the world. That is why I believe the posts about bitcoin's value being around the same price as gold. You might not have something shiny in your hand, but it is just a valuable based on it's flexibility.

My suggestion - do both. I have both gold and crypto currencies. I don't have a huge budget but every little bit helps and becomes a huge sum if you stick with it for 2 years.

I also have lots of problems due to the country I live in. Been trying for a few months using different services. I resorted to mining.

I set up a "google alert" for any exchanges and this popped up 2 days ago

https://bips.me/

They cover a whole bunch of countries and have local bank accounts all over the place. I have not tried them yet because all my money went into my mining rig.

Just one of the pci extenders could give you a problem. Did you try running 2 card directly connected and then try running 1 on one of your PCI extenders. If you boot up and get the same problems, change that 1 PCI extender and try another one. Keep eliminating each component.

If that fails repeat the entire process, but this time use a different PCI-e slot on the motherboard.
 

I don't believe this is a scam because usually scammers do not give refunds. Sure, I am a bit biased because I am also patiently waiting for my 60MHash little box. I am technically speaking an "investor" in butterflylabs. It's almost like a kickstarter project for their new range of products, because I'm pretty sure they use pre-order money to keep this thing afloat.

All new projects have teething problems. I'm pretty sure when Intel created their very first chip they had problems too. If all their investors fled right at the beginning we would not have i7 today.

I just bought myself an ASUS Radeon HD7950 "DC2T".

Look at the copper pipes and fans on this bad boy

http://www2.dma.net.au/Uploads/7950.jpg

http://cdn.overclock.net/2/26/2610a7d0_asus-7950-direct-cu-2-010.jpeg

There are many 7950's on the market, but none of them have such a badass cooling system. Yes - it does take up 3 slots (but that's not a problem with PCI extenders) and yes you'll need 2 PCI-E power connectors per card, but mine runs super quiet and cgminer never needs to take the fans above 20%

I set my cgminer to target-temp 62C and it is humming away at full speed mining without a problem.

Hello!