Oh -- aesthetic bug I just noticed.

At least using BTCMine, it shows the Pool Hash Rate as "89.42GH/sMh/s" which pushes it off the viewable screen for me.

No kidding. I don't understand these "it's becoming unprofitable to mine" arguments. Couldn't be further from the truth. Before the last difficulty increase, BTC was $4-5. Now we're well upward of $7. The market is adjusting for difficulty increases.

CPU mining will get you nowhere. You need a good ATI graphics card for mining. Check out https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison for a good list of what does what.

I looked into it a week ago and found the ATI 5850 to be the best value for me. Power consumption is relatively very low, and if you look hard, you can purchase good ones under $160 shipped.

Also take a look at http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php -- enter in your specs and investment to get a rough idea of your profit margins.

Cooling can only do so much. If you have a problem with heat -- that's when you should consider relatively expensive liquid cooling. If you have no heat problem, you're wasting money, over-complicating things, and exposing yourself to a catastrophe if you installed the cooling system improperly.

The ASUS 5850s I purchased are excellent at dissipating air (unlike some awful Visiontek cards I had shipped to me and promptly returned). Even on hot summer days, my GPUs chill out at 51-58*C with a core speed OC from 725 MHz to 910 MHz. Liquid cooling would be a poor investment for me. Perhaps, however, you will find you have a problem with heat. Perhaps your card runs very hot and the drivers reset when it reaches a certain too-high temperature, or perhaps your cards have a poor warranty and you can't risk running them a little warm. Those would be scenarios you should consider liquid cooling.

In any case - wait. Wait and see if you have a problem with heat before you try to solve it.

They'll look bad, but I doubt enough people will care to do something about it. The FBI actually (I'm not kidding!) raided university kids' apartment building because they alleged the kids were farming WoW gold. This was just a few weeks ago. Did you see any outrage?

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110408/03292413827/fbi-hunting-down-world-warcraft-gold-farmers.shtml

Thanks netx, sent you a donation. Hope others will consider following suit.

IIRC, the US Gov't did exactly that maybe a year or so ago one time when a book came out they didn't like the content of. I also recall a pharma company sending agents to purchase all of their products at pharmacies produced when one of their manufacturing plants failed to meet certain safety guidelines so they wouldn't have to issue a recall (or something like that).

Not that outlandish of an idea.

Close all background programs -- the GPU will not run at 100% load if something else is running (for instance, a web browser). Use -f 1 argument when using miner and see if it corrects.

Sometimes, cards also behave somewhat erratically as far as efficiency for a few minutes of putting them under load and then chill out @ full load.

It could also be (probably less likely) that your card is over-overclocked and the driver is resetting every few seconds.

Paypal recently shut down the account (and froze assets of) the person who ran the most used Paypal->BTC service claiming selling "ecurrency" is a ToS violation. It's now more than just the high fraud rate. For that reason (at least), Mt Gox will not accept Paypal. You can, however, use LibertyReserve, which is very similar and I think charges slightly lower fees. https://mtgox.com/users/addFunds

Not so much, just confuses me. I kept looking to the right and realizing it was on the left. Could just be the alcohol 

I can attest to this, as well. I switched to BTCMine because of issues with slush's server while he was away (or whatever) for a few days. Long polling is nice, too

//

Bookmarked. Thanks for sharing and taking part in the BTC market.

+1 on whole bean request -- I'll make a purchase once they arrive. Also think you should remove the login box and move at least the cart display to the right where it (almost?) always is. Otherwise, site design is very slick. Good luck!

355-357 MH/s each, a very, very slight improvement. A bottleneck is created somewhere when -f parameter is set very low while CFX is enabled. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what's going on, just experimental data to suggest. Others experiencing significant slowdowns on CFX should try -f 50 or higher, or just remove the argument altogether and see if it improves.

With -f 1 with CFX enabled, one GPU is @ 96-99% load while the other is low and extremely erratic, sometimes only 2 MH/s, then next poll it's at 250 MH/s. With -f 50, or without the argument altogether, load on both cards is 99%.

Roughly 355 MH/s each with CFX disabled. The GPUs can become very inefficient if the "-f" parameter is set very low (<40). I think this is what's happening in most peoples' cases when they're running CFX.

I'm surprised this isn't a more prevalent topic. Perhaps not Arnold (well, at least not now that he's been replaced as governor), but we should take into account the hoops the US Gov't & others could make us jump through if they started to more-openly attack Bitcoin, and it should be factored in to persons' decision to build a mining rig. Paypal fairly recently shut down arguably the most painless-to-use BTC seller, Coinpal, and I'm not entirely convinced Paypal came to the decision internally after giving it the OK multiple times. Other sites like Mt Gox (currently operating on a domain regulated by the USG's lap-dog, ICANN) are at risk of being shut down or at least having operations hindered if the USG decides BTC is a credible threat to their power. The Constitution hasn't been a reliable defense against tyranny for decades (at least), and we should give the proper thought to scenarios unfavorable to us the USG could create.

Awesome -- thanks for sharing!  -- And thanks to the OP for creating the foundation!

I'm running 2 5850s in CrossfireX and have the top-rated card performance listed on the mining hardware comparison wiki page (710 MH/s combined). Both run at 99% load. Fwiw. Win7 x64

FirePro M5800 does support OpenCL. Beyond that, I don't know. Keep playing around with it. Try a restart, make sure you have the correct catalyst drivers.

Perhaps it's time to play around with Linux? 

Is it? It's fairly important in how I/"we" mine for BTC.