For (hopefully) the last time, AMD doesn't fab any 5xxx gpus anymore. They're done, they were done years ago, they're not going to start again, hence they make $0 off sales of 5xxx series cards. Why then do they care about bitcoin selling cards used at high prices?

AMD is a multi-billion dollar company, with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars going into each fab line, they're ABSOLUTELY NOT going to cater to a tiny cluster of renegade miners who use their cards just fine as they already stand in comparison to the millions of paying gaming customers. Just deal with that.

No it isn't. Guess how much an NVidia Tesla costs?

Spoiler: Typically over $2000, and for not that much more card than your typical quarter cost gaming card. Same thing you'd see for an ATI style mining card.

The people who think that AMD gives two flying craps about bitcoin are just not in the right headspace, pure and simple. I really wish there was an FAQ posted somewhere about how the bitcoin numbers represent essentially nothing to AMD. Literally, nothing. It doesn't bring them one cent.

THe 7000 series is still completely under wraps by AMD, except for mobility series, which as I recall was a tiny improvement over the 6000 series, with its 28nm fab process, and certainly not something at all related to mining.

As for the main topic the OP posted, as it has been since you started all this a few months ago, no one really knows what will happen. It's been a wild ride up and down; will it continue to trend down, maybe, or up, who knows? All investments are inherently risky. The ones with greater payoffs are almost always riskier. Warn people about that, fine. Make grandiose statements with no backing but supposition and/or fear mongering...  


Edit: Some further thoughts -- There is no real release date for the 7000 series cards, whatever they are. Powercolor suggests Q1 2012, so potentially a release as far as 7 months in the future, or more if there is a delay (almost the 9 months the OP is suggesting people not buy into). The cards when first released will carry with them the huge premium markup that all new releases have, so do not expect to see some balls-out radeon 7000 for $100 with a billion stream processors ready to hash at 5THash/sec. Furthermore, AMD is switching to a newer more sophisticated stream processor, why would they then double the amount? Or if they did double the amount, why would you expect them for anywhere near the same price as we see on 5xxx series cards. Furthermore we to my knowledge do not know how the VLIW-4D cores hash, since they are more complex, with likely more instructions for things that actually matter in a graphics card, such as tessellation, directx, streaming large amounts of data, not so much useful for mining.

Why make the redundant first letters? (S-symbol)s & (B-symbol)b? Why not just use the symbols as the letters they represent, get a less stretched out button as well.

Wrong. Each Solidcoin block yields 32SolidCoins vs. 50Bitcoins per block.

As for CPU mining, assuming that you have suitably fast processor that can get maybe 4 or 5 MHash/sec, you will be able to mine a block maybe every few hundred days, and at an exchange rate of .015 solidcoins per bitcoin,. that is hardly worth it.

You will have to wait until 144 blocks occur, so ~3weeks give or take.

Use http://bitcoinx.com/ixcoin/

Block count 20027

You understand that there is a button marked Edit for posts you make right?

It has been explained many times than supply rates are not what control the price/value of an object, it's only half of the already overly simplistic supply/demand model.

Will be interesting to see how ixcoin does for itself once it steals solidcoins retargetting algorithm, I don't see it going above solidcoins already low rate, but that would still be a big increase over what it's at now. I do better at mining than speculating though so I'll be mining rather than trading much.

I apologize that I had been running my clients with GUIMiner rather than a console client, so I couldn't really keep track of warning messages. My stales were fairly low throughout though, I just got a lot of random inability to connecto. Possibly the database overloaded or something, because I could usually access the website (but it was slow) even when my miners were all dropped off. Just from the temperature of my mining room I could tell that it was a systemic problem though, the temperature was significantly cooler than usual, suggesting that the cards were idling up and down a lot.

If there is another round I'll run a console version next time to give more detailed feedback.


In the meantime, thought it would be prudent to point out that Davinci did indeed pay out for my/our time as he promised, his good word continues to hold merit

"Any mobo" is not really a great suggestion. Remember that a 5970 is more or less just 2x 5870s slapped on a single PCB. That means 4x 5970s is the equivalent of 8 5870s, except that they're drawing power through only 4 PCI-E slots. This is a LOT of juice to run through a single mobo (will probably exceed the 75W per slot alotted to PCIE standard and already is 300Watts), and can potentially melt/burn/blow a mobo not designed for high current.

I know it may sound like a waste of money but I'd recommend 2 lower end mobos, or else save up for a super high end mobo.

For PSU, your options are very limited, Silverstone Strider 1500 and ThermalTake ToughPower 1500 are the only two 1500W PSUs I know off the top of my head that are any good, and I'm not totally sure that they'd cut the mustard (probably, but it'd be close). Another reason to potentially break it into 2 comps, instead of dropping $350 on one PSU that might or might not do the job, 2 $150 Gold Rated PSUs will be cheaper, do the job better and save you on your electric bill.

You have to think about what they would short as well, you need to be specific in circuit diagrams. Computers are typically designed in a way such that it is difficult to create shorts between parts, and most living things are not great conductors anyway. More likely to have damage caused from spider webs gumming up fans or piles of spider bodies blocking your fans exhaust. Stupid spiders.

Thus ends another great experiment. Well, overall the connection seemed decent enough, I assume that some of the connection flakiness was you working on the server, but my miners would all go offline for a while often a couple times an hour. Seems better now towards the end, and overall the ~30Ghash was more or less stable.

My 48 hours have run their course though, and monitoring my rigs to keep their connection up was a bit more hands on work than I'm used to, so I'm gonna point my hashes away now, but I hope you got what you were looking for, and hopefully I will as well

EDIT: Possibly spoke too soon, just had a bunch of miners drop connect just as I was opening them up to move. So still a few bugs to work out!

Electricity doesn't lose "intensity." That doesn't even make sense. Not to mention that "electricity" had to flow for miles from the power generation station down transmission wires to substations to local grid to transformer to your in home wiring, before even arriving at the socket, so a few extra feet of copper is hardly going to make a difference.

If you have a BAD extension cord it's possible you are sending "dirty" power causing the psu to have bad voltage regulation or something, but that's more to do with an individuals set up than it is with extension cords in general.

Come on man, I posted this link a buncha times already.



I use this graph as my favorite eyeball on the situation. It looks like a pretty serious drop actually, though it's currently averaging against a large increase, so it still remains to be seen how consistent it will be, but this is definitely the first time we've seen such a sustained hit to hash.

Whenever you have PSU questions, the last thing you should ever do is consult an online PSU calculator. outervision is good, but not that good.

What you should do is find what a card actually draws as I did and plan accordingly. 750Watts is beyond enough, arching on to overkill territory. Wall power draw is not the same as system power delivery, that's what efficiency relates to. These are 6870s not 6970s

If you can find a *quality* 1200W for cheaper than a *quality* 750W, and come up with the same efficiency then by all means go ahead, but I've not seen that math work out very often. I don't know of any 1200W PSU that retails under $200, while you can find plenty of gold rated 750W PSUs for nearer $100 than $200. But feel free to shop around.

1000 Watts running for 1 hour is 1kWh not 1kW/hr.

The connection for me is usually pretty good with my 5GHash, but occasionally there will be times when it will choke and for a while connection for all my miners will be very spotty in and out. Can't say why one way or the other.

This typically seems to happen when mining an alt coin comes near parity with mining bitcoins, and people begin to head back to bitcoin. It happened with name, Ix, i0 and now sc (though namecoin prices are actually still comparitively high given its current predicament). Solid almost bucked the trend though, we'll see what happens there. Ix stole it's retargetting algo so it may be in for a rough ride.