Silly question: Are dummy plugs required anymore for mining rigs? 

Have a 7950 on a Windows box, want to install a second 7950 once my 1x-16x cables come in from Cablesaurus. Have been reading conflicting reports as to if Dummy Plugs are needed or not. I don't want to have to worry about doing a monitor shuffle down in my basement when starting mining back up.

Thanks.

Marrs, I'm VERY hesitant about mining anything directly to an online address. To me, that's essentially the same as if I just used them for an online wallet in the first place. We all know the dangers THAT poses... place getting hacked and someone making off with about 300 thousand dollars in coin wallets, etc.

I understand your point that you're making... but even if the answer was something to the effect of Load Balance mining with CGminer so that a portion goes to p2pool, a portion to pool-x, and a portion to notroll, I'd rather do that, then consolidate it all into my wallet before sending off to BTC-e... than just mining directly to BTC-e, or any of the other exchanges.

I was just trying to get a little more educated on the WHY this happens.

So, started mining again a week or 2 ago (Last mined a couple years ago). Mining LTC, pointed at notroll, was doing fine until I saw a combo of things... pool-x has a lower pool fee... a post earlier this week that notroll is going to attack the network with a 51 pct attack and destroy the network. Switched to Pool-x, but due to something (DOS, or maybe bad Internet routes), I lose connection at times. So, setup a LTC P2pool (SupaDupa guide) on one of my servers in a VM I have here at home, and have cgminer mining pool-x with failover to my p2pool... and a couple cpu miners also mining to p2pool (the machines are already up all day consuming the electricity.) This way I am not hurting the network by using notroll, mitigating the downtime when pool-x is down by swapping over to in-house, and getting some consistent ongoing income in my wallet from the CPUminers. I cashed a couple LTC out of notroll, and have yet to meet the Pool-x cashout. Meanwhile, generated a couple LTC in P2pool already.

When I cashed the coins out of notroll to my wallet, and deposited up to BTC-e, I don't remember a huge fee. However now, during the past week or so most of my coin accumulation in my wallet has been coming in pieces and parts from my LTC P2pool node (0.02 here, 0.03 there). I have a couple coins, went to transfer to BTC-e, and got prompted about a 0.9 LTC transaction fee.

Want to diversify my coins... so want to transfer some of my earnings over into a few different coins to start with.

So, my question here... why am I getting hit with a 0.9 LTC fee for a 1.8 LTC transfer? Should I just be waiting till I mine up about 10LTC (about once a month) and cash over to the exchange, rather than doing a couple coins at a time?

Or is this something that is tied to the use of P2pool and its many microtransactions of 0.02-0.04 coins? If that's the case, anything I can modify about the config of P2pool to mitigate this? Or is this just something you have to swallow as a cost of getting a constant income rather than cashing out once in a while from a pool? Want to think I read something about that I'm having to pay the transaction fee later, and the only thing that's really correlating in my mind is something similar to the difference between an IRA that you pay taxes ahead of time, vs one you pay the taxes on at time of withdrawl.

I had a 6870 in my normal desktop, been mining LTC with CGminer for a few weeks now. Just got a couple 7950's to use in an old motherboard which I just replaced (Core2 Quad, 8GB DDR2 Ram). Found out my old motherboard only has 1 PCIE 16, but it has two more PCIE 1x on it. I have some powered x1 to x16 adaptors coming in, but they'll be at least half a week.

My normal desktop has enough PCIE x16 to run three cards, but due to fan location in the case, power supply restrictions, etc, I can only fit one of the 7950 cards (longer form) and the 6870. I'll run the other 7950 in the mining rig until I can get the cable.

All cards are Gigabyte.

Question is:
-The first question, which pretty much overrides anything else... Can you mine realistically with two different model ATI cards? A 6870 and a 7950?
-In CGMiner, how do you tell which card is GPU0, and which is GPU1?
-Also, in CGminer, it seems that no matter which way I set the conf file, the cards seem to match to the lowest common hash rate. The 7950 SHOULD be mining well above the 6870 (which would clearly answer question 1), but instead, they're both equalizing to within 20 or so hash rate of each other. Is this normal? Is it a limitation of the PCIe bus, where cards only talk at the slowest speed on the bus? Or is it something where I should choose a different mining software, or maybe does CGminer require opening two sessions, one saying use GPU0, the other saying use GPU1?

All these become a moot point when I get the powered 1x-16x cables later this week, but sometime down the road I will want to upgrade the card in my desktop (for gaming) and re-use it's 300-ish kh (or 300 MH) old 6870 in a miner... which just might make that miner a mixed model machine again.

Thanks,
Steve

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The people who got in earlier, who were there when difficulty was low, were able to make bitcoins pretty fast. Now that difficulty is rising, and seems to go up exponentially faster than it used to, we won't be able to make 30 bitcoins, unless we have some serious graphic power on a whole farm of computers. That isn't to say mining isn't worth it... just that its not as profitable as it once was.

Right now, things to think about for mining. Is your graphics card used for something else... AKA, are you actively using it for gaming, or even looking at your computer screen. If so, then you can count it as half paid off, or all paid off, and consider anything else you make with mining as profit. If you intend to purchase a new one to replace your primary one, use this same reasoning.
Mining right now, with a "average" video card like I have (a 6870, a $190 card when I got it middle of June) gets about 310-315 MH/s on it. The online calculators show that as about $6/day. You're not getting tons of money, unless you run multiple computers each with multiple cards, and at that, NOT using them for anything except mining. No video games, nothing.

Eventually, that $6 will shrink to $4.50, to $3, to $1.75... there will come a point when it still makes you money, but when you look at it, its just maybe a dollar a day. Then, that will be the point when electricity costs come into mind. (Note... if you use AC or fans to cool your room the computer is in, add that into your operating costs too... unless they too are being used to cool something, or someone, else, in which case you can either split the cost or nullify it altogether.)

Long story short... right now, mining is so-so. The age of big deals is gone. Now, its the equivalent of you going to California and panning for gold. All the big nuggets are gone, you aren't going to be able to find huge rocks all over the place... but you still might find a sliver every day or two worth a few bucks. The better place to get to is trading, but thats a totally different state of mind.

Transactions take time to confirm, as they are interweaved into the whole system. I've seen some transaction confirmations take place in as little as a minute, and some take a couple hours. Be patient, it will clear... its not instantaneous (the blessing and the curse of having this be a decentralized system where no one server, no one clearinghouse is in charge of everything, and every transaction can be confirmed by multiple stations.)

Now THAT is the way to do things.... use solar panels to power your rigs. (Or Wind, or geo). Just wish I had the cash to put down for solar.

IF they are not being actively used during the weekend, there's always the option to make bootable USB keys (there's a few versions on the forums, look) and just run a miner off the USB key's booted OS (that already has drivers and network running.)  You MIGHT be able to find DVD images, but not certain.

Otherwise, yes, you are stuck with having to install video drivers, and probably the SDK.

You did the right thing, accounting for future possible difficulties. Yes, the % change in difficulties will vary, and the dates will vary... but basing on the total duration of Bitcoin, I have not seen a difficulty drop at all. What this means is yes, your profits per day will go down over time, because rise and dates are inevitable, they will eventually happen.

Many people do the calculation assuming the current rate will stay constant into the horizon... which, although optimistic, is not realistic.

Keep this in mind... you WILL make money, out to the distant future. Probably going to take a great while to recoup $100 at a low hash rate, but you will make a large portion of it back, IF you keep the mining going 24/7. If you keep interrupting it for various things, you won't make as much, and the interruptions now in a lower difficulty means that you have to wait even longer in a future higher difficuty to make same money.

Yup, ran into the same problem with my HD3500. Guiminer would not detect it, banged my head into a wall for a while, downloaded new drivers, downloaded the SDK... then saw someone had posted the hardware list, and sure enough, my HD3500 did not support OpenCL. It was CPU mining only.

Don't even try doing CPU mining anymore... according to just about every calculator, CPU mining is more costly for the electricity it uses than for the money you get for it... seems to have hit that point about this past difficulty increase a few days ago. The efficiency of the CPU just is not enough to keep up. Depends on your electricity costs... but it will most definitely be more expensive than the electricity it uses within the next couple difficulty bumps, if they go up at the same rate and same timeframe as the past few.

Using Deepbit, I ran a miner for a day, and looked at the stats. Then, calculated. My Prop amount, when I divided it by how many shares I put in, came out quite a bit above the stated PPS amount. Not double or anything, but enough to make a significant difference.

I picked it up a couple weeks ago. At the moment, looks pretty basic. Only a refresh button that does nothing much, a wallet icon that comes up with a "give us one week!", and a Info button. Wishing it had a wall to remotely check what my wallet balance is on my home computer, without having to make a new wallet on the phone and transfer BTC to it.