Thank you all for your answers. I will probably go with a 80/20 route(Invest 4K to a rig, 1K to investments). My plan to to try to get a hold of some 290's(unless someone has better suggestions) and might invest in a small ASIC mining machine to run parallel with it.

Another noobish question, is there a way to make a wallet on an offline computer and have the mining machine sync with it through my home network? 

Hello all, I am new to both the forums and mining.
Today I come to you with some questions regarding bit mining or altcoin mining.
Recently, I came across some spending money($5000) and am interested in mining, so I have some questions

1. Should I use a GPU mining set up or use ASIC?
2. Which would be the best graphics card or ASIC machine for mining?
3. Which OS would be the best to run on?
4. Should I use pci extensions to separate the cards for better heat dispersion?
5. How long would it take to make my investment back (Free power)
6. How long would the machine be good for at the rate difficultly is increasing?


Thank you for you time. Feel free to ask any questions if you need more information.