I picked Mac because that's my favorite OS for personal machines (I have a MacBook and a home built Hackintosh), but I use FreeBSD on my servers (absolutely love FreeBSD jails on production machines), and I'm using Ubuntu Linux on my mining rigs and on my home media center. I pretty much use a little bit of everything besides Windows

If Windows could finally include a decent UNIX compatible command prompt/terminal I'd consider using it for some things, but right now that baby toy they call cmd.exe just doesn't cut it for me and I've tried Cygwin but that just wasn't the same.

No the common reaction is "Fuck you for fearmongering". Obviously everyone should be using a new password. Mt. Gox themselves made that pretty clear on top of it being common sense. But "WARNING - MTGOX HACKING CONTINUES READ INSIDE NOW" is a fearmongering title, plain and simple. That's why people reacted the way they did.

Yes but about 400 blocks were completed already. It may be 6.01 blocks per hour right now (in fact at this second it's actually 6.36), but for other times during that 400 blocks it was higher than 6.01, so in total, an average of 4% more than 6 blocks per hour was completed. The average speed will continue to change over the next 1600 blocks as the hashing speed fluctuates.

I'm interested. Fairly new to Steam though, does this essentially get you a copy of the game?

Now that's something I didn't think of. I was just going by the fact that it only uses up one case slot in the picture. You're probably right though.

I'm running Ubuntu Linux and not Windows, but I've got a 6950 and a 5870 in one of my mining rigs and it's working fine. As I understand it, the Linux drivers don't have that "dummy plug" issue, so that may affect you, but other than that it's definitely possible yes.

@krumplee, thanks so much for posting this. It compiled and worked fine on my Ubuntu rigs. Gave me an extra 5 mhashes per card on each of my 6950's. For some reason it fails to set my 5870 though. Is there some command line option I should be specifying with it to make that work? I'm doing it over SSH so I'm putting DISPLAY=:0 at the beginning of the line. That's working for my dual 6950 rigs, but one of my rigs with one 6950 (card 0) and one 5870 (card 1) it's failing on the 5870. I've also tried DISPLAY=:0.1 at the beginning, as that's necessary when setting fan speeds on card 1 but no luck. Any ideas? I'm really interested to see what kind of increase I get on that card.

The water cooled 6990 linked to in this thread is definitely single slot. If you take a regular double slot card and convert it to water cooling then you're right, but pre-made water cooled cards like the one linked are absolutely single slot, just look at the picture on Newegg.

My guess would be that since it's water cooled, if you have a decent water cooling system you should potentially be able to overclock it further than a regular card, so that could allow for more mhashes. No idea how far it can be overclocked though as I don't have one.

Well my rigs with two 6950s, plus system components (single core AMD sempron and 1 gb ddr 2 ram), use almost exactly 500w from the outlet (confirmed by kill-a-watt meter). I'm using 80 plus certified power supplies that are around 80% efficient, so that means that in actuality the cards are using 400 W of the power supply's rating (I believe they're rated on draw from parts, not draw from outlet but I could be wrong). Anyway, the chip is only using about 30 W of that and the rest of the system maybe 20 (just guessing), so that means each card is probably taking about 225 W from the power supply.

Now a 6990 is two chips, and has roughly the same draw as two of my 6950s. So that means it probably uses around 400 W each card. Given that you want a little breathing room, I would say you can't put more than 3 cards on one 1500 W power supply.

The better idea I think would be to buy two cheaper 1000W power supplies to run four cards (if you want to go the 4 card route).

Also a few days ago btcguild got really lucky and solved a bunch of blocks in a really short period of time. If you are counting that day as your high day, then all days after will look like substantially less. That was pure luck though. It was the day that bitcoincharts.com showed like 15 thashes/sec of processing power on the network (not actually 15, but that's how fast the blocks were solved). At least for me, btcguild was steady the whole time besides that lucky day.

All you have to do when you get the "can't run without an X display" error, is add DISPLAY=:0 at the beginning of the command. So take an aticonfig command like setting the fan speed that needs to be run from within an X session. Just run DISPLAY=:0 aticonfig --pplib-cmd "set fanspeed 0 80" and it will work fine. Also, another pro-tip, for commands that use --pplib-cmd, if you want to set your second card, you have to put DISPLAY=:0.1 at the beginning or it will fail.

I'm actually going to hold off on this for a little bit. I've been running the numbers, and since I still have 3 weeks to just return the parts to NewEgg, it doesn't make sense to sell them right now. When you include shipping costs, I'd need to charge close to new just to match the amount NewEgg will give me back. I very well might be posting back here in a month or two with parts though depending on how everything goes.

I'll post some pics up today, didn't have my camera handy last night.

The 5870s are Saffire Vapor-X factory OCed cards. Supposedly the best stock heatsink/fans on the market from what I read when I bought them.

As of right now, Bitcoin charts is listing 10.859 Thash/s. So it looks like it was just a lucky streak.

What exchange rate are you using for that conversion? When I posted earlier, BTC were going for about 13 USD each, so 14.5 was only about $190, my offer of 19 was $247, but shipping is about $35. These 6950's were $250 plus shipping when I bought them a week ago (I've only had them my possession since Friday). I was looking to take a $35 hit on them (basically selling them for $215 plus the shipping).

Now I look and Tradehill is back up to almost $15 a BTC. These damn exchange rates make it almost impossible to do any real business with Bitcoins other than speculate on the exchanges. I looked at Forex earlier today and I saw that currencies fluctuate a few hundredths or thousandths of a point (I was looking to do real currency trading after messing with Bitcoins). That makes them worse for speculation, but at least you know if you offer someone a price, it won't be 15% higher by the time they read it lol. I really wasn't trying to be a jerk and get more money than new. I'll probably just put them up on eBay or return them or something, or at the very least try to sell them for USD so I can get a price that doesn't change every 5 minutes. I really want BTC to succeed, but I think the exchange rate is going to need to really settle down before that can happen.

Oh wow I didn't realize there were all those customs fees, and being a Yank I don't know the first thing about VAT

I can do any of the GigaByte tri-fan 6950's by themselves for 19 btc shipped (I can make sure you get the 900 MHz stable ones) or two for 36 btc shipped.

I can do either of the Safire Vapor-X factory OC'd 5870's for 23 btc shipped, or both for 44 btc shipped.

The motherboards would only be worth it if you took like 3 or 4 of them because the shipping is basically same for 1 or 4. The ram is too cheap that shipping would be the same as the ram, and the power supplies being heavy probably aren't worth it either.

Let me know if you're interested at all.

It looks like a statistical anomaly as others have suggested. I'm in the btcguild pool, and we found 8 blocks in a one hour period earlier (according to btcguild our luck in the past 24 hours is +27.3%) but our pool is still at only a bit over 2 t/hashes. I expect to see that number on bitcoincharts.com drop significantly tomorrow unless the lucky streak continues. I really doubt 5 new thashes/s of processing power came online at just about the same time we had our crazy lucky streak

I live in Orlando, FL, and I have 4 rigs I'm currently looking to sell for BTC. I am willing to ship internationally, or we can even do local pickup if you're in the Orlando area.

All of the parts are less than a week old, with the exception of the 5870's which I bought used on eBay.

All 4 rigs have AMD Sempron 140's with 1GB of ram and an ASRock motherboard with 2 PCI slots. Three of them have dual overclocked 6950's pushing 350 mhash/sec each (700 total per rig) except one 6950 that is only stable at 850MHz so it pushes 335. Those three have a 750 w power supply. Then I have a fourth that has two 5870s and an 850w power supply. The 5870 rig isn't even fully built yet so I don't have numbers for mhashes yet (the mobo for that comes in tomorrow). All four are caseless.

The rigs are already set up with a customized Ubuntu install for headless mining. Just pop them on your network, connect with SSH, and kick off the miners.

I'm also willing to sell separate parts. I'd prefer to sell for BTC, but I'm willing to entertain offers in USD as well.

Also, if you're looking to use one for a gaming PC as well as a miner, the boards allow for a quad core AMD processor to be dropped in and the ram can easily be upgraded. I customized them with mining in mind (hence the single core Semprons), but to also be easily upgradable (thank you AM3 slot ).

I know I'm pretty new on this board, but I'm willing to do whatever is necessary to prove my legitimacy. I have an ebay account with 39 positive feedback and no negatives. I can take pictures with the parts and my username, and I'm willing to give you my personal phone number and address. I'm a professional software developer with my own business (I can show you the sunbiz.org records and I can show you the app I have in the app store that's sold under my name and can prove I own the website for it), so I'm not just some random username on a forum.

Please post here or send me a PM if you're interested and we can try to work out a price.

I have 4 rigs I'm currently trying to sell, but I'm in the US. I checked USPS express international though, and they list 3-5 days shipping time to Finland so that's still within your time frame.

All 4 rigs are AMD Sempron 140's with 1GB of ram, ASRock motherboard with 2 PCI slots. Three of them have dual 6950's pushing 350 mhash/sec each (700 total per box) except one 6950 that is only stable at 850MHz so it pushes 335. Those three have a 750 w power supply. Then I have a fourth that has two 5870s and an 850w power supply. The 5870 rig isn't even fully built yet so I don't have numbers for mhashes yet (the mobo for that comes in tomorrow).

If you're interested, we can try to work out something, and I can provide whatever proof you'd like. I checked the shipping costs and the price for an entire rig is probably about 4 BTC (I have to check the exact sizes). Shipping for a single video card is about half that.