While the mobile cards would be great for MHash/watt, it would probably not be very much so on Mhash/$, thanks to the price barrier of miniaturization.
If looking at the long term, as long as difficulty rate doesn't change toooo quickly, it may be worth the investment.

As it stands now, you can get an asus g73 (i think) for like $1300, which has a mobile radeon 5870... Matter of fact I nearly got that laptop for going back to the spring semester at university, but built my current desktop instead for an equal price. (Which the desktop turned out to be multiples more powerful in other ways, just apparently not bitcoin mining. EX: COMSOL or Solidworks simulations... ugh.)

I'm kindof on the fence about whether the increased investment (Which isn't so bad when you take into account the fact that a laptop is its own entire system, not "just" one super expensive component.) would be worth the decreased power draw. It may in the long run, but I suppose mileage may vary.

Alternatively, a gtx480m laptop:
Note that the listed power draw is 180W for the ENTIRE laptop, while the gtx480m is said to be almost identical to a desktop gtx465 in performance.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-480m-w880cu-avadirect,2679.html

Sorry for the double post.

After implementing jgarzik's CPU miner and m0mchil's GPU miner, and getting them both to communicate with Slush's pool, my account page is reporting MUCH lower hash rates than what the miners themselves are reporting.

CPU, -a 4way -t 4, is getting 3M per each of 4 cores = 12M/s (reported on the site as 1M/s), and
GPU is getting usually around 53M/s (reported on the site as ~37M/s to ~40M/s).

Huh?

(Just noticed something- when m0mchil's GPU miner gets minimized in win7, my GPU usage levels off to a much lower percentage. Will leave up from now on.)

Well it's a few hours later and I got a small trickle of BTC coming in according to my profile on Slush's site, so I must've set something up right.
Thanks for the help. 
Next task: get a cpu miner to work and RPC it to Slush's pool.

The size of the pool is astounding... Even running a GPU client, I'm getting just ever so slightly over the per-user average (global shares / users).

Food for thought:
It would be interesting to see what other kinds of cool things that gp-gpu's can do. I've read the wiki page on distributed computing, but most of those seem small potatoes.
Currently the fastest single supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, uses 7168 nvidia Tesla's to produce 4.7 peta-flops.
Right now we're less than 2 orders of magnitude off from that, I'd estimate, which is still some serious compute power. And that's just assuming each setup in the Slush RPC is ~similar~ to my own.

[ 7128 teslas / 206 clients on slush's pool] = 34.79x, and factoring the performance difference between the "average" user's 50Mhash's and what a tesla 2050 would be a ballpark 1.5x to 3x difference and we're still talking a 52.2x to 104.4x difference between Slush's pool and the world's fastest supercomputer. Back of the napkin, of course.

Damn, folks. This is some crazy stuff. I wonder what the total compute power of something popular, like folding@home, has at it's disposal.

Thanks BitterTea!
It's reporting that it's hashing with nearly the exact setup you gave there. So hopefully that means its working! 

Reading about some json patch got me confused- is that patch essential for being in slush's pool?

Hi, I'm fairly new to Bitcoin and very new to operating in the command line.
I've been trying to find directions on how to set up the RPC to get to Slush's pool, using a GPU miner but I can't seem to find it nor figure it out.
I have m0mchil's GPU miner working without a hitch using the local server instructions found at:
http://www.newslobster.com/random/how-to-get-started-using-your-gpu-to-mine-for-bitcoins-on-windows
But no real idea how to modify that setup to get it to talk to Slush's pool.
Any help would be appreciated!

Essentially its that simple. To make it efficient, you want the best MHash/Watt and MHash/$, since the power draw on a mining setup essentially nulls the profits unless you're running a big Radeon card with high ratios.


From the time I've spent lurking on the forums, and the sources posted herein, I think the general way you want to go regardless of budget is:

-Maximum ATI gfx card, even multiples that aren't running in Crossfire. (For separate device id's for separate instances of GPU miners)
..... For some reason, ATI cards are several multiples faster than nVidia for mining for the price. An $80 radeon 5570 gets slightly more khashes/s than my $200 gtx460.
..... I'm unsure of the effects of mining with 2 cheap Radeon's non crossfire versus 1 fancy Radeon by itself. It may be mostly additive.

-Cheap CPU, unless you also want it to mine at the same time, then maximize it within your budget. GFX takes MAJOR priority however. More cores are better than faster cores. An AMD X6 or a newfangled intel i7 are ideal for maximum cores, but get expensive. Again, go AMD if price is a concern, they're plenty fast and 20-30% cheaper. GPU miner programs have minimal CPU impact.

-Minimal RAM, 2-4GB, depending on OS. This is just to have a responsive overall system. Bitcoin while generating on 4 of my 4 cpu cores uses ~28 MB of RAM.

-Minimal hard-disk. Doesn't need to be super fast or even big. Has the OS and your miners.

-High Airflow Case. A necessity since you'll likely be overclocking whatever you use. If price isn't an issue, get an aftermarket CPU cooler or water cooler. Even if you don't mess with CPU OC's, GPU OC'ing is quick and easy and generates a lot of heat. Antec's 300/600/900/1200 cases are loved by everyone, are inexpensive, and are regarded as among the best air cooling towers you can get.

-As efficient a PSU as possible. Probably with some decent wattage headroom for upgrades down the line as the hashing difficulty factor increases.

-Minimal Motherboard, unless you really wanna do a CPU OC. Make sure it accepts PCIe 2.0 x16, two of those slots if you want to run multiple cards (crossfire ready, etc), and the variety/quantity of RAM you want.

Valuable Resources:
http://golubev.com/gpuest.htm
http://pastebin.com/AvymGnMJ
http://www.bitcoin.org/wiki/doku.php?id=bitcoin_miners

First post to the forum, and
Firstly, I just found out about bitcoin yesterday, and as of about 12 hours ago have gotten my setup running around ~60M hashes/s.
Very interesting community here, at a glance it looks like very helpful, generous, and greedy folks (simultaneously!  ).

According to Anandtech's article on the matter,
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/nvidia-s-geforce-gtx-480-and-gtx-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/6,
it appears that nvidia purposefully crippled their 400-series line by making it skip cycles in its gp-gpu performance, thereby validating the existence of their more expensive workstation cards. A recent forum post (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2338.0) had rumor of a 680Mhash card, roughly 11x what I can run. The anandtech article cites that my card is limited to 1/12 of the fp64 performance of the equivalent workstation chip. Coincidence?

Any truth to the notion that it could account for the enormous performance difference between ATI & nVidia for bitcoin mining?
Or would it be a simple matter of more stream procs -> higher FLOPS -> more Mhashes/s?
As it stands now, a radeon 5570 with 400 stream proc's gets a roughly proportionally higher productivity to my gtx460's 312 cores.
5570 source: http://www.bitcoin.org/wiki/doku.php?id=bitcoin_miners

And if it IS more cores = more hashes, why doesn't this performance translate to other gp-gpu applications? (Or does it? I haven't done the research on that.)

Setup achieving 60M hashes:
AMD Phenom II X4 956 BE at 3.4 Ghz, stock settings (contributes 5.8-6.0 M-hashes itself on 4-core mode)
OC'd nVidia GTX460 1GB version, running 840/1680/2050 (contributes 52-54 M-hashes on m0mchil's opencl miner, -w 128 -f 30)