I'm really quite interested in putting my OpenCL skill to the test as part of the Bitcoin community. Putting in 4 hours here first doesn't seem like a big deal, but the timer on my account only seems to move if I am actively posting. I'd rather not flood newbie land with posts simply for the sake of posting if it can be avoided. Thanks.

I am developer looking to use Bitcoin as a vehicle to hone my OpenCL coding/profiling/optimization skills. Since I'm rather new to the scene I'd appreciate any links to discussion forums where I can observe current OpenCL based mining projects until such time as I have something of value to contribute. Thanks and may good commerce be with you.

Also, at a minimum use Arctic Silver or better thermal paste for the CPU heatsink. The stock cooler and paste didn't get the job done for me (core temps exceeding 70 Deg C and emergency system shutdowns - not at all fun).

I've seen the CPU be the bottleneck in my system while solo mining and I run a quadcore phenom II. If you are going solo I would consider getting a CPU with more cores. Don't worry about spending extra for larger CPU cache if this rig will be for mining only.

Here is a newbie question: what is a reasonable hash rate given the current difficulty to be able to mint atleast one block a week? I tried solo mining for 2 weeks at 250Mbit/Sec before deciding it was a futile effort and that it was time to join a pool.

Hi, I am developer using Bitcoin as an excuse to teach myself more about OpenCL. And yeah... I'm old as fsck ;-)

Hookers? So far I have only bought beef jerky. AM I DOING IT WRONG?