Out of pure curiosity, has anyone tried some old sun sparc procs and mining ? Even though Sun is dead (god rest her soul, don't bother to try to tel me otherwise I know there's lots of boxes still hiding in datacenters and basements.. so has anyone thrown a miner on one just to see the mash rate? The whole sparc arch is a risc processor, so it does work differently than x86 chips.. just wonder how they stacked up to today's intel procs.

I've been tracking down why my one box crashes, and it seems to be that if the miners go idle (not looking for the 'mine at two pools' suggestion here..) they must automatically down clock (and up clock the mem) themselves to the lower level settings, and then back up to the mining clocks once the work comes in. I'm thinking that the clocks bouncing around pisses it off and then locks her up. AMDOverdrive control goes part of the way, but with the 11.6 drivers can't (or doesn't?) clock it outside of the stock clocks, which aticonfig can.
So after some googling and reading through aticonfig docs, I can't see how to set the other sets of clocks. I would like to set all the clocks to the same, over/under clocked timings so that it doesn't switch around ..

http://www.amfeltec.com/products/x4pcie-splitter4.php

Found this splitter.. looks like it has bitcoin potential, wondering if anyone has used one and how it worked.

I have a sapphire 6950, and a fan blowing on the top of it. The plastic that surrounds the fan seems to be blocking alot of that air going at it. I imagine that it's there to cause a type of air tunnel, in the middle, out the front and back. (very annoying, wish it all went out the back) Just wondering if anyone has taken all the plastic off, to have an exposed fan/heatsink, or maybe just cut the top portion of the plastic to blow more air in on it. Did it help? Hurt?

So I was looking at the numbers for the new difficulty, and then saw the total hashing power, 12434.52 GHash as I write this. Coulda swore it was about almost half that yesterday. Anyone know whats going on there? Someone bring a new ASIC cluster online or something ?

I don't mean to start a flame war of "MSI cards are the best!" But I am looking for suggestions if one brand of a card or another behaves better when overclocking, or running 24/7 for mining. I'm wondering because as I look for cards, there's always a price range for a certain GPU. Being your standard consumer, lower prices are typically better, but not if a $10-$20 more expensive card is going to perform better or live longer.
Any suggestions? One brand or another to stay away from?