Newegg is sold out of every 6970 except one.  A week ago you could pick from a dozen. 

It seems like mining adoption is ACCELERATING despite the fall in price and the uptick in difficulty.  Amazing. 

I guess it makes sense though, how many other investments can offer a 100% ROI in about 4 months?  Until it takes a year or more to pay off the hardware, I doubt the adoption rate will slow. 

Is "free" power over time?  I am lucky enough to have access to copious amounts of electricity that cost me nothing, and figure I could run at least 10,000 MH/s before running into any limitation.  All climate controlled, secure, and wired up the hilt. 

I am just wondering if anyone has done the math. 

I just built a new rig last night with 3x6970, and I would like to ask for some assistance.

I have the 3 GPU's successfully set-up in crossfire config, windows finds them all just fine, and GUI miner is doing its thing with all 3.

My issue is with over-clocking and MH/s.  I am always seeing on this board that 400+ MH/s is the standard for 6970's.  Unfortunately, all I am getting is about 360.  I am clocking them at 910 MHz at the moment, as anything over that and I usually end up with a frozen machine.

Anyone have some experience with getting a stable overclock that could lend some advice?  I would like to get up to 950 Mhz, then maybe I could get the magical 400 MH/s per card.

THANKS!!

Win7 pro 64 bit
sempron CPU
4 GB ddr3 RAM
1000 watt PSU
ASrock MOBO

Just something I noticed:

I recently switched from using the same login for all 16 of my miners to using seperate workers.  I seem to be getting a 10% bump in my average MH/s rate after the switch. 

Has anyone else seen this?  Is there a rational explanation? 

As I scale up my mining operations, I am running into a dilemma.  Spend more money to buy faster mining cards, or save cash and get slower cards. 

I really believe there is an "early adopter" premium involved in bitcoin, and given the difficulty increases that seems to be a fact.  If I can cram more MH/s into the early going, I will ostensibly earn more bitcoins before the difficulty increases.  However, I spend more to get the higher hash rates.

Does anyone have a good breakdown on this?  Does it always make sense to buy the cheapest MH/$, or do the difficulty increases skew the analysis? 

It seems like many forum members are mentally "throwing in the towel" after the recent difficulty increases.  I am reading much bellyaching about how it makes not sense to mine anymore because profitability has dropped. 

I think this is sour grapes directed at newer miners such as myself (2 months), and not really the correct way to view mining.  When looking out more than a few weeks, mining can still be a very good investment.  Given that there are still some 14 million bitcoins yet to be created, the opportunity to have fun, make a little money, and learn something new is still great.

Just because we can't "pay off our cards" in a month does not mean its time to cry and go home.  Show me any other investment opportunity with a 100% ROI in 90 days.....they just don't exist. 

I will continue to moderately scale up my mining operations with a timeline of several years, not a few weeks.  I have not doubt I will earn enough in that time frame to cover my periodic investments. 


Tidbits:  I am running 15 6950's, a random 6870, and 2 6750's.  I average around 5000 MH/s taking into account freezes.