Pretty much yes.

If your hashrate is unaffected its unlikely that your rig is being affected by tiny amounts of idles. Ignore the "fatigue" guy, sounds like he has some weird problem with his individual setup.

The only problem I'm having with BTCGuild is a slightly overhigh stale share rate. Still floating around 2%, whereas before I used to be at 1/2%. Perhaps its just an inevitable effect of higher difficulty I dunno.

Run 2 clients per device. that is just run 2 seperate instances of phoenix on device 1, and 2 instance of phoenix on device 2, also up your aggression.

Two instances of whatever mining client you're using per card.

Yes, they are definitely de-humidifiers, 5GHash/sec is about the equivalent of running an 8500BTU furnace 24/7.

It is also possible that if you hvae all new parts in your rigs that there is some offgassing from the evil chinese parts as you are taking them fresh from their chemical vats and running them at high temps. If you can get ventilation going that would probably not be a bad idea. I don't have any specific data unfortunately, but there certainly are some potential issues with electronics + high heat + low air flow.

Anyone else getting lots of stales lately? I'm on USWest (and in the USwest) and I'm getting about 7.5% stales on each of my rigs.

No idles though which is good.

68xx and 69xx will not "sell out", or if they do it will certainly not be because of bitcoin. It's nice to be optimistic about bitcoin but seriously, people have no concept about the scale of the world we live in.

Let me ask you this, if the network size of bitcoin is 6THash/second, how many video cards is that do you think?
Estimated Answer: If every card on the network were a measly 6870 (instead of the beefy 58xx series) that would be about 18,500 6870s.

Jan 2011 AMD reported sales of 5xxx and 6xxx GPUs had sold more than 35 million units. Do you really think that 20000 more 6870s makes any difference at all? (20,000 / 35,000,000 = .06%)

The HAF X isn't that great for gpu cooling, but it's not bad. The 9 slots give you plenty of room to space out the cards and still not bump into your PSU which will be nice. If you backup your wallet.dat make sure to encrypt it. Would be a shame to have someone nab a rogue thumbdrive with all your coins.

That makes no sense. New gamers rarely look to last generation technology to upgrade. If they're cheapskates there are still 5770s. 6870s were already comparable to 5850s with better tesselation, better crossfire scaling and better power profiles. So... anyway, yeah.

You realize 5970s are dual GPU cards right? You need to run 4 instances of phoenix for all the devices. Phatk will help and maybe try aggression 9

The last few rounds on deepbit have been ~45min - 1hr to get a block. It's called variance. Good god people are impatient. You're probably not noticing the difference in your bitcoin count because 1.5Ghash / 2739Ghash * 50 * .97 = 0.03BTC

Chill out, bitcoin is a waiting game, if you freak out about every nanosecond of time this may not be the venture for you.

AMD already sold those GPUs to the manufacturers and stopped production. Any sales of last generation video cards now has no bearing on AMD

"Usually ships within 1 to 4 weeks."
That means out of stock.

Well this was just an off the cuff rough estimate, 5870s used to go for $225, but I see people have been bidding them up to $275 lately, sheesh. Well anyway, 5x$275 = $1375 + $175 mobo + $175 PSU + $40 CPU + $20 ram + $30 HD + $100 custom case = $1900. Those are desperation prices, so I'd say that's a good ceiling.

This is how vlad makes his money. He locks you in for 4 months, at a cost of which can pay for the equpiment you are renting flat out (as I recall he uses 6990s so his profits are a bit lower but easier to manage) twice over (your rig + a rig for himself). So for this to be seen as reasonable for one months time you would need to pay a slightly higher premium. It's still a pretty good deal imho (for the renter).

The 6990 was more of a marketing ploy than a serious money making venture. I'm sure AMD was surprised at how popular it was, and is deciding whether or not to continue producing them. I wouldn't expect them to be in a huge hurry though. The rarity of the card lends it cache, and that's part of what they want to maintain.

You don't need to CF for mining just FYI.

Nice graph, but kinda large heh.

I typically think of MIRs as a bonus rather than part of the actual price. MIR companies have an incentive to NOT honor the rebate, not a good business model for the consumer.

So if you would be ok with potentially paying $200, then the $150 AMIR is an ok thing to shoot for. I'd be wary though.

If you are you cooling the rest of the house it doesn't make sense to open a window. Because really the rig room will need to be a higher airflow mirror of the rest of the house. If you have AC running it will not behoove you to whip open a bunch of windows and cause an equillibrium attempt. If you rely on fans or are just tough enough to take the heat then opening windows is by all means a good idea, but if not you are wasting all the energy used by the AC to dump heat outside.

The best thing would be if you could create an in-room circulation effect. Blow in cool air (on the low side for a 1 opening room) and blow out hot air (on the high side). General air mixing would be fine too though, you really just want that room to try to equalize with the rest of the house (since that is cool already). If electricity bill isn't a concern though, another AC would be spot on.

Well again you're missing my above point. The reason you can rent for less than the price of what you could mine yourself is because of re-investment.

Really the price of renting GHash should be set only at the cost to add an additional Ghash of mining power.

You should be able to add 2GHash of power to your network for about $1600. $2000 max if you're really bad at pricing out parts. So that'd be about right for a month of mining (figuring you'd normally pay off a new rig in a month).

This is true, you'd have negotiate a model that was attractive to both parties. There is also one thing you are missing, an up-front payment of cash for future Hashing power allows the renter to re-invest the instantaneous monies gained from that agreement into more mining equipment NOW (before higher difficulty rather than after with selling mined BTC). Therefore you own both the hashing power you are renting (assuming you already had it to rent) + the new hashing power you purchased with the rental money, you gain the new bitcoins from the new hardware, and when the contract expires you have all the hashing power back making bitcoins for you (unless the client re-ups, then more hardware).

This is a great risk-free way of expanding your farming power.

You got it right the first time, and wrong the second time.

Bitcoin adjusts to the power of the network, if it were only based on BTCs in circulation, then it would be impossible to do transactions later in bitcoins life cycle unless there were enough people mining.