Don't run multiple PSUs without knowing what you are doing! The voltages are actually differences in potential, and if those aren't grounded on the same value, very bad things can happen. This is probably what happened to you.
But yes, the cards also draw power from the slot, but only a little compared to what they draw directly from PSUs.
Ok. Thanks for the warning. What does "grounded on the same value" mean? Might there be a guide out there for running multiple PSUs? Seriously, I'd love to learn how to do this the correct and safe way. Some PSU's require a minimum load on all rails...usually written on the side...if you have no load on them they burn out...very well documented...use google. Edit: I'll just explain...you need a load on the 3.3V, 5V and typically any 12V rail...if they are not there the psu develops too much heat internally and burns out...I have to modify PSU's for my RepRap's by adding 10ohm resistors to create enough constant current for the PSU to function in the way it was designed...some PSU's have these resistors internally added for safety...read the sticker..if it says minimum current under the rail specs it needs them added to prevent failure. |
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I have run some Excel spreadsheet simulations on ROI and want to warn people that buying hardware just to mine BitCoins won't pay off.
I just bought a dual 6970 system, but I bought it before I did the simulations. I based my purchase on one of the bitcoin calculators. The problem is that the network is growing at 4% per day in computing horsepower. That means that your return is losing 4% per day because you essentialy have to compete with everyone else for a fixed rate of bitcoin production per day. It isn't exactly like that on a day-to-day basis, because the difficulty doesn't adjust continuously. But the difficulty function adjusts often enough to almost exactly approximate you having to compete directly against everyone else.
When you take the 4% growth into consideration, your break-even goes from 2 months to never. In my case, I spent $1,000 to produce about 700 MH/S. Everything else remaining the same, my total cumulative bitcoin production will amount to around $200 before it reaches the cost of electricity in about 60 days. At that point I will just have to shut it off and sell the parts to my gamer friends for half off.
The only way mining makes sense is if you already have a gaming system and mine in your off times. But you better do it while it is still worth more than the electricity. As I said before, that breakeven point will be reached in about 64 days from now.
Some people might say that the exchange rate of bitcoins may go up to compensate. That may or may not be true. But if it is, it would make more economic sense to buy bitcoins now and take the gain, rather than buying hardware to generate them.
I wish that you could paste images directly into the messages, because I have a chart that shows the return falling off a cliff right after purchasing your equipment.
Anyway, I want to warn people not to make the same mistake I made. The only way to beat the system now is to come out with a custom ASIC for cheap enough per chip that you could dominate the entire network and grow your hardware fast enough to knock out any competitor before they could produce their own ASIC and make a profit.
The frustrating thing about this is that I first read about BitCoin around April of last year (tax season) when I was researching anonymous banking. I was going to invest $1,000 just as a pure speculation. I never got around to it though. If I had followed through, I would have around $7 million now.
Those are some low MH/s numbers...I spent $850 to get ~1200Mh/s. You probably got some older 5xxx series cards put in used PCs. Mine was new equipment ($330 each for the cards, plus $300 for the cpu, memory, mobo, case, ps). Um...no...new MSI mobos, 955 phenoms, gskill 4gb ram, psu's...no cases...hdd's were the only thing I had...5830's were where I saved the money admittedly. If you don't think its profitable don't do it...I do not get why people are trying so hard to steer people away...seems like a lot of FUD...same stuff has been going on for months as far as I can tell. I did all my calculations based on $9/btc and a much higher difficulty...sorry bout your bad luck on pricing. |
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The coins are already traceable... have you heard of the block chain?
Not banned, voluntarily blacklisted by the individual user.
Lets say you sold apples. Would you sell your apples to someone who got their money by stealing it from your neighbor? Maybe you would, but I wouldn't.
This is exactly what we are talking about. Nothing that goes against any of the key strengths of Bitcoin. No changes to the Bitcoin network are required. All that's needed is software that audits the block chain and gives the ability to ignore addresses.
Did you even read it before getting your panties in a bunch?
I'm aware of the blockchain. You are trying to 'solve' something that turns a system that acts like cash into something that doesn't. Let us know when the big brother client gets rolling, so I can avoid it  +1...someone is trying to ruin what makes Bitcoin great...protect yourselves people, otherwise if you need someone holding your hand stay with the current banking system. Someone should start a thread polling the early adopters to see how many (if any) would be stupid enough to leave 25k Bitcoins unprotected. I don't even have 20btc and my wallet is. |
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What is generating the output in that screenshot? I've never seen anything like that, but my guess is that it's from some kind of linux trying to boot up? Is it from a boot disk?
Yep - that's what I get when trying to boot Ubuntu from either a USB or a DVD. What happens if you boot without any hard drives, cdrom/dvd, or USB drives hooked up to the machine. Do you see the POST screen (where the bios lists the CPU and ram amount, or it flashes a BIOS splash screen with some graphics from the motherboard maker). Are you able to enter the BIOS when booting?
Yes, and yes. Here's the first screen with the board maker logo...  I can get to the BIOS screen by the normal means of holding delete during startup:  If I don't hit 'delete' and let it proceed with startup, I get this screen next:  If there's no boot device installed, I get this:  And if I have the bootable USB or DVD inserted during boot, I get the standard 'USB Ubuntu' (or whatever) screen I see right before the black/white text screen posted earlier:  The 2.2tb infinity is so you can run drives over 2.2tb...turn it off in bios...set your primary boot device...if it is getting to bios I doubt the MOBO is bad (I had a bad MSI mobo that I had to rma and it did nothing on boot...just black screen). I could be wrong but it appears to not be loading from your flash drive. |
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So what if you pay .05usd/kwh? Like me.
I pay US$0.06/Kwh "off peak" and all it does is move the "drop dead" date about two weeks. This all depends on the Difficulty Factor and value of each BTC - BOTH of these numbers are very "volatile" just now and I don't see that changing for several months. Once the crooks latch on to a way to make money it is VERY hard to kill them off - just like the small rodent type of rat. The Difficulty Factor almost exactly follows the computing horsepower, which is growing at 4%/day. It has been like this for the last year or so, so it isn't volitile at all. It is very predictable, at least until people stop adding to the network, which no one knows when. Price per BTC doesn't matter, because if it goes up, you would be better off buying bitcoins directly. If it goes down, you would be better of not doing anything I would have made more trading so far for sure...but I like the idea of mining better. I pay $.05/kwh all day...it actually might be less since the average for my state (not my area) is .046/kwh (pacific northwest, industrial grade power)...I may end up being one of the last miners...you never know. |
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thats great. i'm sorry but i have to pt out the obvious; notice all the inconsistencies?
I've been noticing them all along. It reminds me of a child playing with money or someone with an agenda. Or someone doing it for the LULZ |
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There's at least a dozen stories about allinvain, some of which use his name in them. I think you are bad at Internets.
Thanks for your input. I have a couple follow up questions for you. what makes you think i don't know about the other stories about allinvain? do you have any idea where they all originated? reporters reporting on other reports doesn't make what the report any more valid, they all stem from anonymous posts on this forum. is it not undeniable that it would be easy for someone with the foresight/funds to fake such a heist? I have yet to see a story with an interview with any law enforcement...or any official report. I find it hard to believe that for every dumb story on the news they manage to have some comment from the officer involved/FBI comment/official report but this big of a heist and all they have to go on is cut/paste from this forum and a block chain which cannot prove that he just sent them to himself. FUD until I see otherwise...sorry in advance if I am wrong Allinvain...it would suck to be you if its real...otherwise sorry about your electricity/hardware loss (because really...just like us getting into it now...that is all you have to lose in mining). 5 day, hundreds of posts, massive media coverage and NO PROOF...sounds like a smear campaign to me...but then again I am paranoid. |
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I wouldn't recommend building a mining rig right now, except if you want to use the components for computer games. If you factor in electricity costs and the increasing difficulty, it will take a long time until you break even. You will get about 10 BTC until the difficulty increases, after that you will get less (I'd guesstimate it to be about 30-40% every 2 weeks). So without electrity costs and a stable price of 16 USD per BTC you might be able to break even in 4 months.
I have to pay about 0,35 USD per kW/h (after converting it from my local currency). Your system will probably use about 800W, which would be about 200 USD for me in just one month. So with this rig I would lose about 50% of my BTC to the electricity bill in the first month, and even more in the following months due to the increasing difficulty.
So expect it to be at least 9 months (probably even more or never) with your rig running 24/7 until you might break even.
So what if you pay .05usd/kwh? Like me. |
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I have run some Excel spreadsheet simulations on ROI and want to warn people that buying hardware just to mine BitCoins won't pay off.
I just bought a dual 6970 system, but I bought it before I did the simulations. I based my purchase on one of the bitcoin calculators. The problem is that the network is growing at 4% per day in computing horsepower. That means that your return is losing 4% per day because you essentialy have to compete with everyone else for a fixed rate of bitcoin production per day. It isn't exactly like that on a day-to-day basis, because the difficulty doesn't adjust continuously. But the difficulty function adjusts often enough to almost exactly approximate you having to compete directly against everyone else.
When you take the 4% growth into consideration, your break-even goes from 2 months to never. In my case, I spent $1,000 to produce about 700 MH/S. Everything else remaining the same, my total cumulative bitcoin production will amount to around $200 before it reaches the cost of electricity in about 60 days. At that point I will just have to shut it off and sell the parts to my gamer friends for half off.
The only way mining makes sense is if you already have a gaming system and mine in your off times. But you better do it while it is still worth more than the electricity. As I said before, that breakeven point will be reached in about 64 days from now.
Some people might say that the exchange rate of bitcoins may go up to compensate. That may or may not be true. But if it is, it would make more economic sense to buy bitcoins now and take the gain, rather than buying hardware to generate them.
I wish that you could paste images directly into the messages, because I have a chart that shows the return falling off a cliff right after purchasing your equipment.
Anyway, I want to warn people not to make the same mistake I made. The only way to beat the system now is to come out with a custom ASIC for cheap enough per chip that you could dominate the entire network and grow your hardware fast enough to knock out any competitor before they could produce their own ASIC and make a profit.
The frustrating thing about this is that I first read about BitCoin around April of last year (tax season) when I was researching anonymous banking. I was going to invest $1,000 just as a pure speculation. I never got around to it though. If I had followed through, I would have around $7 million now.
Those are some low MH/s numbers...I spent $850 to get ~1200Mh/s. |
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I've often wondered about such "payment in the browser" options but... isn't this what we *do not* want?
Right now bitcoin payments happen quite easily. Just paste in the address, enter the amount, and click send. Done.
Wouldn't the "paypal" way require an intermediary website? Yet another site where you have to store your coins, will probably have to pay a fee, ...
Or you could go the route of browser extensions, but then only Firefox would benefit since Chrome's extensions are just javascript.
What I mean is some kind of button a person can put on their site that says "buy now X no. of BTC". Paypal allows you to easily do this. If someone makes a button that just invokes the client program to send money and prefills it, and somehow redirects to a page after payment is confirmed, it will be an instant hit on the internet among digital marketers. Right now, all there is, is bitcoinservice.co.uk, a thoroughly basic site. The reason I say it would be attractive to digital marketers especially is because they do a lot of trade between themselves, buying and selling services. As an example, here is a service that is used by one forum. It enhances Paypal payment functionality. It basically allows you to dynamically price and do other neat stuff. They have overseen 18m dollars of revenue. And this is a tiny proportion of the entire digital market: http://www.warriorplus.com/wsopro/What's cool about this service is that these are for products that are sold within the marketing community i.e. not even to the general public. Much of this money just revolves around this one community and only a portion of it is ever cashed out in my opinion. Like that you mean...I am planning on accepting BTC on my sites shortly...I will let the forums know when I am live. |
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We're running 2 machines per outlet. I used a KilloWatt to measure amps, 5.35. So that's 2 per 20amp circuit to stay below 16 amps  We ran 7 additional circuits into the room :p Be sure to switch the breakers on and off with something plugged into each outlet to see which ones are on the same breaker...sometimes they switch around which "leg" is feeding it. If you are running more than 4 rigs I recommend a 240v line with its own breaker...cuts the current in half...just be sure to either use special 240v plugs so you never accidentally plug in something that should be 120v. (You can also make 120v plugins off the 240v sub-panel if you run the 3 wire with the neutral..be sure to use your grounds...breakers/fuses save equipment...grounds are there to save lives). |
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K, before I comment...I am not an IT guy, I am an electronics tech...so from a hardware troubleshooting standpoint this is what I see:
1)Probably not the vid cards...unless slot 1 is damaged on the mobo.
2)Probably not the RAM...unless its in the incorrect slot.
3)Not the HDD/CD/DVD
so whats left:
1)BIOS...Did u do a full CMOS reset?
2) Processor...Bent pin?
3)Mobo...complete failure or something causing a short (or an open to some power connector)
4) PSU...Check all voltages with a multimeter under load.
Other than that you have switched out everything else, right?
Swishercutter - thanks. In answer to your questions... 1) I did reset the CMOS originally, but haven't try to do it again in a while. I'll give it a shot. Then I'll have to reset the boot sequence, set the time, etc, right? 2) I took the CPU out and it looked fine (but I'm obviously no expert) 3) OMG. Please - not this one!  4) I'll try this, but this is a pretty high-end PSU (Sparkle 1250W 80+ Gold), and I unplugged all 'extra' cords and just left mobo power and two dedicated PCIe leads connected. Be sure to shut off the PSU switch during the CMOS reset...not saying thats the problem...just what I had to do with my MSI boards. We have had ours "hang" at install and had to do a CMOS reset even after doing one...sometimes there are glitches. If the CPU had a bent pin you would see it...they stand out...it would have to be bent flat to the bottom of the processor to get the chip in far enough to get the heatsink on (had to fix an older athlon 64 of a friends because he did this, can be tricky...be sure to use a static strap) I had the PSU last because MOBO failure would probably be it. On my older MSI board I had to play with some BIOS features to get it stable (especially with the GSkill Ripjaws ram, it requires 1.6-1.65V sometimes) |
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I'm losing it. I reseated the DDR3 chip, removed two of the three GPUs and still get the same screen. In fact, I went out and bought a DVD drive and installed it - just to be sure... I threw in an old hard drive on a SATA controller and tried to install Ubuntu from CD/DVD. EXACT same screen. I'll start another thread for help, but here's what the screen looks like (looks the same whether trying to install from DVD or run from USB):  Help will be rewarded. K, before I comment...I am not an IT guy, I am an electronics tech...so from a hardware troubleshooting standpoint this is what I see: 1)Probably not the vid cards...unless slot 1 is damaged on the mobo. 2)Probably not the RAM...unless its in the incorrect slot. 3)Not the HDD/CD/DVD so whats left: 1)BIOS...Did u do a full CMOS reset? 2) Processor...Bent pin? 3)Mobo...complete failure or something causing a short (or an open to some power connector) 4) PSU...Check all voltages with a multimeter under load. Other than that you have switched out everything else, right? |
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alot of smartasses happy it wasn't them, give the guy a break. he knows better than anyone else what he did wrong on his part. if you learned something from his mistake, send him a donation or simply stfu. apologies for my language.
edit: in his place cold have being almost anyone here and the proof is that all of you in past 48 hours were fearfully securing your wallets and scanning pc's. and now being smart###es about his misfortune. very low.
Dude...I am paranoid about 15 bitcoins in my wallet enough to properly encrypt my wallet...early adopters know better, I have been here less than a month. |
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So, any ETA on when this pity-party is over?
Just wondering.
Or a police report, you know, if it is actually real. (or not).
5 days, hundreds of posts and all this news coverage but no police report shown...interesting. Another thing, none of the news articles have any statements from law enforcement of any kind...almost like this forum is the only basis for the stories. |
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I think the most frightening was when I touched something I shouldn't have inside a CRT with a screwdriver... Let's just say I don't fuck with CRT monitors anymore.
Output of the flyback transformer...very high voltage. No explosions or being blown back 20+ feet as you would imagine. Just a very large, and very bright spark and the screwdriver ended up flying out of my hand (still not sure if I threw it instinctively or if it was forcibly ejected) [/quote] Haha, a techie friend of mine, who also happens to be 400lbs or so, said he was thrown back across the room after touching the wrong part of a monitor. Incredible power stored up in those things... [/quote] I'm pretty sure the caps on the output of that flyback transformer (the thing that makes the high pitched whine that only some people seem to be able to hear) are over 10kV. |
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I used the dvi-vga plugs that came with every one of my vid cards...some 75 ohm resistors from my shop. Took about a minute each...coated them in nonconductive paint on coating.
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Has anyone tried running 5 with virtual machines? I do not know enough about them to know if it would work but could you assign 3 to one machine and 2 to another? I am very curious...have another 2 cards on the way and I would rather run 5 per machine...pretty sure I can pull it off physically with card extenders.
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I think the most frightening was when I touched something I shouldn't have inside a CRT with a screwdriver... Let's just say I don't fuck with CRT monitors anymore.
[/quote]
Output of the flyback transformer...very high voltage.
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Nope...I have never even been there so I don't know much of their content aside from the Gawker post and I am too lazy to install TOR to check it out. Even if I was looking for illegal substances I don't think I would have the balls to have them shipped.
As far as I am concerned it could be fiction...I know nobody who has actually used it.
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