Model   MH   $   MH/s/$
5770   200   90   2.22
5830   300   100   3.00
5850   335   175   1.91
5870   420   220   1.91
5970   780   ?   ?
6870   300   190   1.58
6950   240   ?   ?
6950   350   280   1.25
6970   350   210   1.67
6990   770   680   1.13

Maybe you're right, the most relevant value to compare temperatures to in this case is probably the ambient temperature, rather than 0 C or 0 K. But really the total wattage tells you all you need to know about how much heat is produced. Something useful would be a column showing MHash/s/$ next to the one with MHash/J.

Try eligius, no account needed as you just use your bitcoin address to login.

You really can't multiply and divide by values in Celsius and get meaningful numbers. You would need to convert to Kelvin (i.e. add 273.15) to compare temperatures in that way. But really the actual temperature is highly dependent on factors other than the card itself. The wattage is enough to determine how much heat is produced.

Yeah there are not many out there, if I wanted to travel to a store ~150 km away I could get 2 for C$220 each but I don't want to piss off my landlord with the power bill.

How can you earn money in bitcoins, aside from mining? I wouldn't mind correcting OCR or identifying images (e.g. google image labeler) in my spare time if someone paid me. Quality control is easy enough to automate by cross checking the results as a lot of sites do already when they have volunteers do these things, and there could be extra bonuses for high accuracy. The 'employer' gets a database that can be used to train higher quality image recognition software, or perhaps they use the results directly for something. Also, potentially someone doing such a project could rent out GPU time from individuals or pools by paying out bitcoins at a rate a little better than mining currently gives.

Can't send those over the internet with no paper trail?

Going by that chart, the 6950 is only 13% more efficient than the 5830. For that money the 5870 looks a lot better.

Those power meters are nice to have, I have a Belkin one that I kind of overpaid for but it's always coming in handy.

I chose an e-350 motherboard for my current computer mostly because of its low power consumption. It only has one PCIe slot but it works perfect for my purposes. I tend to think a fast CPU is kind of overrated these days, GPUs are much more efficient at a lot of the grunt work anyway as we see with mining. I could lower consumption further by booting from a 2.5" laptop drive instead of a 3.5" "green" like I have, but it wouldn't make a huge difference in the total. You can get single core Atom boards that are lower powered and cheaper as well but I haven't tried them for mining. Of course none of those ITX boards will work with more than one GPU.

Looks like you didn't overspend on anything unnecessary for the task like a high powered cpu or tons of ram. I have the Sapphire 5830 too and it seems like a good buy.

Using a Sapphire 5830 with a Sapphire E-350 ITX mobo, overall system power consumption for 297-300 GHash is 220 w at 1000/300. Was getting some weird crashes when doing this while using Firefox Nightly but I switched to IE and that seems to have stopped.

Canada computers is getting cleaned out too, tons of 5830's when I got my Sapphire for $99 a few days ago and now there is one across the whole chain.

Buying a $1000 computer you can't afford otherwise and assuming it will pay for itself with future earnings is risky for sure. I am one of those people who started doing this a few days ago, and since I already owned a computer my only bitcoin-specific investment has been a Sapphire 5830 for C$100 plus tax. I feel pretty comfortable with spending that amount to get into a potentially profitable hobby, with the side benefit that I can use the card for other things if that doesn't work out. On the other hand, spending the same amount on bitcoins directly seems risky to me and not as much fun. I think people know what level of risk they are comfortable with personally.

Did not know that Trixx was the official Sapphire program, will try that.

Thanks.

Where do you get ATI Stream 2.1? Is it true that 2.4 works just as well if using the Phoenix phatk kernel?

How do you go beyond 875 MHz in Afterburner with the Sapphire 5830?

Tried that and it doesn't seem to decrease hash rate, if it saves a bit of power then I'll keep doing it.

What is the advantage of underclocking the ram? I have one Sapphire 5830.