Very cool project.

I've read over the threads and I can see how it will get better and better. But from what I'm seeing I don't see how it can ever be cost effective. Sure the power to performance ratio is great, but the problem is power is cheap.

Can the fpga boards really come down in price to make sense? $400? $300? $200? Don't you have to rely on the people making the chips and those prices don't look cheap. Unless you're making your own chips, which we won't, it's always going to be pretty costly.

So the question is given the current board, the cost, which is unlikely to drop much can the software really be improved that much to see a 10 fold increase? Is there really a $400 board that can do 1Gh/s down the road? If so what are the road blocks and what has to happen to get there.

It just looks like there's a huge gpu chip maker pumping out boards that are quite good at hashing. With ever improving boards, with better performance. Is there really going to be a fpga board that blows the ati chips out of the water at a price that makes sense? Because from someone who has no experience in chip design/boards (I'm a programmer) it looks like a bicycle trying to catch a car and I'm having a hard time figuring out where the giant leap in cost/performance is going to come from. If you look at newMeat1s design, is it realistic to say "Great start. Now make it go 10x faster at the same price". It just seems like there are limits to the chips no matter how well the software end is, the chips are expensive, they're going to stay expensive, and everything else around the chip can be improved/optimized but it's never going to makeup for the core cost of the chip in terms of competing with ATIs gpus.

I'm sure there is an answer I just don't know it so I figured I'd ask. =)

In guiminer there's an "extra flags" field next to the device drop down menu.

Try adding "-v -w128" without the quotes.

Also try "-v -w256" and "-v -w64" to see what works best.

It looks like "-v -w256" should work the best.

I'm not sure how many people will pay to beta test your software. There are proven pools with 0% fees. Who wants to risk downtime, issues, stales and then pay a 2% premium to do it.

Now if you're saying people will get better performance with your miner then that might change things. Looks great though. =)

What version of CCC? What flags are you using?

If it's just for mining then 11.04 worked for me.

If you're using it as a desktop/computer then 10.4 is probably a better bet.

The mining software will run on either version fairly easily as far as I know. It shouldn't have any effect on your miners performance.

I believe after 5 posts you can post in the miner section. Don't worry this will get around quick and it will I'm sure get added within a week or two at most. Great job! I hope your donation made it. =)

It won't drop.

But the crazy increase has probably stalled.

People looking to make money, it's hard to justify hardware purchases that now might take 4-6 months to pay off. Even to assume that you're making a lot of bullish assumptions on a lot of variables.

It's also shaking out a lot of people who made good money, don't like the fact it's dropped and are happy to bow out. If you were making $50 a day and now you make $30 a day you're probably going to sell your hardware now while there is still demand. Plus CPU mining probably loses you money at this point so that will shake out even more people.

But, there's plenty of people who like computers, think it's fun and if they make 40% on their hardware that's well worth it. Shit there's people spending 5-10-20k on folding hardware and they don't make anything. The geek/hardware guys are going to keep doing it because it's fun, the fact it makes money is just a bonus. The network is going to keep going up unless there's a crash but I don't see that in the near future.

The biggest exchange basically gave everyone's data away, lots of people got robbed, and overall it was just a blip in the network. That shows there's plenty of resilience in bitcoins. If a month ago someone said MtGox was going to get hacked, everyones data lost, peoples gmail passwords changed, money stolen from pools, etc... people would have said bitcoins would be lucky to survive or survive after a 60-80% drop. But the fact MtGox was offline people found new exchanges, the price didn't tank so when people got access back a very small percentage dumped their BTCs.

As we move from making "profit" to simply "getting discount hardware" there will be less growth but there will still be growth. Once it gets so hard to mine with gpus you lose money, some people will still keep doing it. But I have a feeling that would only help the value of bitcoins not really hurt it. Plus we have the next leap after gpus in the pipeline.

You need to edit BitcoinMiner.cl in the guiminer folder. It works as advertised. Donation coming. =)

When it rises like this a lot of people who made 2-4-6 BTC a day won't like making 1-2-3 BTC a day. Sure they might still be making money but no one likes suddenly losing 40% of your return that won't be coming back.

I'd also guess CPU mining now loses you money so that probably dropped a few people out too.

In Windows you have to make sure the 20% overdrive is on. I'd assume that goes for Linux.

If that gets reset to the deault of 0% then I drop from 400 down to 345 like you said. Fixing that puts my speeds back up. For some reason in Windows it gets reset sometimes (using MSI Afterburner). I'd see if that's an option in linux and adjust it. =)

Not every card goes down to 300. Some go down to 600. Some don't do well at all when you underclock the memory. It depends on your system and your card.

If it doesn't help then don't do it. =) Your hash rates are pretty good I wouldn't sweat it.

Isn't that just more people cashing out and MtGox sending it?

If you were paying out that's probably the way to do it. It appeared when MtGox went live and people started cashing out so it makes sense.

Agreed. It looks like MtGox is paying out of that 50k wallet.

It won't hurt you at all. =)

That's not a ref card. All the two fan cards are non-ref. This is what the ref cards look like.

http://www.amazon.de/Sapphire-Radeon-HD6950-Grafikkarte-Speicher/dp/B004FVZDY8/ref=sr_1_3?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1309018902&sr=1-3

So you're not going to get a ref 6950 card with two fans. You could exchange that 6970 for a non-ref 6970 which will have better cooling and the same performance.

I'm fairly sure the problem is your mini tower. Even with two fans the hot air has to go somewhere. If it just ends up in your small case it's not really going to help your heat problem much.

Open up the case, put a fan on it like this

http://www.amazon.com/Lasko-3520-20-Inch-Cyclone-Pivot/dp/B000VZRUIO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1309019194&sr=8-3 and put it in the corner of your room. =)

Maybe if your case has places you can add some 80mm fans, help get the air flow going, but you're jamming an extremely powerful card into a small box even a non-ref is going to get hot. If your case has fans pulling air in AND pushing air out that should help quite a bit.

The dual fan ones do tend to do a little better. But anything you push hard is going to be pretty loud. If you can improve your case air flow that can also help. Just be sure to read newegg reviews to see what people are saying about the noise.

The problem with the 6950 is you won't hit 350 mhs unless you can unlock the shaders which is impossible on a lot of those non-ref cards. So you'd be running 250-280 mhs clocked down for noise.

In terms of performance/noise you're better off with the faster card running a little slower. I'd work on your airflow, see if you can help that enough to run the fan in the low 30% range.

I'd generally avoid auto. I'd try -f60, set the fan to 45% and see how that runs. How is the sound with the fan set at that level? If you're under 75c, drop it to 40% fan.

Under-clock the memory not the core.

Run it at 880/400. Run the fan at 50%. Use -f166 and tell me how hot it's running and how much mhs.

The 6950 is the same chip. It's going to run almost as loud.

It's 108 watts for 200 mhs. It's actually a pretty nice little card when you have 4 of them (and only $109).

There are some good ASRock 3x pci x16 slot motherboards that are around $144.

But always get a board with enough pci x16 slots, the extender/riser stuff adds cost and your computer is much less usable. You end up with a ghetto setup that can't be moved, cant be damaged more easily when you just could have had a nicer motherboard and avoided all that. You're not saving money buying $50 in adapters to run off 1x slots. That motherboard is extremely solid.