Yea when you go above 4 cards things begin to start acting unstable. I was using 11.6 and decided to try 11.7 since making the first post. It made things a lot more stable. You should try 11.7 I was avoiding it at first because it generated more heat on my 5830's but it made things much better for my 5850's.

What he said lol so go away quickly!

Ok so I have run out of ideas and I need help. I'm using a 890FXA-GD70 mobo with sapphire 5850's. I know that all the extenders are working, all the cables powering items are working, all graphics cards are working. When I try to run any gpu I own in the second x16 slot the graphics card shows up in trixx and afterburner but is labeled as "video controller (vga compatible)" but wont let me mine on it or over clock.



If you can help me figure out whats wrong I would appreciate it. Thanks.

I feel like bitcoins will either be a huge success and go main stream or it will roll over and die. If it is a huge success and goes main stream it most likely will not stay at around $10 a btc. I'm here for the long haul and I'm willing to be patient and wait how ever long that may be. I'm not going to be the dude who spends 10k bitcoins on a pizza. I realize there's probably no chance for a jump that high but it's entirely possible people are selling for cheap now and in a month or two it will be back up.

In regards to bitcoins failing I don't mind because I'm a computer science major so this is my hobby. If I lose a grand or two it's not the end of the world because I thoroughly enjoy doing this.

The graphics cards may become valueless over time but I'm pretty sure a lot of people would be willing to take a 2 year old corsair psu thats gold rated. As long as you have some quality parts you will be able to get money back.
As for how long it takes to pay off a whole rig. My 5850's can give me enough bitcoins to be paid off in around 60 days. That's about half the cost of the server so in another 60 days I'll have enough bitcoins to finish off the costs. That's 4 months which isn't bad at all.

No one should buy these for mining. 6870's are just over priced 5830's

That's a fair a point. I'd also like to point out that a 5850 can make enough to pay it's self off in around 2 months. As long as bitcoins doesn't crash in two months a 6990 is the wrong decision. Two months is a fairly small window and I don't expect bitcoins to be gone in 2 months.

The problem is you have to wait a very long time for the 6990 to make up the price difference between the two cards. Lets use the 5850 for example since that was the last 5xxx series card to have a great deal.

I think its fair to say a 6990 can generate 900 megahash with a healthy overclock. A 5850 can generate 390 with a healthy overclock. That means you need 2.3 5850's to get the same megahash.

A 6990 requires around 330 watts at full load. A 5850 requires around 170. 170*2.3= 391 watts for the same ammount of megahash.

This next part will be different for every one. If I use my 6.7c a kwh it would take much longer to recover the costs and it would be much faster if I used 25c a kwh. I'm going to use 15c a kwh because I remember hearing thats the average in the US.

So the difference is 61 watts which is 22 cents per day, 6.60 dollars per month.

2.3 5850's would cost you 145*2.3=333.50
The difference between a 6990 and 2.3 5850's is 401.49

This means it would take 1,825 days or 5 years to make up the price gap between these cards.

I haven't really been following the Mybitcoin.com incident too closely. Can anyone tell me the specifics of whats going on because I don't feel like sifting through the panic posts and misinformation.

This is what I assumed happened. The site holds your bitcoins and it's suppose to keep them safe? A hacker got in and stole everything. Is this what happened or is it something completely different?

Also I'm not sure why people trust there bitcoins with other people and services. The more bitcoins in one place the larger the target is to steal them. Thats why people attempt to rob banks. At least with banks if the robbers get away with the money its federally insured you wont get that guarantee with bitcoins.

Good card for gaming not so much for mining. I'm not sure why miners still jump on this card, all its got going for its self is megahash per square foot.

The north east


We wouldn't be investing in bitcoins directly or mining if we didn't think the price was going to go up. I have seen plenty of people suggest buying bitcoins directly obviously those people think its the low end as well yet they don't get as much criticism.

Ah I just wish it was easier to test the limits of these cards. My 5830s don't full on crash my system the moment they become unstable so I got them to the best speed a lot faster and I'm still working on optimizing these.

I'm not sure if the psu is a lemon replacing the cords fixed everything. None of the cords are permanently attached to the psu. Is there a test I should do to just make sure?

Well changing the cord that goes to the wall let me get into windows and then I replaced of my pcie cords to get all my cards working.

This should be pretty stable though because they run at 75c and it isn't a 990-1000 clock speed. It only requires 960 mhz these days to get 390 megahash. Plus these aren't some shitty brand they are sapphire cards.

I picked up 5 5850's for 145 each and you cant tell me that is not a bargain. I have tested each and the average between them is about 390 megahash. That's .208 a day for this difficulty. I recognize that the difficulty will increase but I'm going to stick with this for simplicity sake.

Now I'm not a dumb ass and I am not selling at the listed price of around 11 dollars. I agree selling at 11 dollars would take a long time to get your roi. I plan to hoard until the price goes up to between 15-20 dollars. So in 30 days I'll have 6.24 bitcoins which is $93 dollars at 15 a btc or $124 @ 20 a btc.

If you take the cost of electricity the card costs $7.2 a month (I pay 6.7c a kwh) That means $86 or 117

Also a months time is only two difficulty increases so my profits wont get drastically lower. Since in a months time the cards will be more then half paid for it still is 100% worth it.

Well I figured out what the problem was. Apparently two different wires were bad lol...

How does this compare to the other one Phateus has?

Do any micro atx mobo's even come with 4 pcie slots?

Which thread are you talking about? I know I made a thread the other day in support about afterbuner freezing when I hit apply for my 5850's but cant remember what your thread was. If your talking about the freezing I haven't had a chance to test any further with the 5850's because I literally spent from the time I got out of work to like 1 am working on a skeleton case and trying to figure out why the psu was making a clicking noise.

Also I know you got the ncixus 5850's as well whats your top speed on those so far? I can get up to 395ish with stock voltage.

I'd say it hold fairly true for my 5830's I get my best megahash as 1030/350.

I've only done minor tests with my 5850's but I have a really hard time getting the mem clock down because it starts to crash my system when I do that.