FSP and Seasonic (and others made by them) are pretty much the best low power units so you did good.

You'd be fine with a 5770 or 5830.  A 6790 does about the same hash rate as a 5770 and are occasionally on sale for less than 5770s.  But a $109 5830 from Newegg (in and out of stock all the time) is the best bang for your buck.

1)  Can't believe your username wasn't taken until now.

2)  The client doesn't report a MHash/s reading anywhere?  I'm not familiar with CPU mining since it is so little compared to GPU.

Depends on the quality of the unit (brand & model # would be nice) before we can make a suggestion.

I ran a pair of 5870's and an OCed quad core off of a high quality 430w unit for several days of looping Far Cry 2 benchmark at max settings for a proof of concept review.

We need a world-wide network of bank teller window suction tube things...

I'd be selling $5 Footlongs all day long for BTC.

Pocket Change.

Yeah, funny when people have some punctuation or spelling quirks that are so easy to identify.


Err... I mean...

Yeah, funny when people have some punctuation or spelling quirks that are so easy to identify !

Motherboard box FTW.  Benched, Folded, Mined and dry iced more boards on boxes than I can count over the years 

Given sufficient airflow and good temps, the cards should last indefinitely.  GPU based distributed computing projects are known to be skilled at killing cards but usually that is due to one or more of 3 things:

1) Bad temps (bad airflow, etc)

2) "Dirty" power (low quality PSU with dodgy 12v rails are usually the cause)

3) Excessive load on VRMs.  Usually you won't have any VRM issues with cards that have enough airflow, some cards are known to have insufficient cooling on their VRMs for 24/7 100% load operation but fortunately no "repeat offenders" are common Bitcoin mining cards.  Folding@Home and GPUGrid forums will have lots of info on what cards to avoid.

I want out since I think I can help some people with hardware questions primarily.  I have a few years of experience writing unbiased "tell it like it is" hardware reviews and an in depth knowledge of current and future hardware (behold the digitally signed NDAs! )

Bitporium sells new hardware (I think he just buys it from Newegg and then ships it to you) and has some good feedback in the Marketplace section.

I'll be first in line to buy an FPGA miner that isn't too spendy, just because they are way cool

Like Kyle said, PSU is more about QUALITY than QUANTITY (watts) especially for 24/7 highly loaded 12v rail usage (GPU mining.)

Generally you stick to certain brands because they are made by certain OEMs (there are some outliers but if you post back or PM me I can help with the oddballs) and you should be safe with a mid-wattage unit from any of these manufacturers (most of whom don't actually make the innards):


Seasonic, FSP, Antec, Enermax, Corsair, PC Power & Cooling (some outliers here since OCZ acquired them), Silverstone, and to some extent OCZ.

500w is more than enough for a 5830, I have 3 5830's running on a 600w Seasonic (X series, one of the best units ever made) no problem.

Also keep in mind that for 24/7 operation, an energy efficient unit can easily pay for the price difference over a low quality unit (like a Raidmax, Sunbeam or similar) since it won't draw as much power from the wall to do the same amount of work.  Look for Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum 80+ rating to know it is efficient, or check reviews.  Best PSU review site by a long shot is JonnyGuru.com where he tells you how it is.

Most units will be rated Gold (or other level, just an example) for 20%, 50% and 100% load of rated power but some might only be Bronze at 100% but sufficiently effecient at 50% to be a Platinum unit, which would be ideal since you'll be pulling mid-range load, so it is worth finding reviews if you really want to make the best purchase.  Reviews should have efficiency ratings at various loads if done properly with a Sunmoon or similar tester.

Nice work!  Best tool I've found.

Thanks

Fair enough.

+1   

Tool_462 as seen on many hardware forums, long time Bitcoiner just never registered.  Now I want to post a "WTB" ad so I need some posts!

First thing I do when getting new (high end) graphics cards (have built maybe 800 computers over the years, lots of cards) is to take the heatsink off, clean the GPU and re-apply TIM.  Most cards will benefit 5C+ (some are drastic, 15C drop in temps) from switching to new TIM.

I've also RMAed a few dozen cards, all of which had "aftermarket" TIM and some of which had aftermarket cooling (ie: waterblocks) and never had a problem with warranty. 

If you don't want to swap TIM (takes about 3 minutes on those Sapphire cards, real easy heatsink to remove) have you made a custom fan profile in Afterburner?  Or forced high fan speed?