I think you ignored my post. GPUs have a tolerance of about 100C. Most will throttle before that happens. Safe 24/7 operating temperature is 80-85C. Also it's just a budget card. I wouldn't be worried. Also try a different driver and OCL.

I might be interested in 2 more cheap 5970 *soon*. I got a fat tax refund coming. 

I find OCCT to be a much greater stress tester. My reference 5870 cards pull about ~5-10% more amps under load compared to furmark, as well as having a built-in error checker to check for unstable oc

This guy has been banned from #bitcoin-otc for being shady as fuck and suspected money laundering (illegal). Avoid.

ASIC stinked to high heaven when it was first announced. Yes its a good "what if" scenario to drool at for those mining for the money, but it's just that. What if...

You know the network difficulty is self-regulating, right? It doesn't need any "help". If there are less devices hashing, the network self-regulates and makes it easier to find blocks. If more miners pop up, the network makes it harder to find blocks. The only reason to mine is to MAKE MONEY.

If you want to really help, do one of those protein folding programs that help cure cancer. That will make a real difference in the world.

occasional hw errors are nothing to worry about. If you are getting nothing but hw erorrs, then start worrying. GPUs have a tolerance of about 100C. Recommended 24/7 temperature should not exceed 85-90C.

I'm tempted to bring my ref 5850 into my outside computer @ 100% fan and shatter all previous records. ... But it would require dismembering my dedicated miners to get at it.

I had a similar problem at one point. I was mining about 5 GPU's on an evga nforce 790i sli ultra mobo, and it would turn off at random (not shut down, power would just go away and stop). I thought it was my power supply (PC power & cooling 1kw-sr 1000 watts) so I RMA'd it. The guys said there was nothin wrong with it. I got back a reconditioned version and the issue continued to happen, -especially- if there was any sort of significant CPU load (it was a single core celeron 420 which was weird). When I upgraded to a newer msi z77a-g45 motherboard, the problem immediately went away.

tl;dr it's possible its your motherboard and not your power supply causing shutdowns on heavy load.

escrow?

I don't believe 97 watts for both cores on a 5970 mining, even at those low volts, is correct. If you want to get a REAL baseline figure, run the computer with a single regular video card (or integrated), and use -that- for your baseline power. -then- plug in the 5970 and get your idle and load power figures, then we can get the true power figures.

also, looks like I replied to a necro.

you arent accounting for baseline system power draw.

lold. 850 watts from one card would melt the solder joints. try again.

The Radeon Driver has a maximum of 8 GPU's. It can be a mix of any of the GPU's supported in the driver. I also imagine you have have 8 Radeon GPU's and some number of nVidia GPU's as well since it's a separate driver.

A board does not need to be crossfire-certified for the purpose of multi-gpu mining. I have a board with a pci-e 16x and pci-e 1x slot (2 slots total) and I installed 2 gfx cards in there just fine with the help of a riser. Also, all PCI-E slots are forward and backward compatible. You can plug in whatever PCI-E gfx card in any slot and it'll negotiate to the lowest common version between the two.

Getting a 1366 CPU will be kinda of prixy though compared to budget single core CPU's (1366 is an enthusiast platform)

Absolutely. You may need to run two different instances of your miner though depending on your miner of choice and install ATI Stream SDK 2.1 in addition to the AMD APP that comes with more recent drivers (use 12.1) to get optimum performance though. You can just install the most recent driver and AMD APP that comes with it, but you'll lose up to 20% performance from your 5870.

pa.mtred.com was available just fine during the outtage. I did not lose connectivity to the mtred pool. You just need to make sure your backups are set up correctly

But it -does- mean I'll make more money if other people don't start mining too. Difficulty is too high and rewards are too low as it is.

Hi. I have paid for one mobo combo.

Just updated my picture of PA. Still 3.6% rejects. Switching back to beta. BTW my miners on beta pool have had rejects jump up from 0.8% to 1.2%. I restarted one miner in hopes of getting 0.8% or lower back, but here is a picture of beta pool for the last 12 days @ 3ghash from a different miner.