He (or me) could only do that If we had been logging our traffic. Now its too late, I cant match that with an IP anymore. That doesnt mean you are anonymos. Give me a time in UTC before you do a purchase, with 24 hr advance warning so I can start logging,   and lets see if its as anonymous as you think.

That cant be the same thing; for one, even at 50% fan and full clock, I (used to) not get anywhere near those temps with my accelero.
Secondly, it would still not cause a temperature spike like that in like 1 second. I dont how fast yours went, but I got HUGE cooler on there, even with the fans off temperature climbs slowly, particularly the GPU (VRMs do go pretty fast). Not +40C in  like 2 seconds.

Its worth noting that Islamic banking rules arent too different from how the Catholic church used to view usury, and how Jewish bankers still operate (although as I understand,  jewish bankers are allowed to demand interest from non Jews). The principles behind it arent so much religious as moral, and to be perfectly honest, I think even practical. The more I read about Islamic banking, the more I think its simply a good idea regardless of religion.

Anyway, Im not sure if Islamic banking is the example, or even word to use for BitCoin. It would simply be full reserve banking instead of fractional reserve banking.

Seems extremely unlikely an increase in clockspeed would cause this. Notice how slowly the temperatures ramp up going from idle (which is like 300 MHz and doing nothing) to full load when I start mining, which is 725 MHz and FULL load. It still takes 10+ minutes for temps to go up.

Also, I only checked for like 1 second before shutting down the miner, but it was still working, though much slower than usually (IIRC around 200 MHs instead of 300). Guess thats the throtteling kicking in.

I suspect the voltage regulation is the problem, at some point the VRM gives out and causes a voltage spike which in turns leads to a temperature spike which is instantaneous for the VRM and very fast for the rest of the GPU

edit: doh, you mentioned current. I agree. Probably a VRM crapping out.

The card still seems to work for gaming (CPU temps under 35-40C and VRMs under 50C), I think ill just stop mining and prepare for the card to die entirely

TeraMiner, why dont you just post a video of the board in action?
Sure you could fake the output, but an ordinary troll wouldnt bother.

As for how many youd sell; God knows. I dont think it would replace GPU mining overnight, GPU's are common as they serve other purposes, it that sense its also less risky as an investment.  You can buy and if needed, sell AMD gpu's with minimal loss of investement, Im not sure how much a market there is for second hand FPGA's if bitcoin comes crashing down.

Still, currenty the bitcoin network provides almost 15,000 GH/s. If youd manage to capture just 1% of that, you are looking at 100s of boards.

ACtually looking at your pictures again, doh, yeah your case is too small:



clearance between the bottom 6990 and the PSU is really not enough since the fans are fighting each other, and theys suck in each others heat. Particularly with the side panel on.

Im assuming you wont run this noisy space heater in your study, but somehwere in the basement or wherever, so Id just leave the side panel off and pull the PSU out and put it next to the case. Problem solved most likely. If you must fit everything in a closed case the above advise of turning the PSU upside down and cutting a hole in the bottom is a good one (if you give the case some bottom clearance), but honestly you want a bigger case, or none at all

Did I fry my card?

update: I did end up frying the card. The reason is monitoring voltage with 2 apps, like GPU-z, Everest and/or Afterburner can cause a bug in the 5xx0 cards to spike voltage to 1.65v!. Read below for details.

I have a 5850 with a huge Accelero twin turbo cooler at 100% and using stock cooler plate for ram and vrms.
Its been mining under ubuntu for 2 weeks with no problems, GPU below 50C, VRMS around 80C.

I booted into windows for some stuff, and kept mining. When I checked my temps, I got pretty much the same temps as in ubuntu. A while later I checked again, and suddenly I saw the left side of the chart:



OUCH
VRMS above 120C GPU throtteling at 100C!
Immediately stopped the miner, thats the first decline you see.

First I thought the fans must have died or something, but strangely, the temps dropped back to normal idle temps. So call me crazy but some time later I launched the miner again and kept watching. For 20 minutes or so, I got perfectly normal loaded temps again. GPU below 50C, VRMS around 80C. Then BANG, VRM and GPU temps shoot up again almost instantly.

WTF?

Card still seems to work fine. I dont get it.

Nonsense. On average it will be exactly the same as not every miner sells and the average amount each miner has in its wallet is extremely unlikely to be significantly different. No one is selling every 0.05 BTC. Besides, even if there is a some miniscule effect (which I doubt) it will be so marginal its completely noise and has nothing to do with the current price, as its not miners driving the price, but speculators (and tiny teenie fraction for actual transactions). If it was miners, the price would be.. zero.

Can you first let us know if the rig is stable with 3 cards?

As for the PSU overheating, I kinda doubt it, but you could just pull it out and find out.

You can plug 6 pins PCIE connector in to a 8 pins "socket". A 6 pin is rated for 150W. x2 =300W. Add to that 75W from the motherboard, and it should be plenty for a 6970 at stock speeds.

You havent mentioned though, if you plug out at least one card, does the system work fine under load?

No you wont. Chances are a bread will cost $1000000 then.

+1
I already contacted a few organisations that take online donations, ask them to accept bitcoins. Thats an easy way to get bitcoins rolling, accepting donations makes it no/low risk for them (compared to a merchant), and it gives bitcoin visibility to a larger audience. Plus its actually a good way to donate, as its cheaper than paypal and co.

If you have a charity or some non profit organisation you know, contact them and tell them you want to donate bitcoins.

Not if you use something like bit-pay, though I have no idea what their fees are. Perhaps you should find out.

Doubtful. I cant find precise die sizes anywhere, but looking at pictures from various Virtix 6 chips, Im guessing they range somewhere between <200mm and 500m2 (better estimates welcome). At 40nm they arent going to cost xilinx anywhere near those quoted prices to produce them. THe die size and process used match that of typical range from lowend to highend GPU's, and given the nature of FGPA's its almost certainly cheaper to produce them as GPUs (higher yields, due to redudancy, low power etc). List prices may be high, but thats just due to the relatively low volume and high fixed costs.

Kidding or not, its actually true. But if you want to infect 30 ? or so users with malware (users that actually generate profits for you), thereby also guaranteeing the end of your pool the moment its discovered,  there are probably easier ways to do it.

Agreed with your points btw and I had thought of them, its just that "hiding" your source makes people suspicious. Having the source in public and people being able to compile it from source if they wish, simply inspires more trust even if it doesnt prove the binary (or whatever you call that with java, bytecode?) is actually the same.

Anyway, I do think its good people are getting suspicious and demanding OSS, even windows gamers. While I wish they were more consistent in that demand, like for their OS heh,  I definitely see that as progress. Just 2 weeks ago I witnessed the same on a forum for a flight sim I play (Rise Of Flight). A long time member posted some "optimization" app. When I read it, I was almost certain lots of people would have fallen for it, given the average PC incompetence on that forum (typically old farts with no clue about computers) Surprisingly  everyone was immediately highly suspicious, afaik no one even installed it even though it came clean on virus scans; I scanned it myself, and uploaded to some multi av scanner online, came back clean. Decompiling showed it was malware, but people are learning not to just trust any app. For anyone interested, here is the thread (first post obviously edited by a moderator since):
http://riseofflight.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=74&t=23491

Ok, sorry for off topic. HURRAY we got another block

Hmm.. thats a tad less then I would have expected. With 85% efficiency that means the PSU is delivering "just" 935W. Assuming the rest of your system is comparable to his, changing once 6970 for a 6990 like the OP adds 75W max (if everything back at stock speed). Although its close enough to the stated specs to make me uncomfortable, it makes you think the PSU should be able to deliver that.  OH well, for the price of a cable its still a theory worth testing .

Perhaps you should ask yourself if the people that are into bitcoins are the one buying e-gift cards. Perhaps thats a more useful poll, see how many here buy e-giftcards at all, and how often or for how much. My vote for that poll: never, not once since the beginning of the interwebs.

Is there even a real market for e-gift cards where you live? Serious question, I see the spam often enough but is the demand real even for $? Personally I would never even consider buying that. What kind of gift is that? Giving a gift card is lame enough as a present, making it electronic makes it even worse. I think even giving an envelop with (old fashioned) cash has more style, but I guess thats just me?

Perhaps a suggestion; I dont know the english word for it, but if you get married, people tend to have a "list" somewhere, where you can select the gifts from or donate an amount. Something like that for bitcoin might be neat. I guess it wouldnt be easy to pull off without help from existing services, but if you can,  Im sure there some bitcoin nerds about to get married who might fancy the idea.

Doesnt make sense to me. You say mining at good profitability would somehow satisfy a demand for bitcoins and that would be different if mining is not profitable, it  doesnt matter how many people mine with how many rigs, the rate at which they are produced remains constant. That miners would buy low is no different than anyone else buying low.

Woha, Bit-pay looks like a fantastic idea. Im not sure if 2 graduates without VC backing will be able to make this work this early in the game,  but this could be big. Huge.