You can pickup a R9-380X for NewEgg for $215, free shipping: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125836&ignorebbr=1  also has a $10 rebate (limit 1) to knock it down to $205.

As far as recommending the older cards, yes they will work and if you are worried about only the initial investment they might work out better if you can get a good price. Unfortunately,with the resurgence of GPU mining, even the used market has gone up in price quite a bit.

One thing to consider though, is with a new card such as the linked R9-380x, it will retain a higher resale value and will come with a manufacturers warranty. The Gigabyte model listed comes with 3 years, so assuming you use it to mine for a year, you can offer peace of mind to the subsequent purchaser which will also fetch a slightly higher price.

If you go used, putting another year on an already used card that is out of manufacturers warranty will probably be close to worthless for resale by the time you decide to get rid of it. So if you do go used, make sure it is at a decent discount, at least by half of its original cost. So comparing it to the card I linked above, you would need to pick up a used R9-280X for less than $107.50 shipped. Of course the used card would probably be out of the warranty period and if it was used for mining before the components may already be stressed to the point of failing the first time it gets a bit warm or a power surge rolls through (think thunder storm), etc.

Anyway, if you can swing it I am thinking sticking with new cards with the intent of reselling them later is the best. Just be sure to keep this in mind and keep all the boxes, accessories, connectors, etc. tucked safely away and in good condition.

Close but missing the important one for 2 GB cards: setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

This variable sets the single allocation of memory that you will need to increase for the large DAG file.

So for convenience the complete copy/paste list is:

Been using this pool since this morning, seems pretty good so far. Payouts also seem a bit above average than I was getting elsewhere, but maybe that's just random luck, I'll wait a few days to see if it holds.

One question though, at the bottom of the worker stats page under Invalid Shares (Experimental) there is a statement:
Does this mean something is wrong after only 5 invalid shares as you have written or did you mean 5%. I have a lot more than 5 invalid shares already after just a few hours, but the invalid percentage is quite low <1%, so I am assuming you meant percentage and not actual shares.

Well considering the price of ETH was around $5 when the OP made his first post, and was around $6.50 when you made yours and told him it will only go down, it has hit a peak of $15 or roughly 3x the OPs original investment. Even if he missed selling at that ATH, it has spent plenty of time > $10 for a solid doubling of his investment.

Say he bought 3 ETH at $5 and sold 1 ETH at $15, he got his money back and 2 "free" ETH to play around with. Not seeing how he could have lost out here.

I just started to look into this coin and was going to buy some on Bitrrex, but noticed the SOIL wallet is down. Does anyone know if this is some type of normal maintenance or is this coin having trouble and already in danger of being delisted? Bittrex's site is very vague on what is actually going on and I would be more comfortable if I knew the reasons.

One word, Volume.

Even if a no-name coin is hovering around a few 10's of satoshis, if it has a consistent volume over a significant period of time, you can bet someone is slowly accumulating and it will have a rise in its future.

Coins with little to no volume, i.e. the ones that eventually get removed from exchanges, will be most likely to lose your money. If a coin has volume, thus interest, it has a future. Not saying this is guaranteed, but is one way to quickly separate out the "wheat from the chaff". No volume == no profit.

Well not only having a large amount of coins, in this case I would agree 1,000 is a good amount to be called a whale, but also the willingness to put such an large amount on the exchanges in order to manipulate markets. You may have 1,000 BTC, but may only be comfortable putting 100 or so of that amount on exchanges, so in this sense you still would not be a whale in terms of trading. So to be a true whale, you would need 10,000 BTC (or its equivalent ~$4,000,000) and only risk 10% of that on exchanges.

Since most of the energy expended in mining is basically turned into heat, 20k watts is equivalent to around 68,000 BTUs of continuously generated heat which is quite a bit. Nice in the winter-time, but if people are living in those apartments, you will also need to consider how to get rid of that heat. Open windows and fans only go so far in the summer months and most A/C's would have a hard time keeping it cool, even not considering all the electricity you would be burning through... Not saying you shouldn't do it, just things to keep in mind.

I disagree on the GPU memory and feel 4 GB is safer depending on how long ETH mining is profitable, but as far as hash/sec yes they will yield the same. The 4 GB version will also retain a slightly higher resale value, so it may be worth the extra $10-$20.

For the power supplies I can narrow your list down a bit:

• Green
• Cooler Master
• Corsair Recommended
• Memonex
• ToPower
• Thortech
• Thermaltake ok
• Huntkey
• RaidMax
• Gigabyte
• DeepCool
• Antec Recommended
• EVGA Recommended
• XFX
• TSCO
• Silverstone OK, but somewhat expensive compared to others

The ones highlighted in green are ones I have personally used and have had good luck with, i.e. no burn outs or unstable power issues. The Corsair are my go-to pick anymore, especially the modular series. Good amount of amperage on the 12V rail and decently built with overall good cost/performance.

If you are looking for heavy duty 1200 watt plus, I also recommend Seasonic, however since those are not on your list they may not be available to you.

Try using:  ethminer -G --list-devices and see if that helps.

Try the following:

The last line is probably the one that will help the most with this particular issue.  setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

The OP's method was correct, however his example was wrong, for windows you need to use setx and there is no assignment "=" operator.

secondstrade

Can you update my payment address to:
Thanks.

Around 60 mh/s, pool reports anywhere from 60-70, at current difficulty earning about 1.3 ETH/day on this rig.

I am sure it is a pump group. There is a post on reddit that is taking credit for generating the renewed interest in GRC: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/4b4drk/a_currency_minted_by_doing_science/

So the pumpers probably gave it it's initial nudge, then once it started going up in price a bit, along with the new attention, FOMO kicked in and bamm, a pump is born.

I don't see it. Actually it looks more like ETH is settling into a sideways pattern, we will probably see it trade between .02 and .03 for some days before it decides which way it is going.

I disagree and think it will remain profitable until ETH goes PoS. You cannot compare it with Bitcoin mining, as when the ASICs started, GPUs quickly became obsolete due to the arms race, not because more people got involved. In fact, this caused the opposite to happen as the price of dedicated ASICs started to out-price home miners, the amount of individual miners declined. As long as the Ethereum algorithm remains ASIC resistant, or at least until PoS, it will remain viable to mine.

While it is indeed true that more people will look to bring more GPU's online, this is in itself limited as to how far it can scale. The early ASIC's effectively replaced 10 GPUs, then later on 20, and now 100 or even 1000's in equivalent hashing power. Multiply a large BTC miner today with 100's of such ASICs now and you can see this represents 100's of thousands, or even millions of GPU's worth of hashing power, which would have been impossible to scale to if mining remained in the hands of GPU only.

Wow, you realize you are contradicting yourself here.

First you say you agree with Dwarfpool having too much hash-power and it is bad supposedly because they have too much control over the network, which is only half-true to begin with because there are many different miners who actually make up that hash-rate and could take it elsewhere should nefarious activity be suspected. So somehow this is bad.

But now you are advocating PoS, where only an even smaller portion of people will control the supply, as early reports indicated you would need balance's of at least 1,500 ether ($15,000+ currently) to be able to stake coins. That is somehow better?

So in short, having the ability for home miners to invest $200 in a video card and generate a small amount of coins, even if they point to a large pool is going to sink Ethereum. Whereas people who can invest $15,000 or more before they even begin to stake is somehow perceived as its salvation. Hmm, strange logic here.

Edit: Actually not all that strange, seems exactly like banker logic. Now they just need to up the minimum amount of coins required to stake to somewhere around 20,000 coins and it would be perfect.

Yeah, I tried using some of the other pools and I keep going back to Dwarfpool.

Why? Because for one they aren't constantly trying to screw you over like a certain collapsing star themed pool, which is what it feels like while mining there btw.

Also, they are one of the most stable, where the front-end is not always under attack. They developed the first stratum proxy for ETH mining to improve connectivity and the pools admin actively responds to questions or criticisms.

I am all for spreading out the hash-rate, but until we get a few more credible pools where the owner is actually looking out for more than a quick buck, I think most people are going to go with the pool where they are getting the most coins for their hash-rate, which is currently Dwarfpool.

Sliced bread is a scam and is shit. You need to learn to bake your own bread, nothing beats the smell or taste of a freshly baked loaf of homemade bread. An un-sliced loaf will also keep fresh a lot longer and if you use whole wheat is probably a heck of a lot more nutritious for you. At minimum it isn't full of preservatives and you know exactly what went into it.

I cut whatever sized slice meets my needs at the moment. For a sandwich, slightly thicker slices hold up better. For breakfast toast, slightly thinner slices work well. With a bowl of soup, a rather large thick cut slice, especially from one of the ends, is perfect.

Anyway sliced bread is clearly over-rated

You must be referring to all  the people in this thread that responded to this obvious troll. In the end it turns out he failed miserably at his attempt to troll as it backfired on him.

Timeline:

Pick a ATH (at the time) point of ETH to post "I mortgaged my house, was I stupid thread" to suck in people. Goal was expecting humongous dump so he could emphasis why investing in ETH was bad because of his made up scenario.

A few days later when big dump did not happen as expected, post again while price is lower that he was now nervous. Also fake wife post jumps on and says I am worried, should I leave my idiot husband because of this. The troller disappointed the big move didn't come yet, but was playing on the slight downtrend, thinking the big one was yet to come.

Third post indicating his investment is working out. Probably needing to admit the obvious, but stills secretly hoping for big crash to be able to pull off the big troll.

Finally realizing this attempt backfired terribly, and if someone had followed this route and mortgaged their house, they would actually be in handsome profit, tries to gracefully exit the obvious fail troll attempt while also trying to get some troll points in for claiming he helped the recent correction by cashing out.

Sound about right?