I hate GPU mining now too, scrypt might be worth playing with once FPGAs for it come out but for example I bought a 7950 from NewEgg, put it into a machine, something went flash when I actually tried to mine with it even before messing with clocks etc, and that machine now no longer works.
I put it into a second machine, mined for maybe a week or two, then there was a frying circuits smell (ozone probably I guess) and the machine went dead.
Each time I put that card in, the ozone smell happens and the machine will not boot. Luckily the machine still does at least still work without that card in it.
Now having to look into how to RMA the thing to NewEgg.
Even the GPUs that work none of them produce the same number of KHashes on scrypt as they do MHashes for SHA256, which the profitability sites seem to imagine they should. I get about 255 Khashes on 5870's that give me 405 MHashes on SHA256. I suspect scrypt is just a less efficient system than SHA256 intrinsically.
FPGAs aren't necessarily all that great either, out of a stack of twelve it was only weeks before two of them died, and the cost of sending them in to be fixed cannot really be justified as they are so close to obsolete already and were already even when I bought them. They, and the block eruptors I bought since, are/were mostly just a stopgap measure to be able to grab up some merged mined coins before they go onto major pools and thence onto exchanges whereupon like the merged mined coins you can merged mine at bitparking they would skyrocket in difficulty beyond what a couple of 5870's could really hope to rake in easily.
So yeah, just buying coins is looking pretty good, though I still hope a KNC Saturn might arrive in time to pay for itself even if K16s don't.
-MarkM-
You're forgetting that Scrypt is VERY memory intensive, and for GPU BTC mining the most efficient way is to downclock your memory, which should never happen with Scrypt, so it's a config problem not a algo efficiency issue.
