or if you want to do it the lazy way .. pools like ispace.co.uk have a port address for random low diff coins it switches now and then and even with a cpu some coins were mined came out in the 1000's
1,000 coins might not be worth much if the altcoin has a tiny market cap or an insanely high coin supply. Most random low difficulty coins probably have both.
Tromp , youre very correct and I would also add in a given time that the hardware electrical consumption will lessen with proper coding (software or cpu) and low power processing (hadware asic) will try to out race each other.. and as in today the hardware asic is winning the race with better efficiency in electric usage.. but imo the gpu might win the race as software and hardware advancements are usually designed together like for example (nvidia gt700 is the hardware / cuda is the software ) Low power with higher gflops units are just over the horizon.
If an algorithm has an ASIC already developed for it then I don't see how GPUs could ever catch up. General purpose hardware can't really compete against specialized hardware.
I tried CPU mining some alts for testing. Some alts have a very fast block time. New blocks are found using GPU in minutes before my CPU can find a hash. So CPU mining is not very feasible.
My Dell 2950 2 x Xeon @ 1.8 gets around .75 mhs. half the hashing power compared to the ati 5850 in the same machine @ 1.5 mhs
If a coin has a GPU miner built for it, then it's usually the case that GPU mining takes over. Once Bitcoin and Litecoin became dominated by GPUs, CPU mining was no longer recommended. Not all coins have GPU miners yet however.
And sirslayer, were you mining X11? I thought the GPU advantage for X11 was much higher than that.