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September 17, 2012, 04:17:25 PM |
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I would strongly recommend nobody buy a graphics card for mining at the moment. Butterfly labs is about to release a chip that, at current prices, will pay for itself in under a month and runs at 3,500 MH/s for $149 on pretty low power usage. We're a a couple months away from the end of graphics card mining. Let's say 100 of these small miner cards ship out. That's 350GH/s added to the mix. The total computational power of everyone total is a hair above 20,000 GH/s so that wouldn't affect it that much. Let's say they sell 1000 of these instead. Keep in mind for $149, 3500MH/s is around 36 BTC per month which is about $420 per month right now. So yeah, they're gonna sell 1000. They also have a larger version that goes 40,000MH/s for $1299 which, at current prices, also pays for itself in like 1.5 weeks or something. So probably 3 months after release, depending on how fast they can manufacture and ship them, graphics cards will look like CPUs by comparison when it comes to speed vs heat vs price.
Of course, if you want a card for gaming anyway and just want to make some BTC with it for a couple months to take a bit out of the price, go for it. If you can still find a 5830, that'd be ideal but good luck lol. Otherwise google "bitcoin mining hardware comparison" for a pretty decent chart of electricity vs MH/s and some overclocking expectations. That's how I made my initial purchase decision. Just don't count on it being worth the cost of electricity by 2013.
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