Which mining pool is the best right now?

[flight39]

I just started mining today (and no, I'm not buying any ridiculous GPUs until I know there's actually some hope of producing revenue with them. The reason I started doing this is that I'm short on money. ) and I followed all the instructions to set up GPU/CPU miners. I am currently connected to slush's pool, as my best GPU, an Nvidia Geforce 8500 GT, can only produce 2.5 mhash per second, and from what I can gather from this forum that is a ridiculously awful performance. I am currently mining with that GPU and a second, horribly slow CPU on a different computer.
My question is: is there a mining pool that gives the individuals more Bitcoins than slush? Because, the last I checked, the Bitcoin -> USD rate is somewhat shy of several hundred dollars per Bitcoin, which is around what it would have to be to make this whole foray profitable, with the amounts that slush is giving me. It seems like a bad time to jump on the bandwagon right now - from what I can tell from one day of research the difficulty is skyrocketing.
Thanks,
flight39

[sirky]

All of the pools will give you around the same expected return (minus any fees, which are usually small, especially for someone CPU mining).

[MiningBuddy]

Stick with Slush, its a good pool.

[flight39]

So wait, maybe I'm not getting this quite right. Is  the amount of Bitcoins you receive from the block directly proportional to your speed?

[sirky]

So wait, maybe I'm not getting this quite right. Is  the amount of Bitcoins you receive from the block directly proportional to your speed?

With some variance... yes.

[flight39]

Oh well. I suppose that even with Bitcoin, it takes money to make money. I just wish that there was a way to boost my speed. I tried all these extra flags on my GPU miner and all they did was slow the hash speed down, so I guess I'll just keep mining for fun until it becomes unprofitable (and it looks like that will happen quite soon).

[Meatball]

So wait, maybe I'm not getting this quite right. Is  the amount of Bitcoins you receive from the block directly proportional to your speed?

Yeah, like sirky said, that's pretty much it.  So let's say for example you are in a pool that is pushing 50 GH/sec total and you are putting in 1 GH/sec towards that.  When you're pool finds a block of 50 coins you'd get a percentage of what you put in, which in this case is 1/50th and you'd get 1 of the coins.

You'll see a huge variance of pools and none of them are really better.  Deepbit is at 2200 GH/sec right now, so if you were mining for them with your 1 GH/sec, you'd get 1/2200th of a coin or .02 coins every time the pool found a block, but with 2200 GH/sec, deepbit is going to find blocks a lot more often than smaller pools.

So in the end, it works out pretty much evenly no matter what pool you pick.  You either get larger rewards less frequently, or smaller rewards more frequently.  Just look at what the pools offer and make your choice based on their fees, offerings, etc, and don't get too worried over the rewards.

[irishmick]

I just started mining today (and no, I'm not buying any ridiculous GPUs until I know there's actually some hope of producing revenue with them. The reason I started doing this is that I'm short on money. ) and I followed all the instructions to set up GPU/CPU miners. I am currently connected to slush's pool, as my best GPU, an Nvidia Geforce 8500 GT, can only produce 2.5 mhash per second, and from what I can gather from this forum that is a ridiculously awful performance. I am currently mining with that GPU and a second, horribly slow CPU on a different computer.
My question is: is there a mining pool that gives the individuals more Bitcoins than slush? Because, the last I checked, the Bitcoin -> USD rate is somewhat shy of several hundred dollars per Bitcoin, which is around what it would have to be to make this whole foray profitable, with the amounts that slush is giving me. It seems like a bad time to jump on the bandwagon right now - from what I can tell from one day of research the difficulty is skyrocketing.
Thanks,
flight39

You may want to double check the btc to dollar rates and your electric rates, unless you don't pay for electric ;o)

[flight39]

Because, the last I checked, the Bitcoin -> USD rate is somewhat shy of several hundred dollars per Bitcoin, which is around what it would have to be to make this whole foray profitable, with the amounts that slush is giving me.

You may want to double check the btc to dollar rates and your electric rates, unless you don't pay for electric ;o)

Okay, you got me. I was exaggerating and didn't really check my facts, but the computer is making a good bit of noise and using up more electricity than usual, and as of now I have about .0005 Bitcoins, which makes out to about a bit less than a cent.

[LegitBit]

I don't know if you can actually qualify which are "better", but here are a few smaller pools that you might get larger payouts from:



http://www.continuumpool.com/
http://eligius.st/
http://simplecoin.us/
https://www.bitcoins.lc/
http://gbyte.dk/

[sirky]

I don't know if you can actually qualify which are "better", but here are a few smaller pools that you might get larger payouts from:



http://www.continuumpool.com/
http://eligius.st/
http://simplecoin.us/
https://www.bitcoins.lc/
http://gbyte.dk/

Larger, but less frequent.

Then again, at 3 MHash... there isn't really a pool out there that you will get a good payout from.

[flight39]

Then again, at 3 MHash... there isn't really a pool out there that you will get a good payout from.

Heh, earlier today I checked out the Bitcoin Calculator... it asked me for my mhash and I put in my khash. Man, was I excited...