How to turn an idle mac pro into a mining rig?

[Zuuxop]

Hi All,

I'm a university researcher with an idle late 2010 mac pro (12 cores, 2.68GHz, 32GB DDR, 512 GB SSD drive) and access to an air conditioned server room.  The machine was bought on grant money, but hasn't been used much.  I want to make it work by turning it into a bitcoin mining rig.  I'd like advice on what the best graphics card setup would be to make this work.  Does anyone have any advice?  I was thinking of putting 2 ATI Radeon 5780's into it, but are there other options that would be just as/more appropriate?  Fortunately, the overhead costs should be pretty low, as the machine is already bought and I have legitimate excuses to charge the graphics cards to the grant, and I wouldn't be covering power costs for the server room.  So, unless the bitcoin yield is identically zero, I have a motivation.

Has anyone tried mining with a Mac Pro?

Cheers,

Zuuxop

[SAC]

Does anyone have any advice? 

Yeah give up on the idea of stealing your universities resources.

[Kluge]

The university would probably be losing more with you mining than you would make in income. CPUs won't earn anything significant, and GPUs will lose usefulness (rather, cost way more to run than what they'd earn BTC mining) when/if ASICs ever arrive (currently 2-3 months behind delivery dates, and bankruptcy very possible for one of the manufacturers).

However, at least poclbm, phoenix and guiminer have Mac compatibility (no idea on others). For GPU card comparison in general in relation to mining, see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison - best $/MHs will depend on what you buy the cards at, but 5xxx GPUs are generally best $/MHs (58xx series used to almost always be best $/MHs, but unsure now), with the 7xxx series having best $/Wh numbers.

[casascius]

Why not just see if you can charge the graphics cards to the grant, and then take them back to the store for a refund, and pocket it, or use the store credit to buy gifts for friends and family?  Perhaps you can find a way to get the university to issue a check to pay for the graphics cards, but actually deposit it into your own personal account.  It's all the same, and you'll keep more of the money that way.

I think that on this forum you'll find a lot of people who are tired of paying taxes knowing full well that their tax money goes to pay for wasteful things that someone can find an "excuse" to buy, rather than things that will actually provide the benefits the public is paying for.