Advice on mining rig

[foijord]

Gents,
anyone shut down their rigs for earth hour? 

But seriously, if any hardware geeks out there want to help out a n00b, here's the spec of the pretty much the cheapest starting point of a mining rig I could manage to put together:

Cabinet:        Fractal Design Define R4 Black Pearl
Power:          XFX ProSeries XXX Edition 850W PSU
Processor:     Intel® Core i3-3220 Processor
Motherboard: MSI Z77A-GD65, Socket-1155
Memory:       Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz 4GB CL9
GPU:            Sapphire Radeon HD 7750 1GB GDDR5
HD:              Crucial m4 SSD 2.5" 128GB

This is a package deal, since I'm too lazy to do the research needed to put together a system from scratch.

The motherboard supposedly supports 3 GPUs. Can I stuff 3 x 7970s in there just like that? (I chose the biggest power supply I could).

I've done my homework wrt. profitability, ASICs etc. so I know I'm not going to get rich here. I just want to be part of the Bitcoin community, contributing to solving blocks and keep the system healthy.

So, does these components make sense?

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[bonker]

Gents,
anyone shut down their rigs for earth hour? 

But seriously, if any hardware geeks out there want to help out a n00b, here's the spec of the pretty much the cheapest starting point of a mining rig I could manage to put together:

Cabinet:        Fractal Design Define R4 Black Pearl
Power:          XFX ProSeries XXX Edition 850W PSU
Processor:     Intel® Core i3-3220 Processor
Motherboard: MSI Z77A-GD65, Socket-1155
Memory:       Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz 4GB CL9
GPU:            Sapphire Radeon HD 7750 1GB GDDR5
HD:              Crucial m4 SSD 2.5" 128GB

This is a package deal, since I'm too lazy to do the research needed to put together a system from scratch.

The motherboard supposedly supports 3 GPUs. Can I stuff 3 x 7970s in there just like that? (I chose the biggest power supply I could).

I've done my homework wrt. profitability, ASICs etc. so I know I'm not going to get rich here. I just want to be part of the Bitcoin community, contributing to solving blocks and keep the system healthy.

So, does these components make sense?

Looks way over speced to me. Be a cheapskate:

My last miner consisted of a £22 mobo bundle with AMD3300+ CPU and 1 Gig ram. A 800W power supply for £25. Boots off an 8 quid 8Gig memory stick with swap turned off. Why spend more?

With difficulty going up like it is the thing is going to be redundant in a couple of months.

[foijord]

Looks way over speced to me. Be a cheapskate:

My last miner consisted of a £22 mobo bundle with AMD3300+ CPU and 1 Gig ram. A 800W power supply for £25. Boots off an 8 quid 8Gig memory stick with swap turned off. Why spend more?

With difficulty going up like it is the thing is going to be redundant in a couple of months.

But how about the motherboard/power supply combo? Can i handle 3 x 7970s? How about 3 x 7990s? Is there room in the cabinet? If it's over specced, that's not really an issue, it's not exclusively for mining...

[ralree]

That PSU will NOT handle 3 7970s overclocked and pegged.  You'll need at LEAST 1000w for that, and I'd recommend an 1100 or more just to have some headroom.  Bonker is right, building a BTC mining rig right now is potentially unprofitable, but if you figure out what cards are best per $ for LTC, you could do rather well for yourself down the road.  7970s are not optimal for LTC mining as they are so expensive.  I'd get some 6870s or 6850s (or some 5xxx series cards) that are around 1/3 the price, but get 1/2 the hashes on LTC. 

Good luck!

[foijord]

That PSU will NOT handle 3 7970s overclocked and pegged.  You'll need at LEAST 1000w for that, and I'd recommend an 1100 or more just to have some headroom.  Bonker is right, building a BTC mining rig right now is potentially unprofitable, but if you figure out what cards are best per $ for LTC, you could do rather well for yourself down the road.  7970s are not optimal for LTC mining as they are so expensive.  I'd get some 6870s or 6850s (or some 5xxx series cards) that are around 1/3 the price, but get 1/2 the hashes on LTC. 

Good luck!

Thanks, this is the kind of info I was looking for. However, I don't really care about profitability... really! I'm just doing this for fun. And I need the PC to be usable for more than just mining. But do you know if 3 GPUs will physically fit in this cabinet/motherboard combo? I guess that's kind of difficult to answer unless you have this motherboard yourself, or is experienced in building computers...

[freebeer2go]

Earth hour is completely pointless, a waste of energy actually. The amount of electricity to generate depends on the peak usage level.

Basically, the electric company has to generate the peak usage level electricity, 24/7, they can't just lower generation at off-peak time. This is why when you use electricity at off-peak time, you often get a huge discount, because electric companies are trying to encourage you to use electricity at off-peak times.