ASIC and other newb questions

[PrimalHoss]

Greetings all.

First of all I have to say I am 100% newb when it comes to crypto currencies. However, I did know about it back in 2011 but didn't think much of it.

After a few evenings of research (please correct if wrong) it seems to me like the ASIC tech businesses are scamming people by a forever-delaying waiting list? Is ASIC technology really 1990ish tech with improvements?

FPGA...I have seen some boards but I dont know much about them. I have read others say they are not worth it, but I have to investigate this option more.

It seems GPU is possibly the way to go if you have low electricity rates. I have been looking at building a set up with three 7970's and from this link https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison they are rating these three cards together somewhere in the range of 1950-2050 MHash/s yet the ASIC tech is supposed to be rated for 60 GHash/s. I am curious how one scales the difference between these ratings? I tried looking for an explanation but I couldn't find anything. My educated guess is that MHash could be MegaHash and GHash is a GigaHash, if so how many "Mhash(es)" make up one "Ghash"  By theory would it be 1024 "mhash(es)" make a single "Ghash"? Am I looking at this from the wrong point of view?

Also, I have a P4 3.2ghz with a sapphire x800 gpu dissembled in the garage, is it worth reassembling to play around and gain understanding on mining and how pools work, or is the computational power just not worth it...I am assuming its not?

 

[1715163985]

1715163985

[PachucoBro]

GPU is not worth it unless you want to have some fun spinning your electric meter.

FPGA is the best out there that is working and WAS easily accessible. I say WAS because evidently the people making and selling these product got skeered by the ASICS and shut their doors... i guess they aren't business minded because I would be selling them as long as people were willing to pay for the on a pre-paid basis.

As it is ASICs just aren't available so why not use FPGA... just because a few have ASICs the majority of people are chugging along with their little FPGA setups making BTCs. I would rather keep chugging along when BTC = $110+ than sit and wait 6 more months for an ASIC.

[Delitus]

ASICs are very real, but just extremely limited in supply at this early stage. Avalon is the first ASIC to have shipped to customers, and Butterfly Labs is looking to ship soon. 1 GHash/s = 1000MHash/s - so a 60GH ASIC is around 100-120x times faster than a 7970. Yes, they are that fast! ASICs are so fast compared to GPUs due to them being "application-specific" (it's in the name!) - the entire chip is dedicated to computing SHA-256 hashes, and SHA-256 hashes only. It's an efficiency/flexibility tradeoff - compare CPUs and GPUs, for example.
Mining with GPUs (or even CPUs, for that matter) is/would be still worthwhile if electricity was free. After all, hashing power is hashing power, be it small or big - more hashes/s means more chances to win. Of course, electricity is never free, and power efficiency becomes a factor in determining which devices should be kept running, and which should be retired. CPUs have already seen the end of days as far as mining goes - even the extreme multi-core chips - as their high W/hash, combined with the skyrocketing difficulty, simply makes it not worth the while. GPUs still remain viable, but older models are not general purpose enough to be used for mining - the x800 is one of those, sadly.
If you just wish to see how mining works, then it is perfectly fine to give your CPU a whirl - just make sure to mine in a pool (preferably PPS - otherwise you may not see results at all!). As for buying 7970s, I would not do this unless you were planning on using them for gaming too, with mining as a secondary purpose. With the advent of ASICs and increasing difficulty, you may never make back your investment, unless you rely on BTC appreciating in the (very) long-term.

[molotov]

Avalon have not scammed people and has delivered ASICS already, however since they know this they have scammed in the sense of pumping next batch prices up ridiculously.

Yes 1 GHash=1000 Mhash (or 1024 whatever)

I am not a miner, but maybe you could use that GPU to investigate mining alternate cryptocurrencies such as LTC which is gaining strength lately.
I doubt you will make much money out of just 1 card (you could check see if you can find the hashing power of your card and then with a mining calculator get a figure of how much you could be earning), but you can get to know how it works hold coins and if LTC continues to rise who knows hey? maybe you will make a lot of money. Just remember the hashing power for won't be the same for btc than for ltc, this will be much lower due to the different characteristics of them, i felt into that the first time and thought omg im gonna get rich!

So yeah make sure you find the script (ltc) hashing power of your gpu, it will normally be expressed in KHash.

[PachucoBro]

It has been said that GPU hashing is not as effective with LTC. Read a few Wikis.

[dataphile]

BFL is the biggest tentative "scam" at the moment, but it isn't likely a scam - they've just failed to meet any of their deadlines at all, and are very, very poor at communicating with their customers.

I'm a BFL customer.

[manface]

It has been said that GPU hashing is not as effective with LTC. Read a few Wikis.

Ive found my gpus mine litecoin a lot better than my cpus

[PrimalHoss]

thanks for the replies. good info!