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?