New and looking to invest in some hardware

[skerv]

I'm new to the scene but very interested and I've got some cash I'm open to investing in this potentially risky arena.  That said I'm wondering if you kind folks can help me out with the hardware selection.  From what I've read the HD 5970 does 802 Mhash/s, 2.3632 Mhash/J, 347 watts on ubuntu which makes me think a few of those would be a sound starting place in terms of power/efficiency/power use.

Budget: $2500 CAD or less  (I've skimmed the $1800 build thread but I figured the extra leeway might changes things a fair bit).

For reference electricity here is $0.12264 per kilowatt hour.  Ideally I'd like the thing to be reasonably profitable but again I recognize that both difficulty and bc values are subject to change.  At the current BC->CAD rate I'd need 125 coins just to break even on the hardware (assuming the full budget is used) which I gather would take a while.

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[Hollie]

you should get if possible a 6990 it can do 835 Mhash/s  for the same price of a 5970

[jalidi]

I weighed the pros and cons and decided against stocking up with 5xxx series cards because a) they're hard to find and are somewhat overvalued by merchants aware of the bitcoin craze, and b) 6xxx series cards are cooler and use less power while putting out comparable Mhash/sec rates so c) you'll have a use for them either to resell to a gamer or use for yourself when the difficulty becomes so high that your minings returns suck.

So, I filled my new system with three 6970's, running them off a gold standard PSU, Corsair Professional Series, 850W. Do NOT skimp on that part of your system. I plan to run them in Xfire when my mining days are done, and it's sufficient for two or three cards if you don't overclock the cpu.

In fact, get the cheapest CPU possible since mining doesn't need it, I put an Athlon II 260 for like 50 bucks into my Asus Crosshair V AM3+ system since I'll replace it with a Bulldozer processor in probably August or September when the difficulty will be so high that it'll be somewhat difficult to mine effectively.