I wonder how you get so much higher hashrate on lower clocks than me:
Well, i was wondering if its just a quirk of GUIminer reporting. Personally I prefer to run linux too, btu for some reason I could not get the ATI drivers to play nicely under 2.6.36 so i made a windows install to mine. If i run one miner thread with my clock settings I get 386MH/sec. If i run multiple threads, it goes higher, but again im not sure if this is an accurate report, or a bug in guiminer.
However, as you are using linux with a pretty intense overclock this proves an interesting oppertunity. Can you try running multiple miner threads with different CPU affinity? (install the 'util-linux' package if its not already).
Why not just run three different miner instances and use the 'taskset' command to specify CPU affinity, then see if you get the same results as me. If you dont get similar results than what I see, then what I report is very likely a quirk of guiminer in reporting the MH rate for multiple miners (perhaps refresh rate from the actual miners it runs?).
If you do get the same result as what I see, then draw your own conclusions
Start three phoenix miners. Set instance 1 to agression 13, instance 2 and 3 to agression 8. Leave other switches the same.
Then set CPU affinity using taskset. get the PID of each of the three miner processes and set accordingly. for example, if you have 2 CPU cores and your miner PIDs are 1234 (agression 13), 1258 and 1299 (agression 8 ) respectively:
sudo taskset -c 1-2 1234
sudo taskset -c 1 1258
sudo taskset -c 2 1299
Then look at all three miner processes and compute the total hashrate. If you see a hashrate greater than your single miner instance of 394, then we are on to something. If you see a total of 394, then what I am seeing is just a quirk in the way guiminer reports hashrates
Its as simple as that. My personal feeling is this is a guiminer issue in the way it refreshes the hashrates form the console (usleep 1000000 anyone?), but id love to be proven wrong.
Do people even mine to get btc/profit in the long term or just drive up the difficulty for fun & to see a number go higher on their screen
Different strokes for different folks. Personally im just an old skool geek who loves fucking around with stuff. I love squeezing every last drop out of things that I do. Look at the bitcoin total hashrate since may - do you really think all of that exponential increase is down to people looking for money? Sure some of it is the big boys with their farms, the pools and then people trying to make a quick buck. But, theres a lot of us out there that dont worry about money and just like new technologies, understding them inside out and dabbling in them.
I guess above all, put simply, Bitcoin has a certain ideal to it that attracts me.
Im based in the UK, so with current difficulty and what my system draws in terms of power, im not going to make a profit on BTC, especially if difficulty keeps going up. But does that put me off mining? Nope. This shit is fun, is a great ideal in terms of what its offering and on top of that its a challenge to get some cheap piece of hardware to do more than its designed to. Hell, I probably make more in a day with my work than I could even with a 50GH/sec rig. You do the math?
Theres millions just like me out there, and the more that hear about this the more you can expect to see being involved. Ill still be doing this if the difficulty hits 500 miilion. Im not in it for money