Possible alternative uses for the rigs

[hoki]

If mining becomes unprofitable for most of the miners (which will eventually happen), I was wondering what else could one do with a bunch of 6990's/6950's, lousy processors and operative memories.

Another related question is whether it is possible to run both a mining and a hosting operation (for personal use) simultaneously on a rig without affecting it's mh/s performance? If yes, what needs to be changed in the hardware configuration of the rig?

I apologize in advance if this has already been asked on this forum - I couldn't find a concentrated topic with answers to this question.

[airdata]

I intend to simply craigslist my stuff and try to get upwards of 60-75% of my cost.

[xane]

Play lots of games?  

As it's been said many times, a lot of people will keep mining even if it's not profitable in the short term with the idea that it WILL become profitable as the value rises.

But if you really wanted to give up, you could always mine Namecoins or whatever the next idea is based on the same technology.

You also could attempt to contract out your rigs to someone who doesn't want to quit.

And yes, you can use a machine while mining on it. Depending on what you do it will likely only mildly affect hash rates.

[Mousepotato]

Convection oven
Space heater
Decoy for heat-seeking missiles

[sead]

cracking passwords 

[stapler117]

^^this

[film2240]

cracking passwords 

Is there a version of those tools for ATI/AMD cards? It's just nice to test it out on locked ZIps,Rars I forgot passwords to from years ago to rescue my work files.

And please don't debate with me the rights and wrongs of using such tools as I'm aware of the implications if they are misused and possible legal issues.When used responsibly,they can be beneficial for you such as recovering lost passwords for your archives.Also this isn't the right thread for debating such issues (for those of you who were thinking of doing so)

I'm also familiar with Black/White hat type hackers as well.(Blackhats do this for financial gain no matter what means they use and whitehats report security loopholes to security companies that develop anti-hacking,firewall tools,e.t.c.As this is my understanding of them)


Also gaming,professional filmmaking (as my work tools require GPGPU acceleration so  a Radeon Hd 6950 would do very well there especially now that my shaders are unlocked as well as OC'd to the max as MSI AF doesn't work for me.)

[Apopfis]

cracking passwords 

Is there a version of those tools for ATI/AMD cards? It's just nice to test it out on locked ZIps,Rars I forgot passwords to from years ago to rescue my work files.

http://www.golubev.com/hashgpu.htm


http://whitepixel.zorinaq.com/

[billyjoeallen]

Flight simulators, Baby! I'm gonna open up a ground school.

[stapler117]

Is there a version of those tools for ATI/AMD cards? It's just nice to test it out on locked ZIps,Rars I forgot passwords to from years ago to rescue my work files.

Just don't forget that cracking a .rar file takes a long time with a reasonable password. As I have found out.

[Jack of Diamonds]

Is there a version of those tools for ATI/AMD cards? It's just nice to test it out on locked ZIps,Rars I forgot passwords to from years ago to rescue my work files.

Just don't forget that cracking a .rar file takes a long time with a reasonable password. As I have found out.

Remember.. Services that display "how many thousands/millions of years would it take to crack your password" are based on the compute performance of a typical single desktop cpu.

It doesn't take in account an attacker with access to 1 TFLOPS or more GPU power 24/7. This sort of cluster can brute force 1000 billion combinations per second, about 2160 hours (3 months) to recover a 96-char password with alternating lower and uppercase characters, special symbols and numbers.

1 TFLOPS can be achieved with a farm of 196 radeon 6990's worth of hashing power. There are a few people with clusters this powerful mining all the time (maybe 2-3, Vladimir could have much more if he stopped renting his massive farms in the future)

[stapler117]

True, maybe someone could turn their farm into a password cracking service, but very few have this capacity as you said. I have a very modest dedicated operation myself and was basing my experience from using a lone GTX 460 with http://www.golubev.com/hashgpu.htm's rar cracker. If I remember correctly, it would have taken a month to get a 8-character password cracked and I most likely used a 12+ character long password. I was also using it on my main computer which made it unusable and therefore I stopped. Now because of mining, I have that card plus 4 5830's. I don't want to stop mining though just to crack that password; I want to get the last bit of profitability out of them with the current difficulty and exchange conditions. I sent the file off to http://www.thegrideon.com about a two weeks ago and haven't heard back lol.