Smart to split between two pools?

[FirewallXIII]

Hey I just started getting into Bitcoin mining. Currently I have a GTX 470 (pretty bad I know, looking to get an ATI card once I have money) and am getting around ~100-110 Mhash/s. In addition I have my laptop CPU running (ATI 3650M in that, no miners for that?), ~6Mhash/s. I just have two questions:
1. Should I split the GPU load between two pools? (I think it'd be Mt. Red / BTC Guild and Deepbit, pay per share)
2. Is pay-per-share worth it? (Are there any other pools besides Deepbit?)

Thanks in advance.

[Bloodys]

Why split it, if you worry about a pool going down you can just setup a backup server, so if one pool is down the miner will automatically switch to the backup pool and you will not loose anything. Try the latest poclbm, besides the performance improvement it also comes with a backup pool server option.

As for PPS, it depends on the current pool luck, if the pool is lucky (average blocks below difficulty) then Proportional is better, if the block size goes higher than the difficulty for a while you may be better with PPS. In general with big pools such as deepbit there is no need to go for PPS as their average long time luck is usually about the difficulty level, and blocks are being calculated quite fast, so not much need to risk it with PPS and the higher fee and constantly monitor if at the moment it is better to go for PPS or Proportional, so better stick with Prop.

[infested999]

BTW at 6 MHash/s your probably just wasting power, there is no way that is going to earn you much.

[FirewallXIII]

Hmm, didn't know about the backup server option, thanks for the information.

BTW at 6 MHash/s your probably just wasting power, there is no way that is going to earn you much.

Yeah, I figured as much, although on campus living = no utilities charge for extra electricity 

[zybron]

Yeah, I figured as much, although on campus living = no utilities charge for extra electricity 

Wonder how much the power would have to spike before they would notice? -Mining cluster with no electricity cost.