Just Starting Out Funds?

[blackshards]

Is there a way to not have to invest over 3k for a decent mining rig? Like maybe a way to just start out mining to make a very small profit and eventually work my way up to one of the bitcoin miners from butterfly labs or build my own 3k mining rig? My computer currently is built for gaming and has an nVidia card which I have learned really sucks at mining. What can I do?

[highcoin]

If you can't spend at least $1.3k on a rig, you should probably just use your available funds to buy bitcoins on an exchange. ASICS are very expensive now because they are new but I predict they will eventually drop in the $1.5k range.

[tacoman71]

I would invest in those KNCminers. They apparently are on track to ship this september, which is when BFL might get their backlog of orders cleared out, which is why you shouldn't buy stuff from BFL until they design new miners that have better GH/$ ratios. The KNC Saturn runs at 200 GH/s for only $4000. They also just started to open up orders on the Mercury, which is 100 GH/s for $2000.
It's virtually impossible to design ASIC chips yourself except if you have about 500,000 dollars to invest in the design process. I might also note that ASIC development can go all the way into the multimillion dollar range.