Thanks for your reply
I just got my first 7970 yesterday (second hand)
Quit gaming a long time ago, took a while for me to catch up on the technology used today.
I got a few questions if anyone feels like helping
Is it possible to link up multi gpu's in a pc (same brands?)
Do you ming using combined gpu power or does each gpu do its own mining
What type of operating system is reccomended for a mining rig?
How hot can a gfx card actually get before being damaged, is there any logs / way to test how hot a card has become ?
No need to link gpus if you have a multigpu system - toss those xfire/sli boards at will!
Each gpu is seen separately by cgminer (i.e. gpu0, gpu1, gpu2, gpu3) you can even pass separate constraints/parameters to each gpu within cgminer
OS is really your preference. BAMT is a customized linux os meant to run off a usb stick to reduce software (windows license) and hardware (hdd) costs.
I have heard some people got lower hash rates in linux, but there's so many variables it is hard to tell.
Windows is easier to undervolt through a variety of OC tools (that we use to under clock). Linux you pretty much have to mod/hack the vbios each time you want to change voltages
Personally, I use windows for ease of use.
by default (i forget what cgminer is set to by default) it will shutdown if you reach a certain temp. you can always run a monitoring program that logs like hwinfo or gpu-z ... but these WILL drop your hash rates. you can also run the OC tools, some of which can log as well. Since you have a 7970, I would try to keep it below 80s