PCI-E slots and hash/s ?

[bitminer]

Do I get the same hash/s rates with a card (e.g. with a HD5970) in a PCI Express X16 slot running at X16 than in a PCI Express X16 slot running at X4, or in a PCI Express X1 slot running at X1?

[bitminer]

and the speed of CPU and the amount of RAM is also irrelevant in case of GPU mining?

The consensus is that PCI-E bus width is irrelevant for bitcoin number crunching.

[Transisto]

Noticed that when BOINC (CPU) is running GPU usage on a 5870 goes down to 50-60%

setting priority of miner from normal to high = 87%, to realtime = 97%

[M4v3R]

I used REALLY cheap components for my rig and I still get ~250MHash/s on my 5850. Components that I have:

- ECS DS7610 - 1 PCI-E x16 slot (I don't know if it's PCI-E 2.0, probably not)
- Athlon 64 2.0GHz S754
- 512 MB of DDR RAM
- 40 GB PATA HDD
- 350W power supply (yeah, this one is cutting edge)
- other stuff is integrated or missing
- and of course, Radeon HD 5850, costing 3x the whole thing

Whole package was worth ~$70. And it works happily! . What I had to do to make it work:

- installed server edition of Ubuntu, and on top of it a very lightweight desktop - E17
- underclocked my CPU to 1.0 GHz. When I didn't, the whole rig would shut down after a while of mining, probably because of cheap 350Watt PSU. When underclocked, it works fine. Underclocking is done by editing /etc/init.d/ondemand file and changing the governor on line #26 to "powersave"
- plugged of CD-Rom after the installation. It can take up to 20W and I don't need it anymore.

Finally, this is how it looks like. Behold .