Couple of questions for beginers

[BEaSTFX]

I'm totaly new to the Bitcoin and i have couple of questions.
First is the Bitcoin client so bad that everyone use something for mining? Whats the difference?
I have Nvidia GT 220 video card and a 4 core processor, wich is better for Bitcoint for me, the normal client or the guiminer for example? (the hash is around 10 with the guiminer). And if i use guiminer whats the difference between solo and mining on some server? Tell me some good servers please.

Thats for your help

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[Ricochet]

Without going too much into the specifics...

The standard Bitcoin client only does CPU mining.  As GPUs can be much much more efficient for this particular type of hashing work, mining with the standard client is fairly pointless at this point in time.  You *might* get really lucky and mine a block with it, but don't count on it with today's difficulty level.

I don't know what your particular GPU is capable of, but if it supports OpenCL or CUDA then it might be worthwhile to switch to a GPU miner, of which there are several in the Mining section of the forum.

In theory, over an extended period of time, you'll get the same amount of Bitcoins while mining solo or joining a pool, minus any operational fees the pool imposes.  It's more of a psychological effect - you feel much better about receiving 1 bitcoin per day than you do getting 50 bitcoins every 50 days.  It gives you more of an instant reward, which encourages you to continue.

[BEaSTFX]

Thanks for the reply. The videocard supports CUDA but i see that a lot of people have very high has rates and 10 sounds low to me.
I downloaded guiminer and connected solo to the Bitcoint client but only says "Bitcoint is downloading blocks" and stays Connected and i dont see any rate.

[Ricochet]

When you say 10, what are the units?  Khash/s?  Mhash/s?  Note that http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php will be your friend when trying to determine how much profit you're likely to get, and that it uses units of Kilo-hashes-per-second.

For what it's worth, if I pushed my laptop (circa-2008) to the max I would get about 5 Mhash/s, and I've already given up mining, even in a pool.  It's just not worth the wear and tear on the machine when you're only earning pennies a day.

[BEaSTFX]

It's 10 Mhash/s. Isnt it possible that my quad core 64bit processor is better than the video card and how can i check and compare them?

[Ricochet]

Unless you have a really terrible GPU (like I do lol), it will outperform the CPU even at 4 cores.  But nevertheless, to compare, simply go into the options menu and make sure that you're not limiting the number of cores being used by the client, then turn the Generate Coins option on.  In the lower-lefthand corner you'll see your hashing rate.  My CPU tends to get about 1 Mhash/s per core.  

I'm not entirely sure what will happen here if you haven't downloaded the full blockchain, and your previous post suggests this might be happening.  If this is the case, give it an hour or two to download the blockchain before proceeding.