Temperature concerns

[grantbdev]

Hello, I am a new miner. I have been using GUIMiner to use my nvidia GTX 260 for more practical purposes. I am in the deepbit pool and have been making quite a bit, but I am not that concerned about becoming bit-wealthy. I do care about being able to live in my room though. Just a few hours of mining put my GPU at 80 degree Celsius and the entire second floor of my house went up 6 degrees Fahrenheit. I live in the south of the USA and summer hasn't even really begun, so I am concerned that mining won't be realistic for me if I can't control the heat generated by my PC. I have EVGA precision installed which easily allows me to over or underclock my card, but I am not sure which settings would be the most beneficial to lower in terms of lowering temp. I am not hardware illiterate but this goes beyond my experience.

The three settings presented to me are:
Core clock (Default: 576)
Shader clock (Default: 1242)
Memory clock (Default: 999)
Rate on default settings: ~45 Mhash/s

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[Littleshop]

You really need an ATI card to mine such as an HD 58XX or greater.  I am not sure you can break even on the cost of electricity with an Nvidia card without even counting the cost of air conditioning. 

[rezin777]

I am in the deepbit pool and have been making quite a bit, but I am not that concerned about becoming bit-wealthy.

With the upcoming difficulty increase I wonder if you will even be earning enough coin to pay for the electricity that thing uses.

[grantbdev]

Does ATI have an inherent advantage or something? I got this card primarily for gaming, I have always gotten nvidia cards. I dabbled in folding@home before but not for very long.

[goatpig]

Does ATI have an inherent advantage or something?

Yes, and a crushing one at that. Within the same price range, ATi cards are 3 to 5 times faster than nVidia.

[rezin777]

Does ATI have an inherent advantage or something? I got this card primarily for gaming, I have always gotten nvidia cards. I dabbled in folding@home before but not for very long.

Yes, AMD gpus have a huge advantage.

You just decided to start mining without researching anything? How much power is your computer using? What do you pay for electricity?

[grantbdev]

Does ATI have an inherent advantage or something? I got this card primarily for gaming, I have always gotten nvidia cards. I dabbled in folding@home before but not for very long.

Yes, AMD gpus have a huge advantage.

You just decided to start mining without researching anything? How much power is your computer using? What do you pay for electricity?

Why does ATI have an advantage?

I was not trying to make a career out of mining or anything, I just decided to try it because I like the idea of bitcoins and haven't been putting my GTX 260 to work recently. Like I said, I've only done this for a few hours and it's likely I won't do it for an extended amount of time. I am just getting some bitcoins to try them out.

[xenon481]

Why does ATI have an advantage?

Integer Performance. Games and most GPGPU applications are mostly Floating Point performance intensive, so nvidia doesn't optimize for Integer Performance.

[mrb]

Why does ATI have an advantage?

Because of this: Why are ATI GPUs faster than Nvidia GPUs?

xenon481: it is not a matter of floating point vs integer. When comparing current generation GPUs, Nvidia does not have a floating point advantage anymore over ATI. Not even with the Tesla 2000 series which can do 1 DP op every 2 cycles (Tesla C2050 = 515 DP GFLOPS vs. HD 6970 = 676 DP GFLOPS).