Cheapest rig for cross fired 5870's

Aye, for a board as big as the MSI Big Bang Marshall then you need a huge case - that said you may be able to keep the costs down a bit.

Looking at the Lancool Dragon-lord K58 (£63) this case has 8 PCI slots and seems large enough to fit the Big Bang Marshall (here is the product page).

With the Big bang Marshal you can install four graphics card - and they each run on a PCIE v2.0 x8 link. However, in this arrangement your cooling issue would not be solved (as it would be with 3 cards), it would be made worse. Bear in mind - if you get three cards and can keep them cool (with a lot of airflow and good motherboard spacing) then you can overclock them and get a nice boost in mining performance (with four hot, tightly packed cards overclocking won't be an option - you may even need to underclock them to stay cool at full mining load).
 
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well i dunno how this works but cant seem to understand why i cant do solo mining currently in BTC guild mining at 360~365 mhash/s .

is that good? bit clueless tbh but will see if this thing worth anything
 
i think if you are solo mining then unless you have a monster rig then you will only get bitcoins very infrequenctly and a lot of them. Instead, if you join a pool then they take a small cut, but you get bit coins much more regularly, since the load and reward is divided up.
 
Haha, this thread has a couple of us having a go today. I joined slush's pool and after 3hrs and 40 minutes ive amassed the grand total of 0.060 credits woo hoo. This is on a HD 5850 in my little rig in the front room. Is it all worth it??
 
Yea, it is a good bit of fun - the prospect of making a bit of money out of having a high-end graphics card. Maybe they should make a console version :D

I have got my GTX 295 spinning up now on Slush's pool as well - a total of 99.3Mhash/sec from a 285W graphics card (across two GPU cores). Not great compared to the AMD/ATI cards - but it will more than pay for the power bill (at current bitcoin prices) and puts a few bitcoins in my pocket. Meethinks I will upgrade to 5870 CF later in the month if this all goes well - I have been meaning to do a GPU upgrade for some time - and that upgrade would cost ~£290 and may even pay for itself in a month using bitcoin.
 
I just sold my GTX295, maybe this is what the dude wants it for?:D

Can someone explain in idiot terms what the hell is going on? how are the cards making money out of thin air (minus electricity costs) what are they crunching? who benefits from the data they crunch?
 
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stulid said:
I just sold my GTX295, maybe this is what the dude wants it for?:D

Can someone explain in idiot terms what the hell is going on? how are the cards making money out of thin air (minus electricity costs) what are they crunching? who benefits from the data they crunch?
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To be totally honest mate I have no idea what they are crunching, and ive also got no idea how much its gonna cost me in the leccy department either!!

Just thought I would give it a go. Ive always been an nvidia type of guy for gaming but im so so glad i went with ati for my front room effort. It seems ati cards are the kiddies for this crunching!!

Ive ead loads of reviews and cost and performance wise apparantly a pair of 5830's deliver cracking performance at a canny price point.
My 5850 has been rattling away all afternoon on 50% fan at 75 degrees, How long is it safe to keep bashing it at full whack like its been doing, gpu activity is near enough 99% all the time in CCC
 
stulid said:
I just sold my GTX295, maybe this is what the dude wants it for?:D

Can someone explain in idiot terms what the hell is going on? how are the cards making money out of thin air (minus electricity costs) what are they crunching? who benefits from the data they crunch?
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Basically the cards are generating the bitcoins, not sure of the maths behind it, but the whole bitcoin idea is based on some mathematical model, that has 21million solutions, gradually getting harder to calculate. Each solution is 1 bitcoin.

That's from memory from what I read a week or so ago, so might not be 100% correct, but is the general idea.

(Mining with a 6950 & 5870 turning out around 800MH/s at the moment, and considering another 5870 to get to 1100+MH/s)
 
Thats some impressive output!! Mine is sitting around the 240 mark but my card isnt clocked, was thinking of adding another 5850 to boost it lol. Its a rollercoaster once it starts, was just for a bit of fun and now im wanting to beef up my horsepower with out spending loads of cash!! Could slot in a 5870 I suppose haha
 
stulid said:
Mad:D

What happens to these bitcoins? can you trade them for cash etc?

still dont ******* get it:D
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The bitcoins are basically an online currency, and you can trade the coins to other people either for cash (there are several sites that allow you to list offers for buying and selling the coins), or for items (although currently, most items that are traded are illegal (drugs, weapons etc) Bitcoins (or the mining of them) is perfectly legal though, as is the trading for cash/legal items)
 
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