Let me save you some money, time and energy. Don't bother mining, period. Bitcoin, altcoins , doesn't matter. Unless you have millions of dollars to invest in a cutting edge bitcoin mine you're throwing your money away. I'm not saying it's impossible to make a profit, because sometimes the coin you're mining happens to sky rocket and that makes your mining worth it, BUT if you just bought the coins off the market you'd have made more. $1,000 worth of coin is going to pay out much better than $1,000 worth of mining gear and mining said coin. Allll just my .02

Edit: Mining was a total blast. I used a network or raspberry pi's as brains for the operation and it worked perfectly, not only was it challenging to set up, but it was suprisingly fun to have up and running. I felt pretty cool. But that quickly turned into sadness once I realized how unprofitable it is.