Quote from: ashkanb on March 25, 2016, 05:14:56 PM

i'm going to start dabbling in gpu mining and have been doing research putting together a rig.

BE CAREFUL. Go to www.bitcoincharts.com, follow the link to the difficulty chart and look up how much of a difficulty rise has occurred between the time of some advice which you are reading and the present. The hardware which you have listed so far would be ok for bitcoin in 2012 but is a few thousand times underpowered by comparison to what you'd want to see much and have a satisfactory experiment. Better to send off for an ASIC miner of some sort. Buying second hand for the price of a competent graphics card gets you around 10^3 more hash/s for a given cost or 10^2 for a given power consumption, neglecting the more expensive later models which are even faster.

I'd suggest getting an older bitmain S1, as you can run the two halves of that off two "any old ATX" with the paperclip trick and often needing to snip off some 4-pin molex connectors to get at enough black and yellow power wires to screw into the miner. Both ATX MUST be capable of at least 18 Amps at 11.6V off a single 12V rail (the sticker on the side will indicate >=18A 12V if it is enough) and these are usually 450W or bigger headline-power, bog standard used ATX out of a scrap pc. At 180 Ghash/s, it is "too underpowered" to make much bitcoin but at least you'd see a bit of a result. The ASIC is also good for various sha256d "altcoins" but you'd spend a few days downloading and sorting out the thing to make those. I'd suggest going for an sha256d altcoin with modestly low difficulty, fast transactions, and not secret enough for illegal trade. I quite like mazacoin MZC for that, and my S1 makes a few hundred of those in a few hours.

If you need procurement assistance in return for payment in bitcoin then pm me.