Let's see if I can reply to all of your posts...
I'm hardly an early adopter, joining up 9 whole days ago. What made me sarcastic and condescending (not to mention bitter) was answering this exact same question about 30 times.
If we assume the difficulty will grow by 30% every 2 weeks (both of these estimates are very conservative, by the way), 700 Mhash/sec worth of hashing power will probably find about 1.95 blocks between now and the end of time.
You'll have to plug in what you think a bitcoin will be worth to find out if this is a good idea or not.
You'll need to scale that to the GPU you are planning to buy. If, for example, you get a 5850, you can expect about 300 Mhash/sec out of it, so it would earn about 1.95 * (300/700) = 0.835 * 50 = 41 BTC. Even that estimate is probably very high.
See that is what I was looking for...Some data on what Mhash/s I could get out of various cards...And I couldn't find any place,with a list of cards and their respective perfomance...
I'd say to anyone not to bother going into mining unless you already have the equipment or can get it extremely cheaply, as in pretty close to free.
It will take a good while to recoup any money invested in a rig, unless the BTC price increases a hell of a lot compared to the increases in difficulty to mine the BTC.
The thing is you cannot tell for sure what will happen with the BTC price or the difficulty level.
Basically at this moment BTC price looks very healthy, but future difficulty levels looks bloody awful for mining.
GPU is the important bit as far as gear is concerned... especially the Radeon HD 5850... this seems to be the best
The rest of the gear, keep it cheap, and keep it cool, and make sure you have the power
Mining s/w ... phoenix is the bong
I don't really mind recouping my expenses for hardware anytime soon,if ever...It would be great if I could do it,but what I would want is to be able to pay for my electric bill,and possibly get 1 or 2 bitcoins spare to keep...
As I said before I wanted to get a new computer anyway,and although I wasn't planning on getting one with 4 GPUS,I was thinking about it,to make it a repsectable mining rig for a few months...
If the only important part is the GPU does that mean I can get away with using my old P4,by simply getting a new GPU?I've seen someone using a P4 at the "Post a picture of your rig" thread but I'm not sure if it is sufficient..
Well, you can think of bitcoin like about share of stock - cos their numbers is limited, if you believe in the future rise of bitcoin - you can mine even if current difficulty/price dont seems so good. And if you did not believe - you should not.
I can understand your logic,but I cannot do that,because I will not be able to pay my increased electric bill if I don't sell some or all of the bitcoins I make,and hold on to them in hopes of selling them after a year or so at a better rate.