I set this up yesterday. I have 3 Raedon 5850s, but one one is set up so far. I was lucky, got all of the cards for $170 each. The most expensive part was the power supply, at $250. I'm going to set this up so I can control it from my mac, so I won't need the display, keyboard, or mouse. It also has no disk, I'm running it from an 8GB thumb drive. I should get about 1 ghash when it's ready, which is pretty darn good.
Is that Ubuntu with persistence or did you install straight to the thumb drive? I can confirm that once you have tweaked the cards you should get up to and a bit over 1 Ghash/s as well.
Awesome. I installed Ubuntu straight from the thumb drive. I don't know what Ubuntu with persistence is.