Quote from: homeyhomedawg on April 07, 2013, 08:40:44 PM

1. I am currently in college, so I get "free" electricity, basically unlimited electricity that I'm paying for anyways
2. I started mining today on my laptop which has a 6490 that gets 30 mhash/s
3. I plugged it into this calculator http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator and it tells me I get almost $10 a month
4. I then plugged in 1000 mhash/s and I jizzed in my pants
5. Is a 1 ghash/s rig viable to run in a college dorm? sound, heat, price, method?

Very viable, up front cost would be 400 to 1200$ depending on what parts you get.

My machine is 900Ghash on bitcoins and cost me about 450$, keep in mind that I got lucky on buying used parts for cheap.
My Radeon 6950's cost me 110 each, the other radeon 6570/5570 I had already.
The motherboard/cpu I bought used with the 6950's (from same guy) cost me 120$ and has 6PCIE slots.

I made a post with details on my machine and experience.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=170401.0

Regarding mining for bitcoins or litecoins, Chuksta is right on the money !

so

You have to shop around for parts at a good price.
You either go with a motherboard with multiple pcie slots and have a mix of cost effective fair cards or you can have a 2 pcie slot motherboard and put in 2 higher end cards.

The easier hash target for a PC that doesn't cost too much is 700Ghash. bitcoin or 850Khash Litecoin.
Any 2 pcie slot motherboard, any cpu, 2x 5850, 6950, 6870...