Hello all, newbie here. I've been a few months tinkering with this whole bitcoin stuff since I discovered it and it's awesome. I also started mining and since I wanted to renew my PC I got a Radeon 7870 to try out mining.

I've been mining for a while now at around 400 MH/s (440 overclocked) and then discovered the FPGA and ASIC. But I also wonder, is it worth spending cash on an ASIC? All I see is people complaining about BFL being a scam but some ASICs seem to be out there working and mining which is confusing. Should I spend money on ASICs, get more GPUs or look for a FPGA?

Also, I know I shouldn't do solo mining but if I did, how do I know if I've found coins? Does a message appear on the console of the miner or does it simply appear in my wallet?