I built a new computer for gaming this November. Luckily, I got my R9 280X for $310. About a week ago, I looked into how I could use it for mining and decided on middlecoin.com. I am getting ~720 Kh/s using cgminer with scrypt stable at 82 C.

One of the wallets I was using stopped updating on their website. I mined to it for about 5 hours and it didn't get update on the website. When viewing it's balance chart, it is blank where it used to show data. I'm guessing there was a Christmas bug on the server and hope it will update in a couple days, but for now I'm mining to a different BTC wallet and it appears to be working fine.

This is my first post here, so I guess I'll throw out some questions for replies. How safe is it to run at 82 C for hours at a time? Ever since I started mining, I've experienced more crashes during gaming, although I can't be sure if it was caused by an in-game bug. Also, how do I mine without a pool for scrypt crypto-currencies like LiteCoin?

edit: Doh! I should have read the middlecoin thread before posting. .