After reading about mining for a bit and pricing out some components on NewEgg I used a few of the calculators available on the web (such as http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/). But all the ones I found were locked in at a certain difficulty level. This is not very useful for future projections when the rate of difficulty is increasing at an exponential rate. So, being a bit of an Excel junkie I created this spread sheet to see if GPU mining still has a chance to be profitable.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmXn4BnLUgYsdEF0TUtWUWtUaUUzR1F2aUhEWW9lN2c#gid=0

The outlook is not good for GPU miners. If my calculations are even semi accurate, there is no money to be made with GPUs, unless you own the hardware already and get free electricity. It seems GPU mining won't even pay for the hardware if you buy it now.

Please take a look at this sheet and share your thoughts on how fast you think mining difficulty will continue to rise in the future.