Quote from: The-Real-Link on February 16, 2012, 09:59:19 PM

Ah gotcha. Thanks for the suggestions. Again guess I'm just used to complete systems, I'm afraid.

The extra hardware (not counting the palty discount on RAM and not factoring in HDD) for all the monitors, CPUs, KB/mice, and CPU coolers only amounts to about $420 over the baseline as-low-as-you-can-go-on-Newegg prices - at this rate, the price of one 5970. Well, again, as low as *I* wanted to go on prices. Now, aside from the fact that at the moment, the only system that has a UD7 that could take a 3rd 5970 in it, I was debating on having to swap the LEPA G900 for one of the 1,200w units (looking at about 700w load for the system and 2 cards already so a third would put that wattage very close to, if not over, the limit).

Now CPU-wise ok I might be $120 over from getting cheapo single cores. When I bought an X3 and saw that the two cards pegged it to 100%, I wasn't sure if it was just a bug compared to the CPU being powerful enough to keep the cards fed. I think now it is rather the former and if a single core is really good enough to mine with then that's good to know. But why spend 66% of the cost of a quad CPU on something that would suck for pretty much every other task except mining? Can't BOINC on a single, nor render or anything for any decent efficiency. Maybe my thought is just flawed but then again I thought I was building pretty "cheap" compared to previous systems I've had. This thread still has shown me that no, you can go cheaper (much cheaper)

. Oh well, live and learn.

Again these were originally intended to run at home where I could barely keep temps at decent levels (IMO, mid-70s and below) with two cards, let alone 3. Now that they're in a cooler location I could probably spend a bit of time to swap things out if I had to. I have all 5970s working away at the moment though so until I can do more builds or get more cards, I might be losing 200MH due to temps overall at the moment (ideal VS current setup).

Well you learned stuff so that is always a good thing.

Buying a more powerful CPU "just in case" is not good economic sense. I can see the desire to have cased rigs and going w/ dual 5970s is a good choice in that respect.

BTW the goal isn't "cheap". My 2.2 GH/s rigs have a $260 PSU. Hardly "cheap". It is efficient.
As in what combination of equipment gives me the optimal MH/W, MH/$ and uptime.