So I'm a newbie and I'm looking into getting into bitcoining and litecoining. From what I've heard litecoin is more profitable since it's like bitcoin jr right now. (That's how I've heard it put) So with that being said I'm going to have a maximum of $2000 to invest at the first of the year and I'm curious which is the best way to go? First things first.... Do I need a dedicated machine for each bitcoin and litecoin mining? Or if I was to get a butterfly labs rig that could handle 25gh/s for $1249 could I share that between mining for each application? My guess is no! Please guide me in this direction. I'm basing my funds to use on current technology not what they may have next year. Also is it really that easy to hook a 25Gh/s bitcoin miner to a new computer and run the miner program connecting to a pool and let it do it's thing? Also another question I have is do you put all your nuts in one basket by only dedicating your computer to one pool or do you run multiple pools? I can do my research on who the best one's are I'm just curious on so many things. Please do your best to guide me on this subject as I'm very tech savy with pc's and hardware but with this mining is NEW to me!!!

Nothing special really, just a ivy bridge celeron and a z77 mobo with 7 pcie slots. The mobo is a z77a-gd65, but a cheaper z77a-gd44 (i think?) works with 6 cards... Has to be ivy or 6 won't work. There's 3500W of power under my rig now, but two of the supplies are cheap 1000W'ers. They run 6 7950's at 1.125V, but not 6 280x cards at any voltage. I use a EVGA 1500W to supplement the other two supplies. I ordered 1300W and 1000W evga power supplies, one will power the mobo and 3 cards, and the other will power three cards alone. Ought to be plenty of headroom, I expect 275W from each card.

The rig is running xubuntu, as I wasn't able to figure out how to get 6 280x cards running in W8. You have to use the beta 3.11 drivers for Cgminer to "see" these cards, they show up as 7900 series with old drivers but won't ever mine.
Anyway, 3.11 beta drivers from AMDs site work pretty well. I did a bunch of reading on the net, and these settings are the best mixture of what I was able to find. I should say that these settings might be completely useless to you, but they should be a starting point. These cards all act different, I'm starting to think any results otherwise are just gamblers fallacy! Either way, I won't charge you 1 BTC for my config because I'm not that much of a douche  

You will need to tweak the GPU clock speed for each card, most of mine are somewhere between 1025 and 1045.





I can lower the fan speed to 80% and still maintain ~75 degrees. I've got some work left to do with ducting and more permanent fan mounting.

(I had enough of that after a 50GH GPU farm).

Sat oder Kabel?