Well done sir!

That's 6.75x the hashing power of a 5830 at ~80% of it's power draw.  Pretty amazing stuff.

Not overly impressive or anything, but here's my three rigs (apologies for mr. blurrycam):

In action:




Ze gutz: 2 identical rigs, 2x 1gb XFX 6950 at ~345mhash/s each  (couldn't unlock the shaders   )




And my first foray into the fold, my KGPE-16 Opteron server being punished by 2x Saffire 5830s at ~250mash/s each




These guys all run with closed panels (two cats) in a closet in my basement, and they're certainly a bit warm. It's 95F ambient temp right above them (there's cooler air dragged into the intakes along the floor), avg temp for each card ranges from 80-85C.  

~1880mhash total so far

Erm, no water or bare wire all over the place?

Most computer cases are made entirely of metal, and have well worked that way for quite some time.

Hey quit derailing the thread!  I want more nerd porn!

LMAO!

Well done sir.

Kick. Ass.

I say a few dabs of super-glue and forego the wooden frame all together

Read what? Your mind?

I don't see you mentioning this anywhere else in this thread.  Perhaps you've mentioned it several times in other threads, but you shouldn't expect others to read your post history.

I'd expect a 5870 may make up for the minor power difference with a higher per-core hashrate, at least at stock clocks.  5970's are clocked down a bit for the same thermal concerns.

Space being a concern for you, however, means 5970's are a better buy.  They're also more widely available, 5870's are a bit hard to come by these days.

for future reference, you can scale the size of your image in the post, something like:

Temperature variation is the real card killer.   I'd agree with anything < 80-85C, but some cards just don't stay that cool even standing alone with good ventilation and room-temperature ambient environments.

It's more important to make sure your temperatures aren't swaying significantly on a regular basis, the (small) expansion/contraction will eventually stress the metals in your GPU, leading to reduced life.

A stable 80C is far better than swinging between 60C and 80C every day.

The PSU specs (esp on newegg) will show you 'pci-e connector:  6+2pin ' - that's usable in either a 6pin or 8pin socket (the +2)

If this PC of yours only has one PCI-e slot, or you're absolutely certain you won't be adding any more cards to it, that 600W I linked will work solidly for you.

That is assuming you don't also have 20+ hard-drives, 10 fans and a bunch of flashy lights

[edit] Also, avoid using adapters if at all possible.  My general rule of thumb these days is if your PSU doesn't have enough native PCI-e connectors to support all your cards, you should look at a bigger PSU.

That's not exactly a cost-effective suggestion, but you'll quickly learn what you can and can't connect if you start to expand.

I would highly recommend against it.  That PSU can't provide half the power a 5970 wants, and that's not mentioning the other cmponents that want 12V power, namely your CPU.

Symptoms would range from mild to catastrophic..  mild would be it doesn't turn on, or does but is very unstable.  Catastrophic would be the PSU failing and taking out your PC and your new 5970 with it.

I would recommend going with something like this PSU at least:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139028

I think we need some fingerprint analysis on the digit reflected in the kill-a-watt, to be entirely sure that aliens were not involved.

My point was to poke fun at the previous poster who's electricity is leaking onto the interwebs.  Otherwise, we're using the same math.

I fully understand that wattage is a measure of the current drawn at a particular voltage, ala Watt's law:

P (work, or watts)  = I (current) * V (voltage)

But wait! Don't forget that Ohm guy, his law says:

V (voltage) = I (current) * R (resistance)

R is the only element you can normally change.  R is the light bulb, the furnace, the computer, etc, and R determines how much current you draw and how much voltage is dropped along a circuit.  You don't change current or voltage separately.


I forgot what my point was?  Oh yeah!  We're arguing from opposite sides of a balanced equation!  That's just not smart, lets not do that.

[edit] I see, when I said "The same current flows through your light bulbs, but doesn't cost as much since you use less of it as work" I didn't mean to use 'current', but instead 'electric energy' like the last guy.  Typo, my bad.

And perhaps somebody is steaing your water! Watch out!

Electricity cost is calculated on wattage used as work (eg. producing heat), not current flow.  The same current flows through your light bulbs, but doesn't cost as much since you use less of it as work.

That is pretty frakkin' sweet.

Have you had any issues with the OS addressing that many USB devices?  It looks like you've got a fairly good hub which probably presents itself as such to the OS, I've had some crappier hubs that start to complain when you multiplex >4 devices..

Nope, still brown.


Nope, still brown  Less brown, but still brown.

I can see that it's clearly brown, even in the tubing outside of the case where it connects to the radiator.

Those things definitely accentuate the color tint, however.   With more ambient light, a white card behind the tubes, and flash off it looks fairly clear.  It still looks like there's a heavy smoker living in my radiator, and it's still enough to make me want to flush out the system and replacing the tubing.

Prior to this go-round the tubing was a little cloudy/milky white, but it didn't look like literal crap.

It's right at the high water mark running everything at full tilt, so yeah it's a little undersized.  With all three cards mining and prime95 running my killawatt reads 760-780W at the wall.

But, I don't really mine with this rig, and have yet to actually stress the system running any of the games I've tried.  Generally it tops out about 430W on my killawatt playing Skyrim, 550-600W playing Witcher 2 which actually uses all 3 cards a little more.

If I did mine, it'd be in linux without the 100% CPU bug, I'd expect to see ~600-630W at the wall with just the GPUs spinning.

My guess is that it's just not concentrated enough to be obvious in solution, and has been slowly depositing on the tube walls.  In that second pic it's obvious there's a tint, but it wasn't actually visible to me at that point.  I pondered then why my pretty tubing was showing up so badly in the pics. Over the next few days, more material oxidized and/or built up on the tube walls, making it more apparent visually.

Right now, visually the appearance is close to the second pic in my post above, but to the camera it looks like someone shat in the tank:

Aye, the rig was all taken apart with the components lying on a shelf ~15ft away. I'd plugged all the free tubes with cotton since I knew I'd be spitting metal dust everywhere, but it'd seem I wasn't careful enough.

I'm ordering some new tubing this afternoon, I'll be flushing it out and replacing all the tubing when it arrives.  In the meantime, is a little rust going to be a problem for my copper/nickel blocks and rad?

I'm thinking I'll need to take the pump apart and clean it out thoroughly - if it is steel dust it's likely been collecting around the magnetic fields in the motor..