Just look at the previous nmc difficulty increases; one was going to be something like 5-6x but in the end it was 4x exactly due to the limit.

The test was done (one cable at a time) with a Corsair HX750 and a 5750. Using other cards where the cables were supposed to go finally of course.

Messed it up how? I'm confused. The connectors on each side were already mounted when I got the cable. The pci-e connectors seemed to fit tightly in the slot / on the card, I don't see how I could have gotten that wrong.

Yeah, I tried one from cablesaurus after this incident. It works fine, so I have ordered a bunch of them now

I bought some cables from http://www.b2c-support.com/pcie-pciexpress-16x-riser-card-extender-ribbon-cable-p-4154.html.

The first two out of the five I tried refused to recognize the card. The third one however, is when it gets really interesting.. I plugged it in, standard procedure. Made sure there was no possibility of shortcircuiting the exposed (why exposed?) contact points.

So I'm all set up and ready to go. I flip the PSU into on, and hit the power button. First I noticed some really thin smoke, it was barely visible. Then the smell of burning plastic and suddenly a lot more smoke. This is what I pulled out:

http://i1081.photobucket.com/albums/j349/drknark/IMG_0517.jpg

Luckily all my hardware survived. Since their support ignored me I had to issue a paypal dispute to get my money back. So don't buy cables from that site I would even be wary of similar looking cables at other sites, might be the same manufacturer.

It might have had something to do with bitcoins.lc having problems. Probably many miners there missed out on some mining time when the servers were down.

Ah, but now I have a different problem. With overdrive enabled, my 5850 is limited to 775 mhz, even in afterburner it would seem (doesn't matter if I set the clock higher, it doesn't go higher). Since clocking this gives a bigger gain, I'll have to stick with overdrive off. Any solutions to this?

Thank you! This did it. Now getting 400mhash at aggression=7. I googled a bit about power control, it's not actually a direct voltage control. It just limits the power draw of the card. So if the card uses more power than the power control setting, it will throttle to keep it down. So there should be nothing to worry about when increasing this, as long as the temp is fine

Since the difficulty adjusts to keep the supply constant, I don't think that argument is valid. There is no reason for the price to track the difficulty. There are however some reasons why the difficulty should follow the price. When the reward for mining increases, more people are likely to start mining or to expand.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4455/amds-graphics-core-next-preview-amd-architects-for-compute

There are a lot of info here. Though I guess it's possible that this is referring to the generation after the 7000.

Personally I mostly did it because I find it interesting, and I like the concept. Of course part of it is I hope it can make me some money. If I happen to make a profit, then great. If not, it's not like I can't afford it. All I said was you cannot plan on making a profit, not that it isn't possible.

Nobody buying gear now (if ever) can expect / plan for a profit. It's very high risk, and you have to be willing to lose what you spend. If that's ok with you, then go buy. If you'd rather be safe, then don't buy.

Yep, they are going for more general purpose computing. In the presentation they even stated that one of the few applications that thrives on their current architecture is hashing.. that's not to say the 7-series will be bad for hashing, but they will certainly not be as optimal for it as the current generation.

I want to make a correction here. Having a copy of your wallet "ID" (what you are talking about is actually your address) is not enough. You need to backup this file: C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\wallet.dat. This file contains your private key as well as all your addresses. You cannot access any of your addresses (you can generate as many as you want) without the private key.

"Whooosh" (sound of the joke flying over your head) 

Why don't you think about WTF you just said? Being online is not a license to act anyway you want.

Bit_Happy, if you had an account on MtGox you could easily verify it. My account was on there. Edit: not same username as here.

Thanks guys for the info on the strength of the encryption.

Man from the future, you seem to know this stuff. How hard would it be for people to bruteforce or crack a reasonably strong password with the encryption in the MtGox file? Say 10 characters alphanumeric.

Well I never did use GUIminer but I might have an old version of Phoenix, I'll check it out

Yup, HDMI to your TV will work. That's exactly the way my computer is setup.