Not trying to suck up any of your business, but i have a very rare Randall i've decided i need to sell. If any of you know the name Randall, you know it means the top quality in the knife game.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=212706

http://imgur.com/a/9spnS

http://i.imgur.com/9LQxbwI.jpg

Block share counts, times, and rewards are now back in order.  There was a bug in the way I handled the list of the block generations for the 3 servers, and the EU server was overriding the US East server's list, rather than adding onto the main list.  As usual, this only caused a temporary problem in displaying accurate stats.  The backend is very strong and is never overwritten by the frontend when performing reward calculations, so your historical data remained safe for recalculating the rounds.

I put together my own Google spreadsheet to examine whether it makes sense to add to what I am currently using to mine, and the numbers keep looking bad.  E.g. for a triple 5830 system:

Days to next reset:5.0, based on http://blockexplorer.com/q/eta
Difficulty of next reset: 513600, based on http://blockexplorer.com/q/estimate
Days per difficulty increase after the next one: 8
Difficulty increase factor after the next one: 1.3 (30% average increase)
Watts: 550
$/KWh: 0.12
MHash/Sec: 840 (3 * 280 per 5830)
$/Bitcoin: 10

Running the above numbers, on August 18 the electric cost exceeds the generated bitcoin value. Total income at that point (assuming selling bitcoins at $10 apiece) is $492 - putting together a 3-way 5830 system for $492 is pretty tough (used parts maybe?)

Are other people using more optimistic numbers?

The 20,000 is probably pretty close to accurate, so if the 16M number sold is accurate why has there been such an impact on the video card market?  You can't reliably find 5850s, 5870s, 5970s, or 6990s in stock anywhere, and even 5830s are going.  If we're only .1% of the market, it shouldn't have had that big of an effect.  Does that mean there is like 50k G/hash in cards purchased recently and still waiting to come online?

It's possible, and I know I'm part of it since I bought 27 cards in the past week 

A simple estimate of the bitcoin community puts miners in the roughly 10-20,000 range. New card sales are likely less but even assuming an optimistic estimate, we'll say 20,000.

In the first 9 months after the 5xxx series was released, AMD sold 16million 5xxx chips. 20,000 / 16million = .1% Bitcoin is a drop in the bucket at the moment. I'm glad people are being optimistic about bitcoin, that's what it needs, but really let's keep things in perspective.

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but I have (2) 6870 cards -- a Sapphire and an XFX -- and the XFX doesn't overclock as high, runs hotter, and the fan is MUCH, much louder. You can hear it over everything else in your room. There are many threads on the 'Net about how to cool them -- mostly desperation. I re-applied arctic silver paste which helped a BIT, but it's only 5 degrees cooler. The fan is still loud. I borderline regret I bought it.

With what I know today, I'd pay $20 or even $30 more for an equivalent Sapphire card over an XFX one.

Just my personal experience.

Matthew

so wait will my 5870 do good since ive been reading that 5830's are like the best card to mine??

sorry im a noob and i didnt mean for my 1st post to be this  i was actually going to post in a different thread but this one caught my eye 

You may not be so glad in 10 days when you finally get your rigs running and difficulty doubles

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=365456&CatId=3669

TigerDirect has them for $99.99 with the mail in rebate (sucks I know, but it's $60 you'll get back later, right?)

Just grabbed 2, lots in stock apparently according to TD Customer Service.