yeah, it spurred me into putting my 5850's on eBay, started working out more, and have been more productive with other hobbies.

In the end, there is no such thing as free money like so many people think this is. I enjoy gaming and like to have a great experience with that, and like to have a nice cool apartment to go home to after a day's work. Running several hundred watts full blast in the summer is ridiculous.

Maybe I will come back in the winter sometime....

Doesn't appear to be any sort of problem to me. Seems like all data transferred is less than 50Mb an hour, but i had a few other things running at the time. I'm guessing its less than half of that traffic.

If I  HAD the money, i would be buying. I don't, so there fore I mine. I will in the near future be trading goods for BTC. Once you have btc, you cant really buy more btc unless its gambled.

What is a typical balance to have for a newbie? I've got 0, but intend on having some in the future. I presume there are individuals with thousands? What do they do with them?

So, with intangible goods this is a great way to exchange services, but what about tangible goods? Shipping and handling is not cheap for many items. I don't believe there to be any shipping companies that accept bitcoins. So, if I were to make something like furniture I would need to charge a calculated amount to cover shipping, convert it to dollars, and then pay for the shipping cost? Or are people simply charging a flat rate for BTC purchased items and then sitting on the income hoping it will increase in value to eventually cash out and cover shipping expenses.

I make a lot of beer bottle cap related furniture, which is usually quite costly to ship.

Be super careful laptop mining. They can be prone to overheating!!! (learned the hard way)

Well, I just sold one a few months ago for $240, before the mining craziness. Id pay at most $215 shipped if for bitcoin purposes only. Gaming-wise, that money is better spend on newer generation cards.

The 5850 is an excellent miner, but does not hold its ground gaming to new nvidia or amd cards, so its value lies in mining with a side of light gaming.

So is the stock cooler on the high end AMD cards up to the task of GPU mining? or will the cards burn out faster from being insufficiently cooled?

Still, I am quite curious.

As a quick tip...CCC had some issues controlling fan speeds with a few different 4xxx and 5xxx series radeons. I noticed this when mining and decided to manually set fan speeds through catalyst control center / amd overdrive enabled. Brought temps down from 80c to 58c, and fan was only at 50%.

Also, HWMonitor from the company CPUid can show GPU temp too. Its not good for the cards to run around 90-105c.

Could be a password issue, I had to reconfigure the configuration with a different password that did not use symbols.

What miner are you using?

I just started with two 5850's (non crossfire) and can only seem to get one recognized. The other sits idle. The motherboard I'm using does not support full crossfire and causes stuttering in gaming with xfire enabled...so I just disabled it thinking mining would work with both and I could still game on one. Using Phoenix on win7 x64.

Thanks!