Well, except for the part where the block is found faster so as your payments shrink, they come in faster. You have to look at the whole thing, not just part of it

difficulty increasing would make each block take longer, but wouldn't change the fact that each block is 25 BTC, so the size of your payouts would remain about the same. Network hashrate increasing wihtout your personal hashrate increasing would lower the percentage of work you have contributed, so hashes would happen faster overall, but your own payout would be reduced. As difficulty rises, blocks take longer, and over time more asics/fpgas are introduced to the pool, making gpu mining less lucrative. You have to determine for yourself whether this is right for you

I understand how the pool calculates rewards, but since I'm hashing along at ~ 700MH/s, I would assume there'd be a smaller variance than 30% over the course of 45 min to 2 hours. the 4 hour blocks match up with the average of 1-2 hour blocks, excluding these outliers but if others aren't seeing them, it must be something on my end

I'm noticing a significant fluctuation in shorter blocks. On the order of ~30% smaller rewards only on shorter blocks, but not all of them. I don't know if these are miscalculations or if people are getting lucky with some sort of pool hopping guesswork

Tried flushing the DNS cache, still can't connect to stratum, stratum2, or stratum3. I'm in Austin. I don't have a backup pool, and I have no idea how to choose one. I mean, I understand how to actually set one up, but I'm not sure how to decide on one that's not too big (btcguild) or too small (is there such a thing?)

having issues connecting.  Tried the built in url on guiminer, and I also tried stratum2.bitcoin.cz:3333 and stratum3.bitcoin.cz:3333 to no avail. Connection is just not happening, something about IO errors

Well, like I said a couple pages ago. I did buy this 7970 with bitcoin mining in mind, but at the end of the day, I'm not doing it to try to make money off of it, the card cost too much for that. I'm doing it because it's a curiosity, and the primary purpose of my machine is to max out all the games I play.

Pool hopping exists, but it's a gamble on slush. You would have to be trying to predict how much longer the block will take and get yourself in long enough before the end to get a sufficiently high score, and you would need to be operating under the assumption that whichever pool you hop from isn't going to have a short block just as you hopped out or you just jumped away from a nice short block. I'm content staying in one place, letting my pc mine away whenever I'm not playing games, although I'm off all day today and all these short blocks are making me not want to start up a game lol

So close though!!!  I am just being sarcastic.

 I rather get the correct payment for block 237575 and also paid for block 237574. and waiting. tap tap tap

edit...

Gotta love the 400+gh/s increase near the "end" of these long rounds. like I said the big boy greed
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yeah, on a string of 4+ hour blocks, pool hash rate is around 9.2 TH/s, I've seen it drop to the 8s a couple of times in the past month, aside from when the ddos stuff was happening. String up some single digit or 2 digit minute blocks back to back and what do you know? Our pool hashing rate is 10.6 TH/s

We had a lucky day today, earlier this week we had a couple of unlucky days as well. It all balances out. You can't use a single day or even a single week as a basis for expectations of how the future will pan out, you need to look at a much larger sample size. Compare all of today on all of the large pools for example, then average the data from all of those pools for a month. Our good luck benefited us today, but it's just a small ripple in the ocean when you start looking at the big picture

He said he undervolted his cards. I kind of wonder how much power I'm drawing from the wall.  I would assume it's in the mid to high 400 range, but I'm overclocked and over volted
Yeah, I don't know too many gamers that would be interested in 5xxx series cards now, since 7xxx cover the entire spectrum of price/performance and 9xxx series are due by the end of the year.

As for the slots, the x1 slot is shorter than the other slots so you'd need a workaround for that with a riser or an extender or something

I'm not invested heavily into bitcoin, as it's just a curiosity for me, but I do want to maintain a small investment in it. To that end, I am just about to get my first whole btc, and although I am thinking of buying something with it, that would just instantly spend the btc that I have, so I wouldn't have any investment in it any longer. Is it prudent to- for example: decide on a btc purchase within the amount of BTC that I have, and then before buying whatever it is that catches my fancy, buy that many BTC so I still have my original BTC?

I agree. I just got into mining, and I even upgraded the GPU in my PC to a 7970 with the intent of mining faster than my GTX 670 could do. However, I didn't buy the card (nor assemble the computer) for the sole purpose of mining, and at the end of the day, I have a badass gaming rig that I can play any game maxed out, which is why I built my rig in the first place. I'm not worried about making my investment back, so long as I don't spend more on electricity than I make mining, which I am currently doing pretty good at (700 MH/s).  That and the 7970 came with 3 games that I had really been wanting to play.

The CDF% will go up more and more slowly as more time passes. We had an 11 hour block the other day, no one knows exactly how long a block will take, that's part of the luck that everyone talks about

You're right, 18082 is fixed for me as well, and I'm certain that any other anomalies will be sorted out in time.

Hmm, more weirdness.  Account page says 724 MH/s, constant shares going out (last update at 0) every time I look, yet instead of the normal 0.0017-0.002 that I get per block, it's 0.00000082. I'm sure it'll be taken care of, but it's weird that these problems have been cropping up over the recent past and not before

I wonder about the score resetting thing, isn't that part of the weighting system to counter pool hopping?  I notice all the time, my score will drop from the millions to nothing and then begin climbing back up

I believe this is the workaround (pics and all in there to make it easy)

http://bitclockers.com/forums/index.php?topic=7.0

I'm seeing the same thing, and I haven't turned off my computer tonight at all. The "my account" page has me constantly submitting shares, so I'm not sure what's up with that. Hopefully it gets corrected at some point, 4 hours and all

In your case, the accelero coolers would not be ideal due to the way that they cool.  They exhaust the hot air out through all directions except the face of the card where the fans suck air in and of course the PCB which is solid, but all sides and the rear are exhausting air, which would cause hot air from each card to be pulled in as cooling air, so it's not a good solution.  The 925 is a decent case for gaming, but for your application, it doesn't move enough air.  You could either get water cooling blocks for your 7970s, which would be pretty expensive, but would work nicely, or you could run an open computer, no case, but you'd end up having to clean the computer components a lot more often than with the case in place. Remounting the stock heat sinks would be ideal because it's much lower cost than water cooling and would still allow you to use your case.

I would recommend you clean off all of the existing thermal compound and examine the surface of the heat sink and where it mounts on your GPU/VRMs to ensure they are nice and flat, with no irregularities.  Once you have verified this and made both sides of the mating surfaces nice and clean with some IPA (isopropyl alcohol), then apply a nice small amount of high quality TIM to the heat spreaders on the GPU and VRMs and place the heat sinks back on.  If you want to be doubly sure, remove the heatsink again and look at the TIM, it should be devoid of any bubbles or clean areas (everything should ideally have a thin layer of TIM on it, little hills or ridges are normal). Clean it off again, as the removal will create irregularities in the TIM (little hills or ridges) and reapply the same amount if it was good, and reattach the heatsink, replace the shroud, and button everything back up.

I highly recommend a high quality TIM like the noctua NT-H1 that comes with the NH-D14 coolers, although you can buy it seperately.  People like Arctic Silver AS5, but it doesn't perform as well as several other TIMs, although the overall difference between best and average is only 4 or 5 degrees in the last comparison I read, so if AS5 is the only stuff you can get at a local shop, it's fine.  Poor application or too much TIM will make a much bigger difference than which brand you choose.  Another factor is cleaning the heat sinks and case to ensure all the airflow is as unrestricted as possible.

As for your performance, it really makes me wish I had a second card, but I'd probably run into heat issues.  I'm running mine at 1300 mV, 1230 MHz on the core clock, 1600 on the memory clock 72C 24/7.  Never crashes during mining, and I only turn off the miner while I'm gaming (primary purpose of my rig).  Hash rate bounces between 715 MH/s and 694 MH/s depending on what else I'm doing, I'd love to nearly double that, but not at the cost of a second 460 dollar card and the possibility of having to ramp them down significantly due to the heat blowing all over the case