I might be wrong (never done it) but you can do it.. just won't make any money. It is having your pc do calculations like folding but you'll spend more on the electric bill.
There was 2 ways to mine bitcoins a few years back, CPU mining and GPU mining, CPU mining has died a long time ago as its just not effiecent compared to GPU mining. Problem is these days GPU mining is also too slow hence the ASIC hardware that is comming into the market but this is at super cost prices we are talking $10k-$20k for basic stuff upwards of $100k for some of it. If you have 4 6990s assuming 24/7 uptime you will generate 1 bitcoin block worth 25coins in aprox 2 years 3months 14days 17hrs. Thats how long it takes to mine these days by yourself.
If you're going to mine you should do it via a pool, where you'll get regular payouts etc. Just go to the link I posted earlier and see if you want to try it, it's simple. They're up to £120 now.
there are alot cheaper options for asic gear, highlighted all here http://cryptojunky.com/blog/2013/02/17/bitcoin-asic-roundup/
How kiquid is the market in bitcoins anyway? Is it easy if say for example a hundred or so to sell them or will you have difficulty finding someone wanting to buy that much?
If you want a laugh i ran my 2 680s through the gui client. Was getting some pitiful 240 m hashes / s which is pretty awful lol. GPU mining is so dead in comparison to what a decent ASIC rig can do now.
AMD cards are still far superior, (2 7950s could get 1000m for instance). But yes if ASICs/FPGAs become available to the masses then GPU mining will become drastically less effective.
Im still pretty new to it, i tried bitminter last night and was getting >1200 on my 2 air cooled 7970's and yes, it sounded like a hurricane in my bedroom :O
My 7950 fluctuates between 400 and 500 and is at 84 degrees according to hw monitor and fans are at 80% according to amd ccc! Folding was ok because my pc was relatively silent but this is ridiculous!
i had msi afterburner open the whole time, i was mining on both cards and playing a game of blood bowl at the same time and watching vids on youtube occasionally. The fans were at 100% constantly and the cards were @ 95 maxing out at 96 Celcius for 2 hours while i was trying it. Needless to say my rig sounded like it was going to take off, and the sheer heat it was pumping out was immense!
Do you know if you would get any decent output out of a a10 5800k, technically it has an amd gpu so should be able to get at least 100, maybe more because it is overclocked and with 2133mhz ram. Also have you joined a pool or doing it solo? 95 degrees is ideal at the moment, it is still cold outside
ive no idea RE: the 5800k, i only investigated bitcoin mining because of this thread, then registered on bitminter.com and joined into their pool and made myself a bitcoin and namecoin wallet. Hence im still extremely new to this and not 100% sure what im doing. The cool thing ive noticed about bitminter though is that you get paid every hour, i liked the idea of regular payments (and the little java applet is pretty cool ). Dont think i'll keep it up tbh purely for how much it thrashes the tits off my machine for the sake of a few quid, though im still looking incase ive overlooked something
you need to join a pool i mine in this pool http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ i recently sold 0.2 BTC on ebay in 0.01 amounts, so 20 0.01BTC and they all sold in several hours i netted £30 ive just added a 6870 its OC's to 1GHz and pulling just over 300 mh/s and is ~65c with the fan at 35% Also this it very useful for buying your next mining card https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
