>>The returns from such cards are so small now its not even worth mentioning.
Well, I dunno about mining BTC specifically but I got a co-worker making about 0.45 - 0.6 BTC a month on a 2 GPU rig from Newegg at $1200. He's using the middlecoin.com pool which rotate-mines different altcoins, converts to BTC and pays out. The rig is on track to paying for itself soon and apparently his electric bill didn't shoot to the moon.
Yeah, the middlecoin.com boat has sailed, alas. Ask him how it's doing now with that pool.
The multicoin pools like Middlecoin are essentially arbitrageurs of the many crypto coins, and the more people that enter the market (and there are a lot coming in), the less opportunities there are for arbitrage. Now, you're best bet is probably to mine Dogecoin and hope that it reaches the potential that seems likely, since its coin supply will decline dramatically in less than a year.
It's tricky finding a reliable pool so you can "set it and forget it" for sure.
It's an adventure:
* First you need parts to build a system (and if you're ordering from Newegg good luck getting your "overnight" order in <5 business days).
* Then you need to setup the software (hint: latest Ubuntu combined with latest Catalyst drivers is a world of frustration).
* Then tune cgminer (which took me a few days between other obligations) which is somehow not a copy-paste job.
* Then you spend a couple weeks fighting unreliable or hacked pools until you find something that works for you.
And reliability matters a lot if you're using the most common PPLNS payout pools since every round you're not mining at 100% sets you back.
I'd definitely recommend Proportional pools like middlecoin. The fees are higher (~+3% over PPLNS typically), but getting paid for 96% of your shares on something reliable is definitely preferable to 99% or even 100% of your shares, minus previous-round penalties (up to 20% or more?) on something unreliable.
Thought peeps might be curious seeing it in concrete terms, and middlecoin's charts are the best IMO. Simple, everything you need, and nothing you don't.
Once I switched to middlecoin (with multipool as a backup) I've earned almost 0.5BTC in 2.5 weeks. And (very) surprisingly, I don't seem to be suffering all that much due to rising difficulty (the brunt of that hit a week or two before I had everything going I guess).
This doesn't include the balance I carry at multipool BTW, which I don't bother to do much with (Cryptsy: meh).
Still, I'm planning to sell the system for what I paid for it (~$1800) tonight. It's made me some money, and that's nice, but wondering when the right time to sell (because of rising difficulty) is weighs on you a bit. And I figured if I can get my money back, well, it's been nice, but yeah, best get out while the gettin' is good. Especially with the possibility of ASICs hitting in a few months (even if they aren't faster, if their hashes-per-watt figures lure in even bigger miners, that's going to hurt).
It's crazy to see cards I paid $409/each for (R290) go for up to 30% over what I paid a month or two before. I've never seen that happen in 20 years of messing with computers. I mean hell, I've never even got more than maybe 20 to 30% back of my initial purchase back on a PC before.
Aside: That's one reason I love Macs so much since switching ~7 years ago: I can upgrade to the latest iPad every year for $100 out of pocket, and even a 3 or 4 year old laptop like my two MacBook Air's will easily retain 50 to 60% of their value. Which makes the whole financial/cost arguments against Macs pretty bogus (and believe me, I used it often enough myself as a PC fan in a past life), but I've definitely spent far less in TCO on my Macs than I did on my PCs. You just have to bite the bullet and get over the buy-in hump. Used Macs hold their value even better though. You might easily find a decent deal on a used Mac, use it for a year, then sell it for more than you bought it for. I did with my first (G3 I think) Mac Mini.
When I was GPU mining bitcoin in early 2011, I was also had to worry about stuff like:
* modifying the GPU firmware to allow more extreme overclocking (I was able to run my 5850s
at 945MHz - factory firmware capped them at 775MHz, default speed was 725MHz)
* figuring out how fast I could run them before the became unstable
* dealing with the heat
* convincing PG&E I wasn't growing weed (their billing system flagged my electricity usage)
* ensuring I could recover remotely even from the CPU locking up
* dealing with pools being DDoSed
* carefully planning which outlets things were plugged into so as not to blow the breakers
* ensuring all the miner software autostarted properly (one miner per gpu - multigpu miners weren't available yet)
Well, I dunno about mining BTC specifically but I got a co-worker making about 0.45 - 0.6 BTC a month on a 2 GPU rig from Newegg at $1200. He's using the middlecoin.com pool which rotate-mines different altcoins, converts to BTC and pays out. The rig is on track to paying for itself soon and apparently his electric bill didn't shoot to the moon.