should I step my toe into lite coin mining?

[shadow32]

So I have a HD 7850 1gb video card i was going to sell on eBay for $100, but this mining has gotten me slightly interested. I have this nice test bench sitting around with a small dual core CPU and 4g of old ddr2 ram.

Was built and optimized to run dedicated mine craft server on windows 7.
The PSU is only 300w I believe, I can get a bigger one if this is worth it.
Now is the main question, is it worth keeping the card to mine with? How long of mining would it take to get me to the $100 I would have sold it for, and how would I get cash from the lite coin to use to buy more PC hardware for gaming?

 

[Brantyn Gerik]

You will pay more in electricity than you will get back from mining with only that card, not to mention you will likely burn out your psu in roughly a month or less (will be under pretty high load all the time)

 

[cst1992]

Burn out is a strong word -- many psu's are built to handle high loads.
But yes, I'm skeptical that PSU can handle a 7850 24/7.
Also, a single 7850 will not get you anywhere in the days of dedicated mining rigs and mining pools.
better game hard with that GPU!

 

[shadow32]

Someone on reddit suggested I mine doge coins instead and in around 21 days, a month to over estimate, I could make my $100.

note on the psu topic, i know 300 is little for this, is there a way i can link 2 PSU's or what is there minimal this card needs with a weak cpu to run with it?

 

[USAFRet]

You can't "step your toe" into *coin mining.
Go big or stay home.

Trying to cheap out only results in negative gain due to power costs, and possibly cooked hardware.

 

[Traciatim]

Someone on reddit suggested I mine doge coins instead and in around 21 days, a month to over estimate, I could make my $100.

note on the psu topic, i know 300 is little for this, is there a way i can link 2 PSU's or what is there minimal this card needs with a weak cpu to run with it?

The Dogecoin thing is true right now, but it changes all the time. My 7850 is currently running just under a buck a day doing litecoins. You can estimate your return of the different currencies based on your power usage over at dustcoin.com . . . I very much doubt you'd get a hundred bucks in less than about 3 months and even then the power costs will eat in to your profits. In 3 months will someone release hardware that mines scrypt at crazy fast rates ruining that like it did with sha-256? Who knows, but if it happens then your GPU mining will pretty much instantly become useless.

 

[shadow32]

Yeah the more I think about it, I could just sell the card and rent out a mine craft server for more