Looking great I think I might do a guide for Microsoft Azure, as I think their $200/£130 free trial rocks - currently using an 8 core/16GB monster and it's not bad for free

Any donations to the below from anyone wanting to see one would be greatly appreciated.

PZ6ZED8q1i7nQqnZiwFHdgLMELi3sgpnzL

Hi,

I have never mined anything and I am very newbie but want to learn.
Can someone please let me know what kind of hardware i should buy to mine protoshares effectively? I am looking to spend around $700 -$800.
If someone could advise what kind of CPU, GPU, cool fan maybe and anything else I need to build a mining ring that would be great..
Many thanks in advance!

Okay, first my two pence on what you're trying to do:

Investing in local hardware is - in my opinion - really ill-advised. There is absolutely no guarantee you will make your money back and although it's true you could always use the rig built to mine another cryptocurrency, you are going to be spending months and months earning that $700-$800 back. Not to mention power costs factor into local mining.. If you're making less than it costs to run your rig, then is it worth it (at all)? Cryptocurrencies are very finicky and protoshares are a very young currency - that comes with all kinds of caveats you should look into.. I would really advise you to do your research on cryptocurrencies and how they can rise and fall and have more of an idea about your investment before you spunk $800 on a rig for it. In truth, it sounds like a silly idea - sorry

My opinion, totally my own doing this on a budget.. I'd spend that $800 on cloud mining personally. The overhead is much smaller. Electric costs!

But to answer your question, the general rule of thumb is to go for as many cores as possible with as much GHz and cache as you can. I local mine with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300. I didn't pay for it - so already I'm getting profit - but I'm netting around 60col/min with that (70col/min on a good day). In comparison, I have a Pentium G860 (mid-range i3 equivalent) that nets around 50col/min. The newer i-series of chips (i7 etc) have an extra instruction set called AVX - these perform very very well with mining and if you were to build a rig, I'd suggest one of these. However, for a budget rig an Athlon II X6 would not go amiss - those cores will definitely make a difference.

Quote from: Darkhand on December 06, 2013, 03:33:57 am

Quote from: afr33sl4ve on December 05, 2013, 04:02:16 pm

EDIT: Nevermind. Reopened the wallet client. Turns out the block chain wasn't updating at all. :\ The transaction is there. Thanks again!

I'm also having this issue.  Eventually the wallet client stops updating even though it still says its connected.  Nothing updates, but everything looks fine and says that's it's connected to the network, until I restart it and find that I'm X number of hours behind.  Then I see my recent payouts.  Trying to figure out what's going on.

Probably because a lot of the time there aren't any nodes with incoming connections to connect to?...  I had a friend that had the same problem, not getting blockchain to update, just told him to addnode 5.9.24.81. 

It's at 135/500 connections right now.  I have it set for only 20 outbound connections.. but when it does lose one, it still takes up to a hundred or two tries on average to find a new node to connect to.

Thanks for this - been trying to find a way to get the wallet to play nice all day. Where did you get that node IP from?