The thread about cryptocurrency mining got me thinking about building an el-cheapo "supercomputer"
A very cheap motherboard with 7(!) PCIe 1x slots:
A very cheap GPU card with around ~200 CUDA processing cores per to go in the 7 slots:
You get about the same number of CUDA cores as a big-ass $400 GPU + motherboard and PSU to support it for less money
GPU-accelerated magnetics simulator:
I won't buy another Zotac *anything*. Cheap crap that died in less than a year, and the warranty wasn't honoured.
Alternatively when the difficulty of "mining" a new hash key exceeds the computational resources small-time players can bring to the game and/or the price starts collapsing there should be a glut of more well-regarded name brand GPU hardware available on the second-hand market, though what shape the power-handling components will be in after being run for a couple years 24/7 is anyone's guess. if they're sold for ten cents on the dollar though mustn't grumble I suppose
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