Great suggestion! Highly productive, useful for new entrants and can provide more knowledge to others!
Hey bogglor, how are XFX cards? They are sold super cheap around here but I've read various users not so happy about them. I'm thinking about getting one.
I like them, they run quiet. I have my rig set up in my basement and I was worried it would be loud, but surprisingly it wasn't any louder than sitting next to a desktop computer.
I bought a kill-a-watt to check my wattage, and doing scrypt mining with the two cards as overclocked as I could get them (and still be stable), my rig was running at 390 watts.
When I bought my ASICs, I left the two video cards plugged in, but idle, and my rig ran at around 85-90 watts, so that's around 150 watts each when fully hashing. My electric bill was $20-30 more than normal each month.
At the time, I paid $119 each for the 7850s (actually, one had a rebate of $30 so really it was 89 and 119), I think it was a great investment especially because the 7950s were $400 and I didn't want to spend that much. Built my whole rig for under $600.
EDIT: as a side note, I got my kill-a-watt because of mining, and I'm *SO* glad I did, because it's such a cool 'toy'. I hooked it up to everything in my house to see how much electricity stuff uses. I had an old VHS/DVD player hooked up to my TV that was using about 10w just being idle - I unhooked that because I rarely used it. And also the CD player component hooked up to my stereo system used like 5-6 watts in it's standby state. I removed that too. It's amazing to see how many things you can just unplug and how much wattage you can save.
I'm thinking along these lines:
Most ordinary people want a computer:1) they can do other practical things with, i.e., e-mail, scheduling, photo/movie editing, etc.
2) they can also have fun with, i.e., play a game, watch a movie, do video conferencing, etc.
3) that looks like a normal computer
4) for the best value for the money available
That kind of limits the 'high end' design to a two card system, but that would still be a killer way to get started and start acquiring all the necessary skills to advance to more complicated rigs if so desired.
How about we design a couple of options for folks who want all the above options (not all at once, of course 
) while mining DGB at the same time?. . . and keep posting your stats . . . maybe we can get a mining baseline put together . . .
Over time I think a ~28.64 to 1 network hashrate to diff ratio has shown itself to be very reliable, for ALL algos. ( diff * 28.64 = network hashrate).
