I see. Bear with me... I know these are pretty basic (borderline n00bish) questions, but Bitcoin is a whole new world for me -- only been living in this realm for approx. 48 hours.
Assuming I keep running in this pool @ 140.2MH/sec for 7 days straight (with only a few brief cool-down/reboot periods), what sort of "return" might I expect? I use the term "return" loosely because I know my GTX-580 eats more Kw than it produces BTC... But then again, if I wasn't running my card at full load to mine BTC I'd be doing the same running 3D flight/combat sims and on DirectX 11 development and engine testing, so my energy bill will probably remain about the same. Huge GPU-accelerated particle and physics simulations put about the same load on my GPU...
Also, I see there are a lot of vendors out there selling Bitcoin mining equipment... which ones would you say are the best? I'm probably going to dedicate the coming week to Bitcoin studies and then make my first informed leap into the Bitcoin arena... Perhaps split $2k down the middle: half on a small mining chipset and the other on buying some BTC for speculation... If I'm pleased with the results I might get very serious and make plans for a new Bitcoin-oriented company (the idea I've been toying with in my head). But anyway... I don't need to put the cart ahead of the horse...
Thanks so much, Holliday! (and to all of you in the community!)
--ATC--
P.S. -- I notice that on GUIMiner there is a label "Balance" and it seems to always stay at zero. What does this indicate?