The benchmark numbers are to help Awesome Miner determine what is the best algo for your card based upon what sites like zpool or MPH are showing as "most profitable."
1. No penalty except for the ramp up penalty. If you are mining on Zpool and have AM switching you every 10 minutes... some mining software can take a good minute or so to ramp up. They initialize the cards, some set DAGs, etc. On 10 minute switching you could be losing 10% of your time ramping up when you could have been mining.
2. An hour is a reasonable time to have AM check profitability.
3. That's personal preference, and there are many opinions out there about this. My opinion is that you should be mining coins that are most profitable over an average amount of time... not spot prices. Coins shoot up and down in value constantly, and you will be chasing the tail end of the spikes. And you've got the coin's maturity time, and exchange time to consider. Just because you mined a coin at X value right now, doesn't mean it will give you exactly that X value after waiting on the coin to mature and hit the exchanges.
4. The temperature seems fine to me.
You don't have to use Awesome Miner's profit switching only with services like zpool or MPH. You can setup your own set of pools and add them to a pool group. Then use the custom pool group to switch between. When you do this, Awesome Miner will use the Whattomine statistics on the Coin tab to determine what coin you should be mining. You could setup all the Suprnova pools up in a pool group for instance.
You rock. Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions. I just set up a Suprnova Zen pool and got it working. Now I am going to take your advice and build out pool groups with just what I want to mine. Thanks for the direction!
