it took me maybe 10 minutes to set up. join a pool, download a mining tool and tell it your pool account info, and let it mine. at some point or another, download the litecoin wallet application,get your receive payment #, and give it to your pool account so the pool knows where to send the mined coins you've been amassing. other than that, it just sits there and makes money
I wouldn't bother doing it unless you have a newer to newish AMD card though. ps video cards don't "wear out" unless something was previously horribly wrong with them. fans are moving parts and do wear out, but you're not going to affect their lifespan by running them at 80% vs 60%. On my nvidia GTX 770 I'm mining about $110USD/month, if I would have spent that 300 bucks on an AMD card like an R9 280x I'd be mining closer to 300USD/mo. keep in mind AMD cards are pretty much sold out everywhere because of how well they mine, and they're being price gouged to fuck on ebay.
I wouldn't recommend dumping any new money into litecoin
mining. If you want to play around and actually put a little money in, I recommend buying one or two litecoins on an exchange directly, and holding onto them, and have fun watching the exchange rate go way up. I only recommend
mining if you happen to already have a card because then it's a no loss proposition, and it's not doing anything else anyways. If your main worry is power draw and cost, keep in mind litecoin is pretty much GPU only, and even horribly inefficient GPU's max out around 300w, which if ran constantly full out is maybe 15 to 20 dollars a month on your electric bill. Then keep in mind any amd card from the last couple years and any nvidia card from this year will net you at least 60 to 70 bucks a month, closer to 300 to 400 if you're a lucky whore and picked up an AMD R9 series before they went out of stock everywhere
Go here to find out the kH/s rate of your video card, then plug that hash rate into the calculator below that to find out your monthly earnings
https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison
http://www.coinwarz.com/calculators/lit ... alculator/ (if you don't know the power draw of your card, assume 200w and stick that in there. if you don't pay for electric, just put in 0 so it won't add in any monthly electric fee)