[Ethereum] GPU usage nill during mining

short answer too, that will take the exact opposite stance as @nicolas-massart ;)

in the long run you'll be always better off mining solo, ever because you get uncles and pay no fees

pool mining reduces your variance, period.

this reddit post is quite interesting, it's basically @vitalik-buterin asking as to why people mine in pools.

It's not true for all pools but most of them don't pay you uncles : that substracts to your gains. It's almost true for all pools, there is a fee that substracts to your gains too

With ATI GPU, your CPU is used heavily during the dag creation phase but after that, there's almost no impact on CPU except the whole computer heat generated. Also disk access and network are lightly used during mining. I think you just should try and see it by yourself but if your computer is well cooled, you should be ok.