Bitcoin Discussion Thread Part 2

Oh god help me! Bitcoin is such a sickness. As soon as I saw BTC hitting near $12 I went out and bought another two 5870s. Now I have 13 :(

And there's another two Sapphire 6950s coming that I hope to unlock. My house is going to get raided by the police for being a grow-up with the amount of power I am using.

5x Gigabyte HD 5870 1GB
3x ASUS 5870 2GB ROG Matrix
3x ASUS EAH5870 1GB
2x XFX Reference 5870 1GB

and two Sapphire 6950s. The logistics of how to split these cards up over 5 computers is killing me. I really need my extension cables to come in from Hong Kong.
 
sethmo said:
wow, 6hrs, I never had issues with Phoenix GPU miners over time. Only time they would stop would be when the Pool had server issues, Phoenix would not reconnect on its own.
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It's not that they stop or anything like that. Check your GPU usage, it drops over time from 99% to 96%. The actual drop happens over the course of 24+ hours, but I just restart them every 6 just because. Sometimes I forget to do it and comeback to check on the rigs downstairs after a week and I remember to do it.
 
Veeb0rg said:
I wish my 5830 would overclock, It crashes if i touch anything besides fan speed. It crashes if i turn down the mem clock, it crashes if i turn up the cpu clock.. its no bueno so I'm stuck at 250mh/s or so with it.
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Sounds like you need different drivers..
You should be able to get at LEAST 10% on that.
 
Evil Juggalo said:
Sounds like you need different drivers..
You should be able to get at LEAST 10% on that.
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I'm running win xp with ati catalyst 11.6. it runs perfectly stable at 800/1000 speeds. ATI Overdrive is completely Greyed out in the control panel.
 
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Since I haven't revisited phoenix in awhile, I thought I'd give it a go.

In ubuntu I'm getting better hashrates in cgminer (-I 8 -k phatk) than phoenix 1.62 with phatk or phatk2 with aggression 13.

Given it's only 2-3mh per card, but across 10cards, it helps. Plus I still see lower stales with cgminer, and it restarts gpus.
 
I guess I will have to check out CGMiner sometime. It's so much of a hassle with multiple systems when you don't have a KVM and have to deal with laggy remote desktops.
 
Spare-Flair said:
I guess I will have to check out CGMiner sometime. It's so much of a hassle with multiple systems when you don't have a KVM and have to deal with laggy remote desktops.
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Go linux :p remote ssh monitoring ftw! I run 2 machines completely headless, no kvm, no dummy plugs, no xfire.
 
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Spare-Flair said:
Oh god help me! Bitcoin is such a sickness. As soon as I saw BTC hitting near $12 I went out and bought another two 5870s. Now I have 13 :(

And there's another two Sapphire 6950s coming that I hope to unlock. My house is going to get raided by the police for being a grow-up with the amount of power I am using.

5x Gigabyte HD 5870 1GB
3x ASUS 5870 2GB ROG Matrix
3x ASUS EAH5870 1GB
2x XFX Reference 5870 1GB

and two Sapphire 6950s. The logistics of how to split these cards up over 5 computers is killing me. I really need my extension cables to come in from Hong Kong.
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Hope those work out for you. Pretty sure these extenders are hand made and hopefully these ones from hong kong are as well made as the ones from cablesaurus.
 
I ordered 10 1x to 1x from hongkong and the first 3 I have taken the time to file down dont work. and i waited weeks for them to come. I think i may break down and buy some 1x to 16x from cablesaurus
 
Kardonxt said:
I ordered 10 1x to 1x from hongkong and the first 3 I have taken the time to file down dont work. and i waited weeks for them to come. I think i may break down and buy some 1x to 16x from cablesaurus
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I just ordered more from cablesaurus. fast shipping and good quality for the price.
 
tsd said:
I just ordered more from cablesaurus. fast shipping and good quality for the price.
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I found a hidden 1x PCIe on my IP-35 Pro, don't think my little 650w power supply can handle a 6950, 5850, and a 5830 running balls out :) Can't wait for my MSI 890FX-GD70 to arrive, 5 magical 16x slots.
 
Seems my computer crashed and I'm at work so I can't restart. Seems like my 5870 and 6950 aren't going to mix well. They were both at stock speeds. And I only got one machine :(. Any suggestions?
 
Hmm. When I first started mining I had 2 rigs with a 6970 + 4870 in each and they worked perfectly fine. How's your PSU and are you setting the fans at manual to at least 70%? You cannot leave them on auto for any reason, the fans simply don't ramp up fast enough to keep up with the heat.
 
EdGaRRRRR said:
Seems my computer crashed and I'm at work so I can't restart. Seems like my 5870 and 6950 aren't going to mix well. They were both at stock speeds. And I only got one machine :(. Any suggestions?
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Lets review, Shall we?





EdGaRRRRR said:
So my new 6950 arrived. Do I just put it in and it will be recognized with my 5870?
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Evil Juggalo said:
good luck.. I had a 5830 + 5850 and a modded 6950 (unlocked).. They wouldnt play nice.. CCC gives the 69XX card the option for power boost, but it tried to boost all cards.. Caused a lot of crashes so I finally pulled it out and traded it for 2x 5750's
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EdGaRRRRR said:
HOLY CRAP THATS LOUD!!! fans are at 100% instead of 70% with my 5870 by itself. How do I get trixx to read each card seperately? And how do I get the degrees to come down so that the fans can go down as well? I was used to 70C. Its currently at 85C AND 100% fan speed.

edit: what is the best way to overclock independently?

Edit2: what degree do I NOT want to hit?
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Evil Juggalo said:
2nd machine :D
Told ya, lol
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PSU is corsair 750tx. So it should be able to handle it. My fans auto to a constant 100% with both vid cards in. With just my 5870 it would auto to 70% never higher. So I should manually set it to 70%?
 
750 will handle those 2 cards fine.. Your running about 75-80% load, I would not go any higher tho..
Trixx can only adjust ALL fans at once.. CCC can do them seperately but you cannot you TRIXX if you do that.. Using one undoes the changes the other has made.

Alternately, You can ghetto rig the something similar to the same thing I did..

Bottom rig (The working one), sound jacked all the way up, headphone plug plugged in, cut off and modified to plug into the reset pin header on the top PC (The one that kept locking up) .. Every time the top one locked up, it would sign off of teamviewer which cause it to DING the friends list on the lower machine and that electrical signal restarts the top machine. Cost about 4$ and took about 30 minutes to make..

But, from what ive seen, mixed generation cards to not play well for the most part..
 
Awesome ghetto mod Evil. I initially tried to run a 6970 with a 4890 and had repeated crashes. Took out the 4890 and rock solid.
 
Has anyone done any driver version comparisons lately? Curious if it would be worthwhile to upgrade to 11.8. I can't remember if I was running 11.5b or 11.6, but 11.7 seems a bit slower than whatever I was running before. Might just download all of 'em and compare.
 
Parja said:
Has anyone done any driver version comparisons lately? Curious if it would be worthwhile to upgrade to 11.8. I can't remember if I was running 11.5b or 11.6, but 11.7 seems a bit slower than whatever I was running before. Might just download all of 'em and compare.
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Stability wise, 11.6x64 on Win 7 has worked the best for me so far.
Running 11.7 on my primary rig with a single 6850 with no problems, but about 6% lower hash rate than 11.6, have considered going back..

Didnt even know 11.8 was out, or even beta

Have yet to figure out how to setup LinuxCoin or get CGMiner to work in windows tho.. so All my rigs are running GUIminer

Ill try 11.8 tonight
 
Oops. Looks like it didn't crash. Just lost Internet connection for...6 hours. Back up and running :)
 
I know it's all supposed to average out, but is there any benefit to splitting your miners among two or more pools? I'm thinking half on Simplecoin, half on BTC Guild.
 
Spare-Flair said:
I know it's all supposed to average out, but is there any benefit to splitting your miners among two or more pools? I'm thinking half on Simplecoin, half on BTC Guild.
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In theory it helps with variance. The likelihood that the two pools luck will be closer to difficulty.

I'm biased as to which pool I'd recommend ;)
 
tsd said:
In theory it helps with variance. The likelihood that the two pools luck will be closer to difficulty.

I'm biased as to which pool I'd recommend ;)
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Of course, since you get all the transaction fees :D

In a week when I get 3 more cards in, half my miners will still be 3.4 GH/s so Simplecoin will still get business :)
 
Spare-Flair said:
Of course, since you get all the transaction fees :D

In a week when I get 3 more cards in, half my miners will still be 3.4 GH/s so Simplecoin will still get business :)
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I wish the transaction fees were worthwhile... However, you only get a few bitcents per winning block.
 
It also helps with reducing potential downtime in case the pool goes down. You could have half your miners on BTC Build with simplecoin as backup and the other half on simplecoin with BTC Guild as backup. That way you are covered if either one goes down.

P.S: All Ruxum invites gone. Thanks
 
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WhoBeDaPlaya said:
Actually, taking care of the 100% CPU usage problem is easier with CGMiner. Only a single exe to change affinity for in task manager, or just launch it with start affinity.
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Must not have used GUIminer in a while. It's just a checkbox to set CPU affinity. Can't get much easier than that.
 
Parja said:
Must not have used GUIminer in a while. It's just a checkbox to set CPU affinity. Can't get much easier than that.
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guiminer certainly is easy (in windows), in linux it's a pain to setup and doesn't quite work like you'd expect (can't stop miners for one).

That said, I just gave my daughter a .bat file to use with cgminer. She's happy to keep the miner up. Plus she thinks her core 2 duo with 3x6870s in a haf 922 is badass looking ;)

If only I could have had a rig like that when I was 11.....
 
tsd said:
That said, I just gave my daughter a .bat file to use with cgminer.
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Do share. I haven't seen any info yet on how to setup cgminer for optimal hashing power happy time.

I tried using "cgminer -o http://poolurl: port -u username -p pass -I 8" that is posted in the cgminer thread, but it's about 10% slower than my GUIMiner setup on my 5870 and about 4% slower on my 5830 in my main box.



On the driver subject, I've tried the latest few and have found no real difference in hashing performance among them.

Setup:
5870 Eyefinity 6 clocked at 930/334
5830 clocked at 975/334
GUIMiner v2011-07-01 running Phoenix with phatk 2.2 kernel
GUIMiner flags: -k phatk AGGRESSION=12 BFI_INT FASTLOOP=false VECTORS WORKSIZE=256

Using drivers 11.6b, 11.7, and 11.8, results are pretty much identical. The 5870 is pulling 432MH/s and the 5830 is pulling 317MH/s.

Thinking I might download a few of the older versions (maybe 11.5b, 11.4, and 10.11) and see if they make any difference.
 
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Maybe I had to much fun last night, but I'm stalling out on getting CGminer running in Win7x64.

Code: 
ative WIN32 build instructions (on mingw32, on windows):
	Install AMD APP sdk, latest version
	(Do NOT install the ati amd sdk if you are on nvidia)
	Install mingw32
Good to this point then um....well, I'm lost.
Code: 
	Install libcurl, copy libcurl.m4 into /mingw/share/aclocal
	Run:
	autoreconf -fvi
	CFLAGS="-O2 -Wall -msse2 -I<path to AMD APP include>" LDFLAGS="-L<path to AMD APP lib/x86>" ./configure

Ninja Edit: And nevermind, it's completely un-necessary. Got it working, KISS rules applied.
 
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Lorien said:
Wow, that's nice. I've heard many people say to never go below 300Mhz cause that tanked their hash rate. You must've gotten some primo silicon cards.
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Figured it out! It's not the cards, it's the kernel! Using Diapolo's 8/11 kernel, you can drop the memory speed down to really low levels and maintain performance.

I tried Diapolo's 8/4 kernel and phatk 2.2 and both of those lose performance rapidly below about 300-350MHz.

So while Diapolo's 8/11 kernel is about 1-1.5% slower than phatk, you can drop your memory speeds so low, it's dropping my core temps by about 2-3C.
 
Parja said:
Figured it out! It's not the cards, it's the kernel! Using Diapolo's 8/11 kernel, you can drop the memory speed down to really low levels and maintain performance.

I tried Diapolo's 8/4 kernel and phatk 2.2 and both of those lose performance rapidly below about 300-350MHz.

So while Diapolo's 8/11 kernel is about 1-1.5% slower than phatk, you can drop your memory speeds so low, it's dropping my core temps by about 2-3C.
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on cgminer, you can add -k phatk to use the latest phatk kernel.
 
tsd said:
on cgminer, you can add -k phatk to use the latest phatk kernel.
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Ok, so I think I've finally got it outperforming GUIMiner with phatk 2.2 using the following flags...

-k phatk -o http://pool.simplecoin.us:8337 -u <username> -p <password> -I 8 -d 0 -v 2 -w 256

It's giving two hash rate readings per card, though. What's up with that? Is that speed per thread per GPU (since the default is two)?
 
mmm Love the smell of new-to-me hardware.. Just picked up a 6970 from a local craigslist listing.
 
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