I don't know why, but I've starting getting an error.
In my rig there's a 6990 and 6870. My 6990 will display one of those errors saying cannot connect with a whole bunch of numbers and lines and stuff, which is normal sometimes for pools. However, a few shares after that prints, the miner will freeze. The 6870 will keep mining tho, which I find weird. If I try to close the miner, my whole computer freezes. This has never happened before until yesterday, and has happened twice now so...anyone got an idea what's going on?
What miner are you using? Phoenix, poclbm, etc? What settings are you using?
Are you monitoring the temperature of your cards? Which card is the most open [on most motherboards when you have two cards in your machine, the one closest to your CPU has the least ventilation]? Are you controlling the fan speeds of your cards to compensate for heat and how about your case fans?
The 6990 will obviously run a LOT hotter. The 6990 is a dual GPU core version of the 6970 (I believe with slightly lower clock and/or voltage speeds). My 6970, runs quite hot compared to other cards I have ever owned. Here is what I run my 6970 at with it as the only card in my machine with fan control on the card and case fans on high to keep the temp at 75C (fan set to 68% fixed right now). Since I use my computer for remote desktop via VPN a lot to work from home (8-10+ hours per day) and MANY other things running (widgets, services, iTunes and of course web browser), but I am careful not to start any videos (the drivers from AMD for the 69xx series are not yet stable enough to allow watching videos while mining, at least not with GPU use high like 98% plus, which is where mine sits).
I run a dedicated mining machine with a 5850 in it. My 5850 runs at 73C in the basement and I use a user defined variable fan speed profile since it rarely changes ... the graph is usually a straight line where my 6970 results in the fan speed fairly straight with little spikes every few minutes ... so I just set it fixed to 68% for now and it is working fine at a constant temp.
I run two machines now [will be three tomorrow or the next day, with the third being Linux].
- WORKSTATION: Windows 7 x64 Pro i7 960 (4 core 3.2GHz with HT giving 8 logical cores) - CPU is 1-4% for most work while mining. 12GB DDR3 12800 tri-channel. MSI Radeon 6970 (core clock pushed to 920MHz), two high resolutions monitors (both greater than 1920x1080 ... the stupid standard res they sell now days) 20" and 22" 16x10
- DEDICATED MINING: Windows 7 x64 Home Premier: Some AMD Phenom II X4 830 (4 core 2.8GHz) with 6GB DDR3 (speed unknown) dual channel, Aero turned off, CPU is about 2%, XFX Radeon 5850 (core clock pushed to 850 and memory clock dropped to 900MHz, but will probably drop more when I get time to play with it), a single 17" 4:3 LCD analog monitor hooked to DVI port with adapter plug.
Phoenix
WORKSTATION: -k poclbm VECTORS BFI_INT FASTLOOP WORKSIZE=128 AGGRESSION=9
~391MH/s
DEDICATED: -k poclbm VECTORS BFI_INT WORKSIZE=128 AGGRESSION=11
~318MH/s
poclbm
WORKSTATION: -v -w 128 -f 30
~393MH/s
DEDICATED: -v -w 128 -f 5
~319MH/s
With Phoenix, I have tried setting the aggression higher than this with FASTLOOP on and get slightly worse results or no change, but seemingly it runs slightly hotter. If you remove FASTLOOP, you can push it to 11, but I have also found the desktop to noticeably lag, which is annoying and only gives me perhaps 3MH/s difference anyway [except it will drop with other graphical usage like moving around windows with Aero turned on].
I just started using poclbm (command line) today, so I may need to work on some tweaks to get more out of it. For my workstation, decreasing to -f 10 added only about 1-2MH/s, but added just a bit more noticeable lag and simply isn't worth it. I am definitely seeing fewer stale shares with poclbm than I am with Phoenix. That more than makes up for the
slight decrease in performance on my workstation (6970).
So, I prefer Phoenix; it delivers a slightly nicer interface when running command line than poclbm. However, Phoenix still has bugs in it and lately it has been hammered by long polling issues causing it to crash and still use a significant percentage of the GPU doing nothing (mine was sitting at 48% usage this morning, but had crashed both machines 4 hours earlier due to a long polling exception. This is well documented in the forums. Rather than lose time, I am using poclbm for now [and maybe forever].
BTW ... with the latest drivers and these settings for the 6970, it seems that if a video comes up on a web page that starts automatically [some news sites do this for instance], then I usually have time to close the tab in the browser before it locks up ... I haven't accidentally locked up the GPU in weeks.
EDIT: I just looked over after typing all this and my 6970 is running 392-393MH/s on average, so I removed my comments about GUIMiner and updated the stats.