Topic: All Sapphire 7950s (11196-19-20G) are not suitable for mining? - page 3. (Read 16872 times)

My dead gpus had intensity 19.
In Gamers case, they don't play 24/7 and always at 99% gpu load, so i think that they haven't problems by these reason.

No, but the Stilt bios for this card works well and it is at a lower than stock voltage. You can also edit the voltage with a bios editor such as VBE7.

anyone?

is their a way to change the core voltage (mV) on msi afterburner for the sapphire 11196-19-20g

true... i tried to look for it too.

somehow it is not a overclocking problem...

if i have the card without any overclocking and just set Intensity to for example 20 than i get crashes although according to the guy who wrote cgminer Intensity is not an overclocking setting i think:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/what-is-intensity-best-intensity-settings-5830-5850-6870-and-7970-cgmine-87022
Quote from: ckolivas on June 12, 2012, 04:56:59 AM
---
Intensity is the amount of work in one go the GPU has to do before it can return its results. It needs to be large enough to keep the device fully utilised yet not so overloaded that the device becomes unresponsive. The faster the GPU, the higher the sweet spot is. Ram is of no use to mining whatsoever. They could even mine fine with only a few MB of ram.
---

Yet, I can't find any source on the internet where overclockers or gamers are having the same problems as miners. The cards only seem to break down with mining...

Is that just because mining is more intensive or is there more too it?

bought 2 cards. (11196-19-20G) tried to overclock them. both crashed. got new ones. tried to overclock from 925 to 950. crashed.
now I stopped overclocking and they are doing fine. arround ~550khash per card at 60-65C

1 question. If you overclock, do you need to put the boost option on or off? so overclock from 850 or from 925?

no.. this has nothing to do with temperature...

i think reading through this thread that there is enough evidence that sapphire shipped a whole batch of faulty cards somewhere at the beginning of this year.

SAME PROBLEMS HERE. Same model #.

I bought 6 of these last year, 1 returned, 1 rma, 1 taking a shit right now, and EVERY CARD had TERRIBLE FANS, I replaced some fans.

They started dying about a month after use, only ran them at 60%.

Temps NEVER above 75C, except when fans both died on one card, temp hit 95C, card still works though.

Found something that could maybe help:


http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoinmining/comments/1w6wo2/two_dead_sapphire_7950_dualx_oc_in_one_month_and/

I have had 3 of the sapphire 7950 vapor x's running flawlessly for about 5 months now. Overclocked but keeping temperatures at 75 degrees.
Maybe there was a bad batch, I must be lucky but anyone effected are you keeping an eye on the HW column in cgminer?

Getting the fastest speed is always great but I know a couple people who burnt out cards because they had tons of hardware errors.

Gigabyte WF3 7950's have the same issue with the small power ripple capacitors for the VRAM blowing up... Usually trips the short-circuit protection on the PSU and shuts the rig down... on restart you get an explosion. Has happened to me probably 4 or 5 times already since I started in November...

On the side that I saw the sparks is where the capacitors are, near to the 6pin PCI-E connectors.
Were your sparks also near to pci-e connectors?

I had 4 out of 5 burned (2 of them sparkling and burning almost to the ground ).

At the beginning they fail and they make the system freeze when you start Xorg. Then if you insist in using them they start sparkling and even burning.

The last one is still working (1020 core, 1250 mem and 18 as intensity, giving me 610kh/s).

My idea is that the room temperature should be kept low to avoid these issues.

Best regards,
ilpirata79

It's called cost reduction. Newer revisions typically make it cheaper for the manufacturer to manufacture so increases the profit margin. The unfortunate problem is that these cheaper components often have a higher variance in their spec (or simply, revised incorrectly under spec) making all your GPU blow up.

I've had 3 of those cards in my system.

Of the first 3 one cards smelled burnt as soon as I turned it on. About a month later it stopped working. Got it RMA'ed.

A few weeks after that another card broke down. RMA'ed that too.

Now that I just received the 3rd card RMA I installed it and it smelled burned again from the very start (only when under load though). Furthermore another card that I had received a s replacement also died a few days later. That's 4 cards burnt in less than 3 months.

No overclocking, no cheating with voltages, no alternative bioses. Intensity at 18. Cards run very cool probably at like 40% fan speed. wtf is this?! Until what point will this shop keep sending me new cards?! They must see this happening with gamers as well?

How the card burns out: it's mining along fine. All of a sudden the screen freezes, all inputs stop working. After restart it hangs right before where it's supposed to show the windows desktop (even when no monitor is plugged in to the burnt card). Weird thing is, you can still get it to load windows correctly when using the second bios (using the bios switch next to the crossfire link connector) but as soon as you run a game or start mining it freezes everything up again. This is definitely seems like a hardware problem. Something on their ASIC wired up wrong, bad cooling paste or some other low-quality problem.

Why did they even come out with this new revision? The previous revisions worked really well as far as I'm aware. So dumb...

Latest burned card:
PN 299-1e249-100sa
SKU# 11196-19
Serial: A13510003xxxx

MADE IN CHINA go figure

List of brands to avoid at all cost:
club 3d
sapphire
powercolor
XFX

It's curious because my dead gpus were bought also in Pixmania (Pixmania.es)
   

I run a 7770 @ 17 intensity   xfx brand 200kh stock.  Also a xfx 7790  intensity 18 both 24/7 run a little hot but flawless.

Thats exactly what happened to my Sapphire 7950s. 2 out of 4 were fried this way within one month.  Beware they were undervolted to 1.036, running below 60C and powered by a Corsair Platinum PSU.

Still waiting for a replacement.... I am done with Sapphire for sure

Yes, can confirm this too, Sapphire 7950 Dual-X aren't suitable for mining.  
Had 8 cards of this type of which 7 died within weeks, one after another. Bought them new from pixmania.co.uk, about £150 per card, ... was thinking that it's a bargain but it was a total waste of money and time.

The last one still works (after about 2 months of usage) but isn't stable anymore and I'm afraid that it may die soon as well. Serial numbers of the cards were  A13500003XXXX.


The way they fail is:  PC shut down randomly  then at one point it doesn't start anymore, the screens goes black after windows start up logo. Some cards fail with sparks, one actually burned out filling the room with smoke, that was really scary, thanks God I was nearby to switch it off.


BTW: don't overclock them at all (use default settings only) and don't use more than 1 card of that type per miner, that appears to save them for a longer period of time, but it's still not guaranteed.


I'm trying to avoid all Sapphire GPUs were possible after this experience.