Topic: [ANN]**** NEW THEKEV VERTMINER ****Ultimate Vertminer guide for Windows**** - page 5. (Read 115578 times)

Vertminer, tweaked. Written by DMFree88.  
Still a work in progress reply with suggestions will also be adding photos + much more .

DMFREE88
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TheKev (Created the great new fork of vertminer)
VaPb26SAPFnH53ZRWeqp1492DEpzepytBx
Zaw9c1(Windows compiler that helped get us a quick release to windows)
Vy8oEUWVc3wB6bTX2uAAyh11M3gKJA6V3f


WARNING! MINING WILL CAUSE HEAVY USEAGE WITH YOUR GPU! ESPECIALLY WHEN FULLY TWEAKED! ASSURE YOU ALWAYS WATCH YOUR TEMPS! I HIGHLY RECOMMEND SETTING UP A FAILSAFE THAT SHUTS DOWN YOUR PC IF EXCEEDING A CERTAIN TEMP.  HWINFO64 CAN BE GOOD FOR THIS.

I WILL NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE, LOSSES OR VOIDS OF WARRANTIES.  MINE AND OVERCLOCK AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!



Settings you will need to understand to truely tweak your gpu. I will explain how to adjust each one later but you must understand each of these settings:


Intensity: How hard the miner is working. Each increase by one is DOUBLE the previous number of threads:
I:12 = 4096 threads
I:13 = 8192 threads
I:14 = 16384 threads
I:15 = 32768 threads
I:16 = 65536 threads
I:17 = 131072 threads
I:18 = 262144 threads
I:19 = 524288 threads
I:20 = 1048576 threads

As you can see this makes a major impact from level to level. You can use a comparison chart (https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison) for all settings to get a good starting point for your gpu. If your feeling more crafty you can use rawintensity. Almost all the same settings apply from the litecoin wiki to vertcoin (unless you use rawintensity).  I will explain the differences below.


RawIntensity: Exact thread-count. (see above to get close to regular intensity)

Using rawintensity will give you MUCH more room for play.  With normal intensity you are limited to the exact numbers above.  Raw intensity can be more dialed in so gpu that previously had trouble with 2 threads will be able to achieve it easily!  I recommend setting to shaders*N to start. You are only able to use this in Thekev's Miner NOT 0.5.3

(N represents a random numbers between 1-200, using 2 threads you will likely end up on shaders*4 or one of the much lower numbers. Look up your gpu to find your shader count)

GPU-Threads: Now with the release of rawintensity it is possible for nearly all gpu to run 2 threads.  In every scenerio where someone was able to get this to work properly they have seen a decrease in stales and in most cases an increase in hashrate and wu/m.  Also I have noticed myself its generally MUCH less choppy if using the gpu at the same time as mining . As far as I know all gpu generally end up on 1 or 2 threads.


Thread-Concurrency: VERY IMPORTANT.  This is one of the only settings that will be different from the normal scrypt litecoin wiki.  You will generally end up at about half of the normal TC.

good numbers to attempt for TC if having trouble (really majorly depends on GPU):
10241, 8193, 5119, 6336 so basically Multiples of shaders + or - 1 is a good combo to work with (Shaders*N{+or-}1=TC).


Work-size: This is also another difference with Scrypt-N mining vs normal Scrypt.  Work-size is from what I have seen almost always best set to 256(current max if you set higher will still create 256 bin). I still recommend trying multiple settings: 256,128,96,64,48 and if new miners release with higher settings try them aswell.


Shaders: Normally you dont adjust shaders and if your using Thekev's miner with rawintensity you wont need to.  But if you decide to take the easy route with 0.5.3 then you will want to put your shaders in this is VERY IMPORTANT.  normally again shaders would be useless but with the 0.5.3 update the intensity will be adjusted automatically to your shaders ONLY if you put your shader count in the config.  IT WILL REVERT TO NORMAL INTENSITY IF YOU DO NOT! again only needed and useable with 0.5.3.


Device: Sets which gpu to use. I highly recommend using seperate miner windows to tweak seperate gpu. You will have to make seperate config files (will explain later). But you want to set to "device" : "0" for your first gpu then 1,2,3 etc for others. If multiple gpu of the same types end up on the same settings you can run them in the same cgminer window, again much easier to tweak seperately though (Also Easier to mine seperate servers, coins etc if you keep em that way).


Queue, Scan-Time and Expiry: All these settings have to do with the work being accepted and givin back to the server. In most cases you will see much less stales and generally better wu/m from setting queue=0 scan-time=1 and expiry=30. Its very difficult to see results from adjusting these settings but best to either set them that way and forget about it or set to stock. Seems to help on multipools more then others.

Those were all the settings you will be tweaking in vertminer to get the best results from your card. I will explain below how to set everything up but you will first need to download the miner. As mentioned above as far as I know TheKev's release is the only one with rawintensity. If you are not going to use rawintensity then I recommend using 0.5.3. You can use the same settings for either one with only the differences mentioned above




DOWNLOAD YOUR MINER

Vertminer 0.5.2 TheKev's Fork (highly recommended for optimum tweaking Please donate some VTC to Kev hes a good friend of mine the more people who donate the more likely he will release new versions: VaPb26SAPFnH53ZRWeqp1492DEpzepytBx ):
Compiled Windows Version:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dfx474gasa7d2md/VertiKev.zip
(  Please also donate to the compiler Zaw9c1 for helping us get this to windows in a timely manor and hopefully he will help us on the next one : Vy8oEUWVc3wB6bTX2uAAyh11M3gKJA6V3f  )
Source:
https://github.com/thekev/vertminer-gpu

Vertminer 0.5.3 (recommended for normal intensity settings or if experiencing too many bugs with 0.5.2):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7nwv3wyr90imvj3/vertminer-0.5.fre3.zip
source (source contains newer version):
https://github.com/Bufius/vertminer-gpu


Either miner will work great, thekev's is based off 0.5.2 so doesn't have all the bug fixes, but does have the very important tool of rawintensity and works better then 0.5.3 for me .



CREATE A CONFIG

Once you have your miner downloaded and unzipped to a place you can easily access. If using 0.5.3 you will then want to go into notepad and copy conf below. If using thekev's miner then right click on the included vertminer.conf and edit or open with notepad


TheKev's Miner:

{
"pools" : [
	{
		"url" : "stratum+tcp://YOURMININGPOOL.com:3385",
		"user" : "YOURUSERNAME.YOURWORKERNAME",
		"pass" : "WORKERPASSWORD"
	},
	{
		"url" : "stratum+tcp://stratum-us.backuppool.com:3384",
		"user" : "USERNAME.WORKERNAME",
		"pass" : "WORKERPASS"
	},
	{
		"url" : "stratum+tcp://3rdbackup.com:3333",
		"user" : "USERNAME.WORKER",
		"pass" : "WORKERPASS"
	}
]
,
"rawintensity" : "5120",
"worksize" : "256",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"thread-concurrency" : "6336",
"temp-cutoff" : "90",
"expiry" : "30",
"log" : "5",
"queue" : "0",
"scan-time" : "1",
"device" : "0",
"shaders" : "1280",
"scrypt-vert" : true
}

{
"pools" : [
	{
		"url" : "stratum+tcp://YOURMININGPOOL.com:3385",
		"user" : "YOURUSERNAME.YOURWORKERNAME",
		"pass" : "WORKERPASSWORD"
	},
	{
		"url" : "stratum+tcp://stratum-us.backuppool.com:3384",
		"user" : "USERNAME.WORKERNAME",
		"pass" : "WORKERPASS"
	},
	{
		"url" : "stratum+tcp://3rdbackup.com:3333",
		"user" : "USERNAME.WORKER",
		"pass" : "WORKERPASS"
	}
]
,
"intensity" : "13",
"worksize" : "256",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"thread-concurrency" : "6336",
"temp-cutoff" : "90",
"expiry" : "30",
"log" : "5",
"queue" : "0",
"scan-time" : "1",
"device" : "0",
"shaders" : "1200",
"scrypt-vert" : true
}

Keep an eye on the Commas and punctuation.  One wrong move and your conf will fail.  Notice the last setting has no comma and the last pool has no comma after the "}".

These are pre-set for a 270x, 270 or 7870. As you can see in the 0.5.3 edition I personally saw better results from setting shaders to 1200.  I have no idea why but this instantly gave me a 30kh/s boost VS what would be normal at 1280.  So be weary and set to 1280 aswell if using the same cards to test.

You will want to change everything based on the wiki and the above information provided about each setting.

BACKUP POOLS ARE SUPER IMPORTANT.  Attacks happen all the time taking down entire pools, You ALWAYS want a backup pool SEPERATE from your current.  EVEN IF YOUR CURRENT ALREADY HAS A BACKUP POOL!  Always make sure you have a 3rd and even 4th to be sure you get paid no matter what happens.

Save your config file.  Make sure when saving you press save as, and select "all files" from the dropdown box NOT "text documents". Then save as "vertminer.conf". (assure it saved as a conf file in the folder and not a text document)


CREATE YOUR BATCH FILE

Time to go back into notepad or if using thekev's then you can use the .bat file provided.


Some of this information is not required and may not be needed at all but you will want to assure you have -g 2 as this is your gpu-threads.  For whatever reason I choose to adjust that here rather then inside the config file.

color adjusts the color, timeout gives you time to adjust the size of the miner and also can be increased if set-up to auto-run when pc starts, Failover-only is to assure it goes back to your first pool when its available (usually takes 5+ minutes after pool is available)

This can be saved as anything but make sure you save as a ".bat" file.  Same as before "All files" to assure it doesnt save as text. (for example: TheKeVKiCkSAzz.bat)



TEST RUN!

That's it you now have set-up your miner. All you need to do is run the .bat file and you are up and mining! Heres some of the info you will want to focus on and information about each:

Expect problems! The miner will be buggy just like cgminer was there has been some errors reported.  You may need to restart the miner to get it to work properly sometimes.  Expect bad connections during startup. vertminer almost requires backup pools to assure it starts properly.

kh/s: This is how hard your gpu is running on average (next to it is current K). Generally this is what people watch as they tweak there gpu. Using a multipool can effect testing. Generally you want to do your tweaking on a single coin dedicated pool to avoid loss of kh/s during coin switch. Otherwise you may end up with a headache.

wu/m: This is the real major factor. kh/s is nothing without work being submitted. Ive seen some high kh/s on my card that produced horrible wu/m. This is wildly random at first and goes up and down significantly. But after hours it will even out. Sometimes you will see wu referred to on a ratio vs kh/s. Most the time you want atleast .9 ratio vs kh/s. so for every 100/khs you should have at least 90wu/m. This can vary though and has a little to do with luck and again will take a long time to even out.

[P]ool management / [G]pu management / Settings / [D]isplay options [Q]uit
Somewhat self explanatory but I thought I would mention. Press Q to quit you dont want to X out and lose work. Also you can access most of the settings from your config from inside of cgminer while its running. This is the best way to adjust intensity. Simply press G for gpu management and a new menu will pop up. press i for xintensity and adjust up and down 1 intensity at a time and you will find the "sweet spot" that give your card a boost. Just gotta find the right sweet spot that gives good wu/m and kh/s combination especially when using rawintensity (which would be adjusted in larger increments at first).

HW: This should ALWAYS be 0. There may be some bad luck with a pool that causes errors but that is extremely rare. This number has been 0 for me for over 2 months unless I have bad settings. HW means you have hardware errors. If you have ANY HW then you need to find the problem. Generally it means too low of thread concurrency OR too high of intensity (or sometimes too high of thread concurrency as well). Always adjust settings one at a time to pin-point the problem.  Thread concurrency is much harder to tune in scrypt-n and is generally the problem.

A:, R: These are work accepted and work rejected. This can vary from pool to pool based on connectivity but you will want this to be super low. If you have a good pool connection it should be as low as 1 percent or even lower. multi-pools will have higher rejects due to coin switching as well as p2pools tend to have higher rejects too. Even under extreme circumstances 4%+ is too high you generally need to lower intensity or find other solutions. Remember 1% may not sound like much but at 500kh/s actually running at

Most of the other information is irrelevant. but do keep an eye on GF: as this is getwork failures. if this keeps going up too much you have a really bad connection to your pool and may want to consider switching pools. after 24 hours i have about 150 getwork failures on a fairly bad pool connection (to give comparison).



TWEAKING TIME

So you hopefully are running smoothly but it can be very difficult sometimes.  The main culprit usually being thread concurrency or intensity.  I highly recommend going with intensity 13 in most cases or rawintensity of shaders*4 to start. (for new cards anyways please reply with what works best for you)

You can adjust each setting to try to optimize it but theres really not alot of "play" with vertminer once you find the right setting its pretty much all you get (asside from overclocking). Maybe try adjusting worksize and see where it gets you.  The main goal you will have though is getting to around 50% of your normal scrypt hashpower (wiki posts will show you normal scrypt hash power).  If you can get to 40%+ your doing pretty good but if your using 0.5.3 and cant get any more out of it id recommend switching to thekev and seeing what you can do with rawintensity.  

Thread-concurrency will be a battle aswell.  You will want this to fall under the perfect number that can shoot you up in hashrates. Sometimes when changing TC you will see errors so be weary and expect PC restarts and long miner starts. Only real information I can give is mentioned above to keep adjusting to assure you have no hw errors. once you get close you will see less and less hw errors.  if you get only 1 or 2 overnight then you are very close but im sure theres a way around it! keep tweaking!

Lastly you may want to do some clean-up in your vertminer folder before starting overclocking. Everytime you changed thread-concurrency, worksize OR gpu threads it created another bin file. This bin file is used everytime you start vertminer and keeps your settings stored. Once your at your optimal settings you can just delete all of the bins. It will create a new one with the same previous settings and you wont have 20 bin files anymore. Also I am sure you noticed everytime you start vertminer with one of those settings changed it takes a much longer time to start because this is when it creates the bin. Once you have your settings locked in and a bin file made vertminer will start much quicker (unless it has pool connection or other issues ).





OVERCLOCKING

Overclocking can be very frustrating. Many cards can respond differently. You will need to tinker with both core and memory clocks at the same time in order to optimize your settings. You can even end up at different clocks for different cgminer settings.

Use a program like MSI afterburner or Sapphire trixx or something. You need on the fly controls to really optimize each gpu. (you can always add your final values to your config and not use these programs in the future)

Sometimes you will see the same results from 1340 mem as you will from 1500. Sometimes not. Depends on memory, brand and card. Core clock can also be the same way. My 7870 likes a much lower clock between 975-1010 is optimal but it still runs almost the exact same kh/s at 1300-1340. So when you think your going up sometimes its better to go down! Try everything!

My current clock settings:
7870: core clock 1005, mem-clock 1365 runs at 215kh/s. Can push around 225ish but wasnt running well
270x: core clock 1098, mem-clock 1456 runs at 244kh/s. Can push up to 250ish with minor tweaking but was bad wu/m (reports show these settings work on multiple 270x)
my normal scrypt hash rates were 500kh/s for 270x and 425kh/s for 7870

This can be HEAVILY effected by the bin file created by the miner from different driver versions. I do NOT suggest using the new 14.1 drivers for pitcairn cards. For both my 7870 and 270x there was a MAJOR loss in kh/s. Have also seen alot of bad reports from others aswell. 13.11 or 13.12 are recommended especially with pitcairn. (newer drivers hopefully will do better )

So your goal is to underclock and undervolt if possible.  This can save you power and can still increase hashrates.  Some may see better results from overclocking.  Like the memory generally will be overclocked while the core underclocked.  

Not all cards will have access to voltage control.  You may need to check in settings to see if you can turn it on.  It might not come on though.  Lowering voltage will lower heat and power significantly.  This can be a major factor in your profits especially if power is costly where your from.  Lowering volts too far will cause your gpu to be unstable if you go too far.  Have to find a happy median.

Once you find the perfect settings for your card you can set to overclock at startup.  Or you can edit your bios using VBE7 and then us ATI winflash to set the settings permanently to your bios.

OVERCLOCK AND FLASH AT YOUR OWN RISK! I WILL NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE OR LOSS OF WARRANTY CAUSED BY THE USE OF THIS GUIDE OR PROGRAMS MENTIONED WITHIN.


Please take the time to understand that I am just a small miner (as many of you are) with just a 270x and a 7870 to work with.  I do not have a large amount of income, I am the only one currently working to support a family of 4 with an autistic child.  It has been an extremely rough year for us and if not for the help of my family I may not have made it a couple months.  I ask that if you got any help from this guide that you please donate just even a very small amount to help us out.  If everyone to read this guide were to donate even just a single VTC I may actually make it through the winter warm.  I have never asked for help in the past some of you may know me from my kalroth guide here: http://www.overclock.net/t/1461916/tutorial-ultimate-guide-to-tweaking-amd-cgminer-3-7-2-kalroth-edition-sgminer-instructions-included-aswell-get-the-most-hash-out-of-your-gpu.  

I hope to spread the help as much as possible please reply here if you need any at all.  But please keep in mind I do spend a lot of time here and any help to support me and my family no matter how small I will be extremely grateful.

Thanks a ton I hope this helped you get some more hashpower!

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After a recent donation from a certain someone I was able to get the parts needed to fix my car.  I am eternally grateful to you.  I appreciate the help more then I will ever be able to express with words.  Any future donations go towards my familys survival.  Thanks for your time