You may want to check how many HW errors exactly you're getting. If you're lucky like me, you could be getting only 3% HW errors. I'm still mining with the same settings on my 7790:
Just noticed that all my 7950 and 7970 don't have any errors at I=17 although 5870/5970 get them as soon as I set intensity at 12 or higher. I used various combinations of thread-concurrency, lookup-gap and threads but nothing works past I=11 for 5x70 cards for me (on several versions of Xubuntu Linux).
So this HW errors problem might be specific to <7xxx cards.
Before N increased I used the maximum threadcount my systems supported with lookup-gap = 2 (unless it was faster with a higher threadcount and lookup-gap = 3). I didn't change my configurations after N increased (other than trying to find parameters without HW errors on my 5x70, but results weren't good and I reverted to my previous configurations).
I use threadcount = 41216 on my 7950 and 7970 with lookup-gap = 2, 8000 or 12000 on my 5x70 (lookup-gap = 3 with threadcount = 12000).
I suppose results vary wildly with OS/drivers.