Dunno if Dev follows this thread or not but I figured I would pass my findings along...
I have 2 6XR9-290 rigs. I downloaded CryptoNote Miner 5.1 beta a week or so ago and started mining XMR. I am running 13.12 modded drivers and have my rigs dialed back to 924/1250 @ powertune -15 (voltage and fans controlled by MSI Afterburner) to keep wattage and heat down. My temps and fans average in the 70C/70% with the reference style cards and 64C/63% with the 6 "Gigabyte Windstream OC" style cards at around 1500 watts per miner. With standard v5.1 files and these settings, I am pushing around 3690H/s with the reference cards and around 3740 with the Windstream OC cards.
So I thought I would download the latest v6.1 and see if there were any new optimizations that would increase hash. What I found was that the v6.1 lowered H/s by about 100H/s per unit. Thinking maybe I needed the 14.6 drivers, I tried the trick I learned from SGMiner v5 where instead of replacing the rock solid 13.12 video card drivers with the 14.6 drivers, I just unpacked the 14.6 open cl files and copied them into the CryptoNote directory where the mining executable was. I could tell a huge difference right off the bat with one rig pushing 3880Hh/s and the other 3790H/s. But within about 5 minutes the hash rate was back down to about 75-100 less H/s each than the older v5.1 averaged. I wasn't happy with that so I rebooted the machines again and went back with the v5.1 install. On a whim, I copied the 14.6 open cl files out of the v6.1 directory into the v5.1 directory to see what that would do... Wow! Nice little 50 H/s boost out of each unit! Now the miner with the reference cards is averaging 3740 and the Windstream unit is pushing 3790.
Not sure why it works so well like that, but there it is!
Appreciate your efforts!
I can test miner only on my rigs and v6.1 is the best for me. I get completely different feedbacks for every version - some people like v4, some people like v5, some people have problems with all versions except v6.1. Miner uses video memory a lot, it causes problems or unstability on some systems. I tried many different approaches in code in different versions so you can select the best version for your configuration. Unfortunately, it seems there is no way to build one version that will work on all configurations properly, AMD drivers often work strangely if miner has to use a lot of memory, especially on multi-GPU systems.
I would like to see a Linux version so as when the app crashes it doesn't take out the whole OS. Windows is shit for mining, having a linux miner that could work with BAMT/PiMP would be a preferred solution.
People who are running 5,6+ card rigs might want to take a look at lbr's application -
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.8045134 - works well with my setups, just wish the miner would be a bit more stable.