Taco can you take a look at my problem quoted below?
Okay - need some help on this anomaly.
First rig - Sapphire 7970 standard edition with Vapor X, used settings suggested in Taco's thread - out of the box 650k/H per second.
Second rig - two (2x) Sapphire 7970 "GHZ Editions", used exact same settings in Taco's thread - out of the box - only about 350 k/H per second.
I have spent the last week in "newbie purgatory" so have been unable to discuss this issue. Finally on the second rig, I was able to get 500k/H per second/card by putting aggression back to 13, and overclocking the memory to 1680Mhz.
Can anyone tell me WHY do two of the same brand/manufacturer, same model, have such huge variance in performance?
Why would the two "Ghz editions" VASTLY under-perform the standard one?
Does anyone have any suggestions experience with a Sapphire "GHZ Edition" that could explain the variance? The standard one was plug and play @ 650k. The better ones have taken a week of tweaking to even reach 500k/H, and NONE of the recommended settings worked. I know it is not bad cards because they both perform the same - what is different about the "GHZ editions" that is hurting them so much, and made them so finicky?
First rig is Q6600 65nm, 4GB DDR2, PCI-E 2.0, Win7 Pro 64, Sapphire 7970 - 650kH/s
Second rig is 22nm Quad i5 Ivy Bridge, 8GB DDR3, PCI-E 3.0, Win7 Pro 64, 2 x Sapphire 7970 "GHZ Editions" - 990kH/s (both cards)
I followed all instructions in this thread. The second rig would only do about 300 per card until I overclocked the RAM on both cards to 1700Mhz and dialed back aggression to 13. Any variance from that setting and I get LESS than 500kH per card.
I would REALLY like to get the potential out of these supposedly "better" Sapphire 7970 Ghz editions.
this might be the problem I am having then ...
I have the vapor-x GHz edition because it was supposedly better and I am capped at 500kh (for each of my 4 cards) :/ I am running v12.10 drivers and 2.8 APP-SDK, my first thought is to uninstall 2.8 and install 2.7 because I read this was supposed to be better for mining. But I had already finished setting everything up and just wanted to go to bed
if the standard cards are in fact quicker, then I am pretty pissed obviously since they would have saved me a few bucks each. I might exchange them since they are recent purchases if we think the GHz edition is the root cause
as probably will be requested for everyone's use, the system is running linux and I have Sapphire Vapor-x GHz editions (4 of them). I am waiting on my riser cables to get all 4 running at once, but I have tested each and currently only mining on two. As stated, I was able to get them to max at 500kh with 975/1710 clocks, thread-concurrency 8192, I believe the voltages came stock at 1.25v .. I noticed the vanilla cards seemed to all have lower voltages, or is that my imagination?
Perhaps the higher voltage causes the mining speed to decrease (doesn't make sense, but neither does anything else that's happened with them). Since I only am running two until my risers get here, maybe I will just exchange the other two for vanilla vapor-x cards. If I can get those doing that they are supposed to, it would be worth the hassle for an extra ~150kh per card.
based on FullLife's post:
So after reading through this whole thead, I thought I'd contribute my setup and config.
Rig:i3-3225
Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3 mobo (in hindsight, I should have bought a different board, this one is overkill)
8GB DDR3
(4) Gigabyte 7970s
link (in hindsight, I should have bought either vanilla 7970s or 7950s, these are not worth the extra $$)
1200W Coolermaster Silent Pro Gold ps (I can't say enough about this power supply, it's excellent)
250GB Samsung 840 SSD
(2) WD hard drives (500GB, 2TB)
Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit
Setup:So I had all 4 cards running in my case, but with them being all crammed together, it was way too hot. So I pulled everything out and sat it on a rack. I have 2 of the cards plugged into the board, a 3rd card plugged in via 16x riser cable, but couldn't get the 4th card to work with another 16x riser cable. So, I ordered a 1x to 16x riser cable and hopefully this will solve my problem.
In the meantime, I'm running 3 cards and getting pretty nice hashrates. These are my settings and results using cgminer 2.11.3 and AMD Catalyst 13.1 drivers:
--intensity 13 -g 2 715/710 = ~1500Kh/s
--intensity 13 -g 2 925/1000 = ~1950Kh/s
--intensity 13 -g 2 1000/1206 = ~2100Kh/s
--intensity 13 -g 2 1022/1244 = ~2150Kh/s
Other settings:
--thread-concurrency 8192 -w 256
I've literally spent most of a entire week playing around with settings and trying to find the sweet spot and I feel like I'm pretty much there. As you can see, I actually underclocked my cards to get these hashrates. Stock clocks are 1100 core/1500 memory. Unfortunately the default voltage is about 1.2 volts on my cards and its locked (@#&($$^(@&$!!), otherwise, I'd be able to save 100-150W easily by undervolting.
I'm seriously thinking about getting rid of these cards and getting 7950s or 7970s that don't have the voltage locked. Having the voltage locked is such a huge drawback, I'm just wasting too much power right now.
I may try some of what he did because he has the gigabyte GHz edition cards and they seem to be hashing just fantastically. I'm not sure if the voltage is locked or not on mine, but it might be worth checking this out when I get home to try it. I can vouch for the fact that any intensity other than 13 on these GHz edition GPUs seems to be worthless.
sorry for a long post, I just wanted to get my thoughts documented on this in case it helps me (and others) later
edit: I forgot I set it up to connect remotely
I set it to 1022/1244 (and played with other values around that) it seems that this was able to get me 20kh more, so I'm at 520k now... but I'm running drivers 12.10, maybe the key is 13.1 with these GHz cards, that will be my next thing to try, but I can't do it remotely.
