Topic: Consolidated Litecoin Mining Guide for 5xxx, 6xxx, and 7xxx GPUs - page 20. (Read 624200 times)

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 finally got my 7970s working at 740+ KH/s it is now running for few hours, they were crashing at the start till i got the right voltage with the right Freq. i have 3 rigs which has 5x 7970 and 2x 5970 and 6970 i am pulling a total of 5700 Kh/s , i use around 2400 W/h for all rigs together so this puts me at  2.375 h/w, for the rig where i have 4 x 7970s it runs about 3000 kh/s and consume about 1100 w/h so it is about 2.72 h/w which is some how fear , the 7970 temp are around 55 C° with 3 C° ambient , i have all fans running at 85%.

the only thing i hate about the cards i have are the fans , they are a sapphire Dual-x, each card has 2 fans , and they are really shitty fans , they are around 6 months old, they were used only for mining (btc , now LTC) and  2 fans in different cards has already failed, for that reason i do not recommend this model , sometimes i wish if i bought the reference cards as my 5970 are and 6970 are reference cards and they were heavily used but didn't have any problem with them yet.

I haven't tried it but I am not using the beta drivers.  I'm using 13.1 and getting 650 to 700 kh/s depending on the card.

I would also recommend this.  Try going back to 11.2 if you are using a thread concurrency of 8192.  I have been tinkering with 11.3 but have not been able to hit the same speeds as I am at using 11.2.  However - if you are using 11.3 you need to make sure you use the larger thread concurrency values.  That is the entire reason for being on 11.3 to begin with.  Make sure you used the set MAX GPU yadayadaya command.  Then keep playing with your clock speeds.  Keep in mind you may have manage to overshoot your efficiency window by clocking the memory to high.  When in doubt, turn it down and try again.  Yes a lot of us are having success in the .57 to .60 area of core/mem ratios but DO NOT be afraid to venture out on your own.  I have found in my 7 cards each and every card has its own "personality".  Each has its preference of what it would like to work at to get the same speed as the card next door.

The only thing I am struggling with is finding my 24x7 stable setup.  One rig is pretty damn solid, the other rig is all over the place. I am undervolting my cards which I know is introducing some of my issues, but its getting a bit maddening.  We had a hard shut down today that corrupt the windows install requiring it to be completely reinstalled.  Though I think its odd that on one rig, everything is peaches and cream - the occasional shut down has been due to some power outages and internet outages we have faced.  I'm hoping with this final reinstall we will get everything as stable as the first rig, which funny enough has one more card the the 2nd rig.  They are 100% identical rigs which is what makes it even more frustrating.  I do have some ideas though, and am going to back off on the overclocking a little bit and bring it back down to the 680 kh/s per card area instead of 705 kh/s per card as that this rig has been running at.  Once I'm stable there I will try to slowly increase it and see where I end up before finding stability issues.

Basically I'm sharing all of this so you guys realize, this isnt like mining Bitcoin.  Its a very finicky animal that is going to require a lot of patience and a lot of determination to get your desired outcome.  I can not tell you how many hours I have sitting in front of my laptop remoting into the rigs to play with things.  My buddy who I am partners with in this operation is frustrated too, because every time I need the rigs to be reset he has to do it because they are in his basement.  We are working on a remote solution for that.  Either a IP Controlled logic relay board or an IP controlled power strip.  We prefer the logic relays so we are not pumping so much juice through another power strip, but I"ve been having issues contacting the manufacturer.  I get the feeling this guy does it on the side as a hobby, but everything else I find is a lot more expensive then his solutions.  Hence why I'm trying to connect with him.

If you stick with it every single card has got to be capable of at least 650 to 675 kh/s at stock volts.  I'm running at as low as 1031 to reduce power consumption and still hitting those numbers.  Some of the cards are turned up to 1038.  The hardware is all the same on every single one of these cards.  If you happened to have bought your cards brand spanking new - maybe get on the phone with the manufacturer and see if you can talk to some higher level of tech support to make sure there are not additional bios changes that are not advertised especially those of you who are running those voltage locked cards.  I'm not really certain what they could have changed - but if tall the hardware is the same - the only other thing that could be different is a bios setting.  If you are an advanced user maybe consider pulling the bios from your card and compare it to another card.  If you can't it online, when I find time I'd be happy to pull a copy of the bios off my cards so you can compare.  Just be sure you dont try to upload my bios to your card and try to blame me for anything. lol  I honestly do not think there could be anything in there that is limiting the hashing performance, but - you never know.  If you are not getting the same performance as someone else with a 7970 - something has to be different.  If it turns out there is something in the bios we can warn future miners which cards to stay away from.  Or maybe it happens to be a setting that can be flipped on or changed, IDK.

Sorry for the long post but I hate to see so many people struggling with this.  First thing I'd do for some of you is get rid of the beta drivers, most of the guys I have talked to that are getting similar speeds as I are also running the 13.1 drivers.  Make sure you completely wipe out all of the driver.  Registry values included.  Heck, you might wanna think about just reformatting your hard drive and starting from scratch.  Eliminate things that could possibly be wrong or different from your machine compared to others.  Eventually - your going to figure it out, its going to work - you just have to work at it and dont rely on someone to give you the magic setup or answer.  Use the information that is here and available to everyone and make sure not one thing is different about your setup vs what you are reading.  One little thing like drivers can throw the whole thing right out the window.  If you have any questions, feel free to reach out - I'll be happy to help.  I'm not running anything different then what is in this thread or the other 300 threads so I wouldn't expect a "what setup are you running" pm.  But if you want someone to help look over what your doing and point you in a direction - I'd be more then happy to help you.

Just wanted to throw this in!

It seems to work great with 7970s getting hash rate up to 700Khs+

http://www.judeaustin.com/theoretical-litecoin-gpu-settings/

Please let me know if this helps you!

Thanks.

Have you tried high thread concurrencies with high intensities?  eg 21712 and intensity 20

I did exactly what ckolivas suggested in that post.. Cgminer defaulted to tc 22400, but that was a lot slower than 8192, so I manually set 8192.
1880 MHz turned out to be maximum stable memory clock and I went through 900 - 1175 MHz GPU in 5 MHz increments and at 1175 MHz GPU I finally reached 600 kh/s.

Dunno what else to do at this point.. I've been reading forums and others seem to be having problems as well. I wonder which driver set is ckolivas using?
Some results that I wrote down:
https://i.imgur.com/nD7euPK.png

Added a link to ckolivas post here on front page for 7970 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1635964

7970s are some kind of black magic apparently, you need to change the memory and core speeds 1-5 MHz at a time to get 700 kh/s

Has anyone got even close to this hashspeed with the clocks above? And if so, which settings and drivers did you use?

I tried clocks with the "memory ratio of 0.68",
1000MHz & 1480MHz = 508 KHash/s
1175 & 1728 MHz = 594 KHash/s

So far there hasn't been any magical performance boost with the clock ratios mentioned. My extensive testing has shown that performance increases linearly with clock speeds...

Here's my setup:

Yes. The only version that's up right now is 0.03.

Usually the version is in the about screen, but its possible I didn't update it going to .03 (wrote most of the fixes while I was supposed to be sleeping after 12 hours of work). Anyway, if cgminer works with high thrrad concurrencies its the latest version, if it crashes it isn't.

OK so you are saying with latest version of GUI miner scrypt, it will just work with a 7950?

Also, how do I tell which version I am running...?

version 0.03 sets the environmental variables automatically, so no need to open the console.

Update: 3-20-13
cgminer versions 2.11.3 and up can be used to mine with high thread concurrencies now.  Follow these instructions:
WINDOWS: Open console and type
Code:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

Now, close the console (it will not work if you open cgminer in the same window).  Open cgminer using a .bat or a new console, high thread concurrencies will now work.

Hey Im using GUIminer Scrypt, can I configure it to work properly with a 7950 now? Can I edit a config to make the change or do I need to open the console? A little more detail would be great Im not great with command lines...

this is what i do constantly.

note: you cannot monitor gpu temps or change any clock/voltage settings while using the intel gpu though.. just keep that in mind, so set a proper fan speed to keep temps reasonable before plugging in the monitor to the intel card port.

just make sure it is set to always be enabled in the bios, and give it 512mb of ram or so (default might be 64-128)

oh. and my experience is with windows 7. i can't speak for how it works if you are using linux.

oh... the settings in reaper will be slightly different as well. the "platform" will switch from either 0 to 1, or 1 to 0 (i cant remember) within the reaper.conf

Most motherboards should allow that. Some will auto disable the HD4000 when a discrete card is detected though.

Move your VGA/DVI/HDMI from the 7850 to the motherboard connector and go from there.

I have a i5-3570k, I thing it has that Intel HD4000 stuff, can I use that to work and the HD7850 to mining?

Get an extra card, or use less intensive settings. GUIminer comes with options like that.

My RAM usage is only at 35%, I have 8 GB.

I was hoping I could mine and work at the same time... 

Yes it's normal, you're taxing your video processing capability and using your RAM.

Is it normal that my computer gets really slow during mining?

I'm using reaper for a HD7850, about 600 300 kH/s.

And I've disabled CPU mining.

Not going through all the previous pages, sorry if this info has already been posted:

cgminer 2.11.3 has rendered reaper mostly pointless for me as both programs are yielding nearly identical results.

Now that the buffer limit has been removed from cgminer, it seems as though the reaper's days may be limited.




Spoke too soon...Many errors with 13.3 beta2 on vliw 5 and 4 when there shouldn't really be any.


 Oddly, It took a little while to show up. I switched back to reaper for now.