end of ETH mining on 2G cards - page 3.

adaseb

legendary

Activity: 3808

Merit: 1723

Damn,

I restarted one of my rigs which were mining ETH for like the last 250 hours and the 2GB cards wouldn't work.

Tried another rig, same thing.

Tried a 3rd rig, and for some reason the Radeon 6990 still works. Its the only 2GB card working on ETH.

So at the time of this post, it worked but since I never restarted that rig it kept hashing.

Cry

greaterninja

hero member

Activity: 924

Merit: 1000

Quote from: eckmar on November 24, 2016, 08:08:54 AM

Umm i'm still mining with r9 380 2Gb each and they are doing just fine. There is no 4Gb card in the system but as i said no problem here. Looked at used memory, its 1870 on primary card

I think it depends on the OS, driver, and how its configured.
On my Ubuntu 14.04 LTS rig it allocates 200-300 MB for the primary video adapter unless I set it to headless mode.

eckmar

legendary

Activity: 1878

Merit: 1038

Telegram: https://t.me/eckmar

Umm i'm still mining with r9 380 2Gb each and they are doing just fine. There is no 4Gb card in the system but as i said no problem here. Looked at used memory, its 1870 on primary card

greaterninja

hero member

Activity: 924

Merit: 1000

I ran into this issue a 1-2 months ago.

The primary display video card needs to be greater than 2gb. I used 1 x 380 4gb
The others can be 2gb. I used 5x 370 2gb.

You also need to set the environment variables as posted above.

I restarted that rig today to see if it would run into issues, its still hashing. The lifetime though...who knows. Zec is probably a better alternative for 370 as nerdalpha says.

They are slightly different commands in linux and windows.

Camnates

newbie

Activity: 31

Merit: 0

Quote from: maxmad_x on November 23, 2016, 03:18:41 PM

Currently solution for all those who are having 2G cards will be to move to Zcash which has almost exactly same profitability as ETH. Sell ZEC and buy ETH for the same price

I am sorry this is not a technical advice from any point of view but a crappy solution to unfortunate miner buddies.

Those cards will be more profitable to mine the ZCash anyway. I have all my 7970, 7950 running the ZCash.

nerdralph

sr. member

Activity: 588

Merit: 251

Quote from: maxmad_x on November 23, 2016, 03:18:41 PM

Currently solution for all those who are having 2G cards will be to move to Zcash which has almost exactly same profitability as ETH. Sell ZEC and buy ETH for the same price

I am sorry this is not a technical advice from any point of view but a crappy solution to unfortunate miner buddies.

For R7 370 cards (2 or 4G), ZEC mining is better. They get only 13-14Mh mining eth, but 80+ sols mining ZEC. The R9 380 does better mining eth, and I don't expect that to change. The cards that are slow on eth mining like the 370 and the R9 280x will be used for ZEC. Cards like the Rx 480 will be used mostly for ETH, except for the occasional price pumps on ZEC that briefly make it more profitable to mine.

maxmad_x

sr. member

Activity: 546

Merit: 250

It takes a lot to build but not much to lose

Currently solution for all those who are having 2G cards will be to move to Zcash which has almost exactly same profitability as ETH. Sell ZEC and buy ETH for the same price

I am sorry this is not a technical advice from any point of view but a crappy solution to unfortunate miner buddies.

nerdralph

sr. member

Activity: 588

Merit: 251

Quote from: adaseb on November 23, 2016, 02:16:21 PM

Try

setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

Or put those 2GB gpus in a rig with at least a 3GB or higher GPU.

Currently works for me.

Looks like you just cut/paste from somewhere, since the only GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT needs to be set for 2GB cards. Using another card with more memory is an interesting comment. I have 2 other 4GB cards in the same rig, and it doesn't make a difference. I could see how it might though, if the driver's crossfire support allows allocating RAM from another GPU, with DMA over the PCI-e bus. That would only be OK for the lite DAG due to the much lower bandwidth of the PCI-e bus.

adaseb

legendary

Activity: 3808

Merit: 1723

Try

setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

Or put those 2GB gpus in a rig with at least a 3GB or higher GPU.

Currently works for me.

nerdralph

sr. member

Activity: 588

Merit: 251

Even though the DAG is still < 1.8GB, the lite DAG for on-GPU DAG generation takes up some extra space. Genoil and Claymore are both failing to allocate enough memory on a 2GB card I tested. I've thought about trying to tweak the kernel to free up a bit more memory, but I don't think it is worth it for a few more epochs. For the really desperate, you can probably still mine a bit longer with the official ethminer which uses DAG files.

edit: Swapped in a 4G card for the 2G, and although it has no problems allocating the DAG, it's hashing at half speed. Maybe I have an issue with the rig...

edit2: rebooted, adjusted OC settings and now have a couple 4G R9 380 cards running smooth at 21Mh/s on 840/1500 clocks.

Even if the issue is not the DAG size, we're not far from it. While the actual DAG size won't reach 2G until the new year, with the extra memory for kernel code, lite DAG, etc., I'd say 2016 is the last year for 2GB cards mining eth.

Topic: end of ETH mining on 2G cards - page 3. (Read 15887 times)