Topic: help tweaking 5970 for max MHash/s please :) (Read 2867 times)

thanks reeses,
if i had enough space, i'd have the box tucked away because none of it's functions require it to be accessible but you are correct that noise is a bit of a factor in the living room so i'll probably dial the overclock back unless i some day go the water cooling route. it has given me the opportunity to turn a few new people on to bitcoins after they ask "what's with all the noise your pc is making??" haha.  if the card wasn't SO long that i had to remove one of my 120mm intake fans just to fit it in my case, noise would be less of an issue too, but i have a plan to squeeze it back in there with the help of some tin snips

i'll keep your advice in mind but doubt i'll be going to linux on this particular machine because some of the software i have running 24/7 is windows only, as far as i know, and i also game on it occasionally. 

at this point, i'm probably at the "good enough" point but, of course, i continued tweaking anyway and have now run into a new issue. 

i installed APP SDK 2.1 along with SDK 2.7 (which is included in the latest (12.6) drivers because i had read that even the modified kernels like the dia one i'm using, which are tweaked for performance on the 2.6+ platform, are still just trying to close the performance gap with the better performing 2.1 SDK.  everything APPEARS to be working when i use the GPUs with 2.1 and my hash rate went up considerably (showing 365-370 per core), but zero shares are actually being submitted.  when i select the 2.7 api, everything works properly again, albeit slower.  i don't know if you are also experts at mining in windows since you both use linux, but i have created a new thread for it here:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/zero-shares-submitted-with-sdk-21-sdk-27-works-fine-on-same-machine-92258

and thanks for the help getting me as far as i have!

that's strange. i did a crash course and tried several different miners, kernels, settings, frontends etc this week and didn't run into your issue at all. i did see several threads with people who had to use a "dummy plug" or swap their monitor cable to get both GPUs active on 5970s though.  i don't know if that was because they had multiple, non crossfired (to each other) 5970s in the rig or what though.  maybe search for "dummy plug".

currently i'm using win7 64bit with the latest Catalyst drivers (12.6) and GUIMiner as a frontend for a modified phoenix kernel that i linked to earlier.  805/225 @stock voltage and seeing 710 MHash/s.

flags for the MODDED version phoenix i'm using (if you use a different kernel you will need additional flags): -k phatk VECTORS2 AGGRESSION=10 WORKSIZE=128.  i've changed to VECTORS4 and saw a decrease and changing the worksize from 64 to 128 to 256 didn't seem to do anything noticeable.

I know in GUIMiner you need 2 tabs, one for each GPU and it sounds like you do have 2 running.  Maybe it's something to do with crossfire. that's all i can come up with but best of luck!  there are people here (everyone) who know a lot more than i do!!

yes yes, i do use windows. the pc i'm mining with doubles as my home theater pc/dvr/media server/occasional gaming rig but it stays on 24/7 and i had a 5970 in there anyway so i figured i'd check out mining. i only wish i could have some dedicated pcs to do a variety of things   i'll definitely check out BAMT if i get to that point.  thanks a lot for the help. i'm sure i'll try a few other things but i'm feeling much better about my numbers now.

i tried phatk2 and phoenix 2 as well, assuming they were better based on nothing but the "2" that follows them, haha, but i saw a decrease with both of them. i think it's because I have the latest AMD APP/Stream thing installed and not 2.1 or 2.4, which i think a lot of miners are optimized for. that may be the next thing i look into to try to increase my efficiency. 

Thanks again!

I use phoenix with a phatk2 kernel. I can't really help you with any of your settings, as I use BAMT, and you use... well whatever you're using I've no idea what it can and can't do, or how to work it.

Having said all that it looks like you actually found the most important performance booster anyway...


I'm not sure what version of the phatk kernel I'm using... as I say I use BAMT which is basically a ready-to-go system on a USB stick. Having said that, the author of BAMT knows what he's doing, and setting all my cards to 800/200 gets each core 359 MH/s so I presume I have the 'best' kernel version.


A linux utility called atitweak, included as part of BAMT (though you can install it easy enough on any linux distro). It's sounding more and more like you use Windows.


My three rigs are dedicated - if I wanted to play the latest GPU intensive game (my tastes run more to very old strategy games/god-sims) I'd be doing that on a separate machine. Re crossfire, I have heard of this, and all my 5970s came with a widget for it, but I have never used it. It seems to be disabled by default on my systems, and if there were ever any need to ENable it, I wouldn't have a clue what to do.


Guess so, been a while since I used GUIMiner. 

I'm kind of in the same seat as you, looking for ways to get optimal mining-performance from my 5970. Although, I have a quite annoying problem, I can only use one core for some strange reason. When I open two clients and run them on each "device"(0-0 and 0-1) it still only uses one core. Did you have to do something to be able to use both cores or am I just doing something wrong?

Thanks Nancarrow, mind if I ask what miner you use?  I was surprised I couldn't get acceptable performance out of any of the others I'd tried.  I was definitely expecting a bump when I tried CGminer, in particular, but instead I saw a noticeable drop. 

1) I initially had both tabs set to 11 but it seems 10 is as high as I can go without seeing my CPU activity increase so I backed them down a bit to 10.  Any ideas? 

About the "CPU Affinity" boxes... I'm assuming those are my two CPU cores but don't know what should be checked/unchecked there or if it would prevent me from "turning it up to 11" so I left the default, on both tabs I have core1 checked and core2 unchecked.  Is that the correct setting?  Now I'm in a mood to watch some scenes from Spinal Tap, btw, haha.

2) 300 was a guess and made a world of difference in regards to heat.  I just bumped it down to 225 and lost no performance. 

What do you use to tweak your mem clock?  CCC and MSI Afterburner won't go below 500.  I have been opening CGminer so it sets the mem clock to what I have set in the config file, then closing it to run GUIMiner.  Kind of a pain and then I have to remember to reset the clocks in CCC or Afterburner when I want to play Diablo 3 instead of mining   I wonder if it is possible to game on one GPU while the other mines... hmmm.  I think you can't disable Crossfire on this card though :/

3) My card has been treated well and kept cool.  It reset the driver when I had jumped it to 825 MHz the first day I was screwing around with mining (this week, lol) so just knocked it back to 800 right away.  You are probably correct that I could bump it up to somewhere in between. I have it at 810 now and seems stable.  May push it more after a few hours.

Soooo, after bumping the memclock down to 225, leaving aggression at 10 and increasing to 810 GPU clock I was still only getting 670-685 MHash/s. 

HOWEVER!!! I swapped the kernel to this one : https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/further-improved-phatkdia-kernel-for-phoenix-sdk-26-2012-01-13-25135 and am now seeing 355 on each core easily, for 710 MHash/s combined.  Nice bump! 

When I run only one GPU they will do 360 MHash/s but when I fire both up, they drop a bit.  It didn't seem to happen with the other settings I've had before.  Any idea what to tweak to fix that? I tried upping the mem frequency but it made no difference.

In regards to the flags I'm using, I'm assuming I don't have to specify platform and device since it says 0-0 and 0-1 already in the tabs of GUIMiner, correct?. 

Thanks again, and sorry it took me a while to respond, I wanted to tweak and figure out what I could before asking more things

That all looks about 'right', by which I mean, 'pretty much the same setup and results I have on my three rigs with three 5970s each'.

That said I can think of three little tweaks which should get you another 10-15 MH/s per GPU

1) Set aggression to 11 not 10. (Insert joke about Spinal Tap here)

2) You *might* find that lowering the memory clock from 300 MHz to around 220 MHz actually speeds things up a little

3) Depending on how old and battered your card is, you could probably bump the engine clock up to 805 or 810 MHz without locking it up.

Hi I'm trying to get all the MHash/s I can out of my current setup using a 5970 (dual GPU) and looking for advice about using a more efficient miner or tweaking my flags properly.  I'm a noob to this but am good with tech in general and did a lot of reading and tinkering before posting.  I've tried Phoenix 2 and CGminer but have had by far the best results with GUIMiner with Phoenix (whichever version is included with GUIMiner) using these flags:  

-k phatk VECTORS BFI_INT FASTLOOP=FALSE AGGRESSION=10 worksize=128

I'm running the card at 800/300 (725/1000 is stock) at stock voltage and seeing a steady 680 Mhash/s combined (340 each GPU).  

Based on what I've been reading, that still seems lower than it should be, although no other miner/flag combinations I've tried will stay above about 600 MHash/s.  Any tips on setting this card up properly to get the most out of it?

Thanks in advance!!