Topic: Lets Solve the unreliable 7970 issues.... (share your observations/input) (Read 26022 times)

Yea, you're right about a new thread. But I don't think days of GPU mining are numbered. Vertcoin is a new alternative crypto currency, which takes place of Litecoin.

We are 7970 experts. Maybe start a new thread? I would sell and buy a script ASIC though... my days of hassling with those is over.
lol

Please, help me with my PowerColor 7990 card. It has a very low hashrate, about 1090 k/hash per 2 GPU cores. Settings from litecoin mining wiki did not work for me. I think all the problems due to the BIOS and high latencies.

Did you ever have any success?  I have the same card and same problem.  I've tried the MSI BIOS's listed on Techpowerup without much success.   
I also posted my problem in a separate thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.4567267

I've been on a Googling marathon to find a solution, but I've yet to find one. 

Can anyone help me out? Besides my 2 half speed 7970 XFX DD cards I also now have added 2x Sapphire Vapor-X r9 280x cards to a different system and it too will not hash above 347kh/s. So apparently it's a cgminer setting? I need help asap and will tip whoever gets me going in whichever coin they prefer. If I need to ask this in a different topic please tell me where.

Here's my cgminer.conf:

I bought a visiontek 7970 and have never been able to get over 419ish.  So I thought this bios flashing would be an instant fix but was hesistant to pull the trigger.  It took me a bit, but i located the dipswitch for dual bios.  (It is tiny, on the top by the crossfire connects)

So I tried the standard tahiti bios everyone recommends to make it into a ghz addition.  Xwindows will not load with it.  I was able to boot into Windows once before the new drivers were loaded.  After that I got blue-screened.  http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/index.php?page=1&architecture=ATI&manufacturer=ATI&model=HD+7970&interface=&memSize=3072 is where I found the bios.  It is the latest from ATI.  It works as well as http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/116807/visiontek-hd7970-3072-111207.html which is the one visiontek bios on techpowerup.  I don't see any other alternatives.  I am about ready to put the old bios back and use the card for awhile and return it.  I would have never bought these things but the 7900 family was not really available when I sold my BTC as the peak.

Vision Tek 7970 HD - Do not buy this card.  Warning. 

Are there any other bios's ?   I've searched all over the web and there aren't that many mentions of this brand of card.  Supposedly lifetime warranty if you register within 30 days.  I am going to opt to return because I see no solution besides a very hot card running barely in excess of 400 khash.  Visiontek or vision tek 7970 HD should never be purchased for scrypt mining unless someone has some other solution and yes I've done my share of tweaking to cgminer and NEVER did I hit 420.

I also bought a broken 7970 sapphire dualx.  The 2nd fan doesnt work and possibly the gpu temperatue.  I am going to return it since I can't service it not being the original owner, but I suspect I'd have better luck with and replacing the cooler than these visiontek cards.

Hello! I precisely followed this above quoted post and am still stuck at low hashing with my 2 7970's. In fact I only flashed one 7970 and left the other one OEM to have a live comparison. They are still hash identical after the flash. Here's my setup:
SMOS/BAMT/cgminer 3.2.1
Gigabyte A970+D3P mobo
AMD Sempron 2.8Ghz proc
4GB Corsair memory
2x XFX 7970 DD (box says 79-2797TDJV1-00-D).

I'm running GPU 0 on OEM BIOS, GPU 1 on the flash from the quoted one above. Both hash at 345kH/s which of course is a huge problem. I once got GPU 1 near 480kH/s but instantly got the "nonce" errors before it hard crashed and went "sick" on me. If intensity is set above 13 it freaks out right away.

Both GPUs are currently stable and running like this:
Engine: 1125
Memory: 1575
Intensity: 13
Powertune: 20
Voltage: both appear locked but OEM is 1.175V and flashed is at 1.170V
Fans: 90%
Concurrency: 8192 all the way up to 40960, never seems to make any difference how I set it.

When I plug the system into a Kill-A-Watt and take turns disabling GPUs, they are both only pulling 160-175 Watts apiece so obviously besides hash rate the GPUs are using WAY less electricity than they should at full hashing. I get different setting ranges now between the 2 GPUs due to the different BIOS but they are only stable at 1125/1575 or below it would seem. If I can just get it stable at intensity 20 maybe that would get me up to the high 600's or even break into the 700's.

I'm definitely down to tip if someone gets this resolved with me as I'm wasting time and watching difficulty rise. If it matters, I think the box says 925mhz/1375mhz core/mem speeds. I can verify later if it needed.

ok so i have the same problem. I have the msi ref oc model as shown here...... http://us.msi.com/product/vga/R7970-2PMD3GD5-OC.html. Mining Litecoins and i struggle with the 500 range. Highest I have hit is 560 khs. I have tried every config. New drivers, new cgminer etc. I even went as far as to try and flash the card... Key words try to flash the card. IN my experience flashing has been easy. Usb stick formatted, throw your bios on there w boot files, and atiflash, reboot flash and your golden. This msi card is running me up the road. When starting the flash atiflash.exe -i 0 I get adapter not found, that problem occurs with any pcie slot number i put in. I have the big bang marshall so I have 8 pcie slots. If I just force flash using atiflash.exe -f -p 0 GIG.rom I get the adapter not found error 0fl01... which usually refers to a bricked card.. My delimna, this card has never been flashed, nor has the bios been edited. SO why am I getting this message.?

  Being stubborn and not ready to accept failure I decide lets flash this bitch in windows using atiwinflash. LOl FAIL... not even atiwinflash will work. So I decided maybe I can use the msi live update from their site, and auto install new bios...... I download the update install it, andf it says my bios are up to date.
   What is confusing me is the settings that Im changing should give me more than just a 5-10 kh/s bump.
  Before we start hashing out the easy noobie answers remember or keep in mind Ive been piddling w bat files, and cgminer configs for a week now. And, have tried just about every setting out there. My sweet spot is 1070/1500 which produces 560 kh/s.
  The flashing is also confusing me, like I said Ive flashed several cards.. 5850s, 6950s,6970s,and 2 other 7970s, never seen this error.
Here is my config file incase I have just over looked something

,
"intensity" : "13",
"vectors" : "1",
"worksize" : "256",
"kernel" : "scrypt",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"thread-concurrency" : "8192",
"shaders" : "2048",
"gpu-engine" : "0-1045",
"gpu-fan" : "0-85",
"gpu-memclock" : "1500",
"gpu-memdiff" : "0",
"gpu-powertune" : "20",
"gpu-vddc" : "0.000",
"temp-cutoff" : "95",
"temp-overheat" : "85",
"temp-target" : "75",
"api-mcast-port" : "4028",
"api-port" : "4028",
"expiry" : "120",
"failover-only" : true,
"gpu-dyninterval" : "7",
"gpu-platform" : "0",
"gpu-threads" : "1",
"hotplug" : "5",
"log" : "5",
"no-pool-disable" : true,
"queue" : "1",
"scan-time" : "60",
"scrypt" : true,
"temp-hysteresis" : "3",
"shares" : "0",
"load-balance" : true,
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}


Please help, I know alot of people will throw suggestions, and possible fixes, but one ltc goes to the man or woman who posts the lucky fix for me. Ive already thrown away a few ltc's today trying to get this fixed.

Okay, I've fixed this.  It's extremely weird, though.

I had two cards, MSI 1 GHz and Sapphire 1 GHz.  MSI card was getting 450 KH/s, saph 700 KH/s.  Mucked around for 3 hours until I finally hit the solution below.

Catalyst 13.3, MSI AB 3.0.0 beta, APP SDK 2.8, cgminer 3.3.1

To get them both running at 700 KH/s:
1.) Create two instances of cgminer miner with -d 0 and the other with -d 1, on both: -g 2 --thread-concurrency 8192 -I 13
DO NOT RUN BOTH CARDS IN THE SAME CGMINER INSTANCE
2.) Go to MSI AB and hit reset for both cards to reset them to stock clocks.
3.) Start both cgminer instances.
4.) Apply your OC.

I had same issue with I believe same GPU and flashed to this : http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/131592/gigabyte-hd7970-3072-121214.html
Now running 770 kh/s on 1100/1500 where before I couldn't break 550 to save my life. Just make sure you do at least a few backup copies of your working BIOS. From my understanding if you flash with wrong bios you can just re-flash it back but will need to have the saved copy to do so.

I have two sapphire 7970 Vapor-X and they had below 400 kH/s out of the box. It took few days to tune them to about 540. Finally i found the topic talking about flashing dualX bios on vapor-X and that did it. Flashing drops the voltage to 0.950 and also unlocks the voltage change. I also changed from cgminer to bfgminer. Now i have 750 kH/s for both of them without crossfire cables and i use ati drivers 13.6. without CCC. Temps are 75C and 65C. Afterburner shows my cards as Lightning BE.

My setting are almost the same as pyromaniacs. These cards are quite moody. It always takes a little while before settling down to stable speed.
bfgminer.exe --scrypt --worksize 256 --thread-concurrency 8192 --gpu-fan 100 --gpu-engine 1070 --gpu-memclock 1500 --lookup-gap 2 -g 2 --intensity 13

Feel free to donate something to below addresses if this helped you. Thank you.

That's my settings:
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
bfgminer.exe --scrypt --worksize 256 --shaders 2048 --vectors 1 --thread-concurrency 8192 --gpu-fan 100 --gpu-engine 1085 --gpu-memclock 1500 --lookup-gap 2 -d 0 -g 2 --intensity 13 -o mypool.org:9327 -u USER -p PASS

CGMiner Settings for HD7970 GIGABYTE GV-R797OC-3GD - F80 BIOS

I've just bought 2 x GIGABYTE GV-R797OC-3GD cards and they have come with F80 bios.
Has anyone got a decent hash rate out of these cards?

CAT 13.4
CGMiner 3.3.1

GPU-Z reports the bios of the new cards as 015.034.000.002

My existing GIGABYTE GV-R797OC-3GD cards have an F71 bios - GPU-Z reports bios as 015.025.000.007
My existing cards run at 720kh/s at 1043 GPU and 1500 Mem.

Any clues as to the best settings for the new GIGABYTE GV-R797OC-3GD - F80 BIOS cards?
I cant get more than 550/600 kh/s out of them and the same 1043 and 1500 clearly does not work.
All my cards are Rev 2.1

Can I flash the F71 bios onto an F80 card? Gigabyte suggest only the same series can be flashed i.e. F70 to F79 can be flashed. F80 would have to be flashed with a bios between F80 and F89.
Have they changed memory supplier or something?

Thanks for any advice...

OMG... this has helped me tremendously, you're absolutely right that if you let cgminer compile at default clocks it will go much higher with these XFX ref cards, just tried it out. Thank you! (edit: all i'm getting is rejects right now but i'm sure i will get it working and report back)

Try bumping your clocks to 1030/1500
That seems to be a fairly standard 7970 clock ratio.

When flashing your GPU, you may not get any improved results.
Look up how to recover from a bricked or failed gpu bios flash. That way when something goes wrong you know how to fix it. You will need a dos boot disk with atiflash and a copy of your original bios. Make several copies of your original bios incase it somehow gets corrupted. (I don't mean make a backup then copy/paste, but make multiple backups directly from your card). If you only have one gpu, you will likely have to do a blind flash if your flash fails.

When xfx changed the pcb on this model they didn't  put a dual bios switch on it   

what can go wrong if you got the dual bios switch?

Hey guys quick question, i'm using the xfx 7970 double d edition. stock 925/1375

My question, from doing my research online it appears xfx no longer use the reference pcb in these cards, cost saving, so the pcb isn't AMD any more. Would it be safe to flash the bios mentioned in this thread?

I'm struggling to get 550kh/s out of it at 1025/1375

Thanks so much for your help, I'm gonna have the changes made and post the results here.

Thanks again.

Surp

I guess nobody has any advice for the question i asked a bt earlier in the thread?