Topic: Mining rig weirdness (Read 3140 times)

Thank you for donation!
All money will be used for BTCMine mining pool support.

Yep it was 10 right on the dot...thanks

On a different note, it would be cool if the Red Cross accepted donations in bitcoin. I think the ease with which bitcoins can be transferred make them perfect for charitable uses.

Done mrb, again thanks for the help, and good choice as a donation recipient.

If it was 10btc, then yup, that was me.

That is an excellent solution! I'll have to keep that in mind. Thanks

I would advise dedicated miners to go diskless. All my miners netboot from NFS. No UPS. No disk. No thumbdrive.
This takes filesystem corruption out of the equation, and greatly simplifies management of a mining cluster.

Give my share of the 50BTC to the EFF. Their Bitcoin address is listed on: https://www.eff.org/helpout

TenthReality, did you by any chance just sent me some bitcoins cause I see a payment I cannot account for...time received 4/7/2011 17:10.

You are right, however repeated power loss while the file system is writing to disk could lead to data corruption. I've encoutered many computers that got file (important system files) corruption issues because the user stupidly forcefully turned off the computer instead of going through the proper shutdown procedure (this is in Windows though!)

I guess a really GOOD surge protector with a high joules rating would be what he may need most, no?

A UPS will cleanup power though but one has to wonder how much one is willing to invest in a big UPS system just for the power cleanup feature.

I wonder if there are any power cleaning systems that do NOT have a batter backup..sort of like those fancy double conversion UPSs but without the battery? Then again the system would still have to use some sort of energy storage medium (ie batter) from which to feed the system cleaned up power.

That is most generous of you! I am glad I was able to help even a bit.

Btw, if you want a good UPS I think you can't go wrong with APC. For a 5970 though I think one with more than 1000VA is what is required. I currently have a 1000VA (650 watts) and it does not have enough juice to sustain the system for more than the minimum preprogrammed amount of time (I think that's like 5 to 7 minutes) at full power. I am in the dillema of having to get a bigger UPS myself. I'm thinking for a system with ONE 5970 a 1200VA UPS should do the trick - at least give me enough juice to keep the system running for a few minutes which is more than enough to deal with typical brownouts and give me enough time to safely shutdown the system.

As [Tycho] mentioned in the post above you definitely need one serious UPS to run your rig. Also be aware that once you got above 1500VA rating then whatever UPS you get above that rating will require a 20 Amp plug!!

All of this kind of underscores why if you're going to dedicated time, money, and energy into bitcoin mining then building a dedicated mining rig that does NOT require power backup may be the best course of action. I would even be tempted to build a system that boots via FLASH or USB drive or something low power directly into a mini linux distro and starts mining right away. Should the power go out the system will reboot and resume mining.

On the desktop side I would still keep say a 5850 in that machine which is not demanding on a reasonable UPS system.

Choices choices

UPS usually are rated with VAs, not Watts, so if you are going to use 1000W 80PLUS grade PSU at 100%, it will drain ~1300W from socket, so you'll need at least 2000VA UPS. And you may need even more if there will be any issues with PFC.

And since mining process is almost stateless, you won't loose almost anything in case of unexpected reboot, so UPS is needed only to protect from power surge.

Awesome, thanks!  FYI, I would definitely recommend in a beefy, high-quality UPS -- one that cleans up dirty power.  If you're going to run electronics hard on power, make sure it's not going to DoT your equipment.    (Sorry for the WoW reference; couldn't help myself.)

Got home, yanked the UPS out of the mix, issue gone, both GPU's and CPU are going full bore, well inside thermal levels, no horrific noises of doom involved.  Turned off the CPU since the power/heat isnt worth the effort but its nice to know I can max it all out without issue.

Tycho, allinvain, cdhowie, dbitcoin and Mrb, as soon as the transaction confirms and they are back in my wallet I'm splitting 50btc between you guys for chiming in for the assists.

Need addresses for Tycho, and mrb please in a PM.

Again, thanks guys for prompt, intelligent replies here.

I have had EXACTLY the same issue and it turned out it was the UPS. I spent hours running around with multimeter and measuring everything, then I looked at the UPS...

I would recommend connecting your rig directly to the power socket.

The UPS could be giving bad power to the power supply due to being overloaded and the power supply is complaining about it? (ie PFC kicked in)

I too have exact same power supply and I got a radeon 5970 overclocked to 850 and before I plugged it in I did some research and ideally what you want is to split the load in two because as I'm sure you know the HX1000W is technically two 500W power supplies joined together. The power supply will actually handle more than 1000W from what I read somewhere because its very similar in design to a much higher rated Thermaltake 1200W unit - both built by the same OEM.

Anyways, this may be helpful:

http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=70317

First thing I'd recommend to try is to get the UPS out of the picture to rule out that possibility.

I too have an UPS (1000VA) and there is no way it can handle the 5970 at full load. The amount of power this thing sucks is incredible especially if you overclock both the GPU and the memory.

UPS is about 5 feet away, the noise is very much coming from inside the PC and not the UPS itself.  It is however very old, and nowhere near rated for the power i'm pulling across it, so I'm wondering if its leaning the PC out causing the alarm.

Will give this a spin as well.

Are you sure that the screeching is not coming from the UPS?  As in, an alarm?  My roommate in college had a UPS, and due to the bad power quality in the building, it would trip the alarm whenever he started gaming.

For optimally spreading the load, connect the 5850 (lowest power consumption) to the modular cables to 12V1 (shared with CPU), and connect the 5870 to the non-modular PCIe cables. This will get rid of the PSU noise.

More info: http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story&reid=89
which says: "Well, the ATX and 8 pin EPS connectors are on 12V1, while the two 6+2 pin PCI-E connectors are on 12V2."

You sir may be on to something here, the UPS is a bit older and already has a heavy load on it.  Sadly i'm fiddling with it via RDP from work so I can't exactly change power plugs here.  I'll try this when I get home later, great suggestion I didn't even consider.

Well, PSU looks good.
Do you use UPS in your system? If not, try replace PSU (probably this one defective)

And +125W (1090T) probably too much for your system and you need another PSU.