BIG shout-out to Aries for providing the detailed instructions for maximizing effectiveness of the MSI 470s!
I just modded 1 of my 4 GPUs based on your instructions and amazingly, am now getting a whopping 28.4 Mh/s from it, at the same power draw from when it was getting 20.7! You were spot on on your speed predictions at each step... i got to 23.5 after the 1500 strapping, then 28.4 after setting 2000 & 1150 in afterburner! I actually forgot to go in and reset my previous WattTool adjustments, so my custom negative power offsets per each card were still in place when I made these mods, but it still worked just perfectly!
It was so great to launch Claymore and see that 28.4 number pop up for the modded GPU, so thanks again for these great tips! Probably should be a sticky topic somewhere since that's a HUGE gain from out of the box!
2 quick questions regarding modding my other 3 GPUs...
1- How long should I wait to make sure the modded GPU is stable? If it was going to brick, would it have done it immediately? Or, is there a recommended waiting time to make sure of stability before flashing the other GPUs?
2- In the strapping process, I made a copy of the card's bios then modded it as instructed and saved as a new file to flash with. My question is, can I skip this part of the process for the other 3 and just continue to use the modded bios copy from the original modded card? Basically I am asking if the settings in the bios will be exactly the same for every GPU? They are all the exact same model so I am assuming yes, but want to make sure before proceeding.
Thanks again!
Thanks for the Shout! One warning: Do Not Use the same Bios for each gpu. You have to go through the whole process again with each of the gpu's. They have different characteristics and capabilities.
As for how long to wait. With these I just let them run for about 10 min each. If they are holding 28.4, I go onto the next gpu.
Thanks Again, I appreciate it.
Thanks for the extra tips... I went ahead and modded GPU #2 shortly after and it ran perfectly at 28.4 for about an hour. #3 appeared ok at first but but crashed after about 5 minutes, so I reduced the amount of power offset in WattTool by a couple and it was working fine for 30+ minutes so I went to #4. This one caused me some problems though... crashed my system about 2-3 minutes after starting Claymore. So, like #3, made the power offset # lower. Ran for 5 minutes, crashed my system. It was getting late and I didn't want the rig offline overnight, so I ended up reducing the power offset of all 4 cards by bit as well as going to 1950, 1950, 1900 & 1850 on the clock speeds and Core clock up to 1175 on the latter 2. This ended up cutting my total HR from 113 to 108 and not as power efficient but it has now been running steady for 9 straight hours, so I'm happy with that. I expect that if I spend a few more hours fine tuning each card, I can improve somewhat, but even as it stands, it's still a very nice 30% bump in HR from where I was at 2 days ago!
There are 2 things that really frustrate me in all of this... first, the fact that WattMan/Afterburner settings are reset after every reboot. Very annoying and time-consuming. Is there any way to fix this?
In addition, I am going crazy over tracking which card is which, since all 4 are identical models. Luckily I made some notes a few days ago that compare what device #'s they show up as in AfterBurner and Claymore, but those are different from the true system device #s and with new tools like GPU-Z, etc., it seems like a huge pain to try to determine which card is which. Does anyone have trick for tracking this effectively?