Drakoin, Thank you very much for your continued work!! You're a great value to this community :-)
Thank you very much. It feels so nice to read this. Today I realized that I had passed 500 postings, whew.
And thanks for your loooooong posting. I recognize myself in you :-)
Let me see how I can help you.
Now on to my situation. I just bought a pair of XFX DD R9 280x's (non black edition) .
And I might be of so little help in that topic - because I only own 7xxx cards? Someone else, please? And/But:
Firstly, I guess, this whole thread here contains most the principles you need to understand, and can apply to the 280x, and secondly, you have already started to follow
TheStilt. Check out his latest postings.
Thirdly, I was in the same situation as you. And then (after even reading less than you have already read, judging by your long study list
) I took all of my courage ... and flashed my card. I had a high heart beat but never had any problems. I read somewhere, if you brick the card, you can flash it back to the old BIOS, as long as you get a picture with another card. So extra careful have to be only the people who only own one graphics card.
> I've tried every 280x config I've found on bitcointalk with no luck.
And I guess, you also got creative, and tried out your own CC/MC combinations? I got mine up to over 600 without BIOS tweaking / undervolting. See one of my very first postings here in this thread.
> I've also tried to adjust the voltage in cgminer and cgwatcher with no luck (fixed at 1.200).
Yep.
Modify your BIOS.
In almost all cases that I know of now, that helped. Suddenly you can undervolt all the way down to 850 mV. Which as it leads to crashing, is not your target - but it's good to be able to go the full range, for testing.
> haven't touched the bios or voltage at all.
I fear to tell you ... you will have to :-)
> hesitant to flash my bios (possibly to a non-xfx modified bios) if there's a chance to brick it.
Come one, you even have SEVERAL cards, right?
> What's the safest place to start on my quest to ~700kh/s ?
to 720, I only got with TheStilt BIOS, and modified CL files.
But after a few days of being proud (and sweaty) with such hashrates, I went down to economy mode again.
I hate the heat, the noise, the wasting. I am not promoting maxed out hashrates.
What all this here is about, is getting out as much kHash/s out of as little electricity as possible.
See the next posting.
> Sapphire TRIXX?
> Afterburner?
I don't think they can undervolt if your BIOS is locked within a narrow voltage window, or on a single voltage.
> VBE7?
yes.
> Is there a "safest" way to flash my bios?
yes:
* Not with atiwinflash, but with atiflash. Making that USB stick, and booting into w98 DOS is not as difficult as I thought before.
* Read before until you know what you are doing.
* Flash only one card, try it out for a while.
* Stick to your own BIOS, just tweak some values. Don't go for BIOS of other vendors!
* Make two copies of your original BIOS, on two different harddisks, if you ever want/need to go back.
* If your BIOS is not yet there, you could also upload your original BIOS into the database at
http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/ then you have a copy there, too.
* Your two cards might differ in their BIOS! Use "GPU-Z" to find out.
Anyone else got ideas to add to this?
Are there other XFX 280x (non black edition) bios out there that helped people in my situation? I've read lots of posts about people adjusting voltages and flashing 280x bios to get 700kh/s, but I haven't read one yet that confirms it for a DD XFX 280x.
If you really want to go high, it's also important to undervolt, otherwise the cards get too hot.
My card may be getting throttled. It never heats up above 75C to 76C, but the hash rate will jump/drop as much as 30 to 40 kh/s every few seconds.
I have seen a similiar behaviour, when in the beginning I was wandering through the CC/MC plane for days. I always thought it means that the engine clock rate is too high for the memory clock rate, because when I lower the engine clock a few MHz, it calms down a lot.
I ended up finding a reply ( reply #134 see below) where The Silts modded a bios for XFX 280x (non black edition), but all his dropbox links lead to a "deleted or moved" error page. Was anyone able to save or archive the bios that he created for the community?
Perhaps you can write to the owner ('madnod'?) of the card ... who uploaded the BIOS? He will have it, right?
As far as I understood it, TheStilt wants to re-upload and re-index all the BIOS, but it might take a while.
Mem type: Hynix H5GQ2H24AFR AND ELPIDA EDW2032BBBG
Means that BIOS supports Hynix and Elpida. There is a tool which reads out which memory your card actually has.
Whatever you find, please compile, report it back. ...
Hey, what about this idea: You seem to be a reading and writing guy, who has a lot of persistance, and understand technology. So: Just start your own thread, modelled after this one, but about your quest to optimize your XFX DD R9 280x cards. I'd be happy to help, and read, and contribute.
( RMA can confirme that it is imposible put 3 in motheboard without riser, bruteforce power 
) will take SOME time. How long I have no idea at the moment, but I will be uploading the files as soon as they are done. There is obviously no ETA I can give as this is 95% pro bono."