Topic: Want legit 7970 testing/benchmarking and tuning for cgminer and Diablominer? - page 4. (Read 19825 times)

i will be pretty upset if the 7xxx comes out only marginally better for mining. Because i just sold both 5970 at $300 a pop on ebay getting ready for the 7xxx series. Miner is down right now waiting for the new card to release.

Yet, but soon. We already know its going to be between $400 and $600. Donations do not happen over night.

problem is.... this card cannot be bought anywhere yet.

I have added a much easier way of donating to this. I have added a donation mode to DiabloMiner, download the most recent binary and use the -b flag.

Just another raving lunatic.

what?

Releasing a GCN-optimized miner would be a HUGE mistake.

Really, efforts should monetize. Just stop it before it's too late - you are turning the bitcoin mining community into an even more fucked up version of the SL3 one for yet another generation of GPU chips. Be responsible

thogar threw in 1 btc.

Current total: 20.0101976.

That is hardly a problem.  The prices are so discounted <$150 for 5870 and $300 for 5970 that hell if one in 5 fails you still come out way ahead.  Ebay has a 30 day buyer protection.  Of 13 5970s I bought on ebay.  1 I returned (no issue) because its second core seemed very unstable in first two weeks.  The other 12 are running fine 9 months later all purchased at a >50% discount to new price.  The failure rate after 30 days seems to relatively low (note it doesn't need to be 0% because cards are massively discounted).  So far I had one card "fail" when a fan went bad.  Some cleaning, and replacement fan and it is back in operation.

Comparing the price of a card released 3 years ago is dubious.  Moore's law marches on.  The issue in price isn't nominal $ but MH/$.  So say optimized you could get 500 MH/s from a 7970 for $550.  It still would be garbage compared to used 5970 pushing 730+ MH/s for $300.

Spiccioli just threw in a BTC. Thanks man.

Current total: 19.0101976.

7970 requires at least 11.12 and at least SDK 2.6. It looks like they used 11.11 + SDK 2.5 or similar for these tests (maybe pre-release 11.12 + 2.6?). Also, I'm pretty sure 2.6-fail is a bug and nowhere near the intended behavior, so I'm going to assume their 375 is really supposed to be 380, and their 392 on the 6970 is supposed to be 397. This would mean, completely unoptimized, the 7970 is 420.

Which, really, isn't all that horrendous. 1.68 mhash/watt vs 6970s' 1.58 mhash/watt vs 5870s' 2.02 mhash/watt (or vs 2.09 on SDK 2.1). And thats unoptimized, I'm really thinking 7970s at stock can push 500 mhash which pushes us back up to 2 mhash/watt which brings us back to the glory age of 58xx cards.

The problem with 58xx is *we can't buy them anymore*. Used cards off Ebay is iffy at best, and even the $599 price of a 7970 isn't all that much when you realize 5870 and 6970s were in the same ballpark ($499 and up). If I don't get enough donations for a 7970, I can always buy a 7950, and if I can't get that, I can always wait for the inevitable price drop to drop it down even more.

50 btc at today's prices is still $200. 7950s may eventually drop to that, but I'm not sure if everyone wants to wait that long for support. The donation serves purely as a "does the community want this or not" thing.

So THG is getting substantial better results than you, since its clear they are not using the old SDK 2.1. That might be because of the drivers and SDK they used are better for mining than the available (and terrible) 11.12/2.6, but the point still stands. Their results are entirely reasonable and a fair point of comparison. If anything it shows the 7970 is a bigger dud than you might think looking at the chart, because you can use older drivers to boost 5870 performance, you probably cant use them for the 7970.

I use SDK 2.1, which is what is recommended to use on 5xxx hardware. If you want strict oranges to oranges numbers, 2.6 is really really bad on 5xxx. On my 5850@960 on 11.12, under 2.1 I get 400, 2.4/2.5 I get 387, under 2.6 using the same settings as 2.1 and 2.4/2.5 I get 357, and under adjusted settings for 2.6 I get 365.

As usual, YMMV.

Neither is mine, nor any 5870 Ive seen here when adjusted for overclock:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

To be clear, stock speed of a 5870 is 850 MHz.

You can get slightly higher speed than what THG got out of a 5870, but it will require, among other things downgrading drivers and OpenCL. They seem to have used something newer even than 11.12 . Experimenting with older drivers on an older card to provide a comparison point for a new card is not something you can reasonably expect them to do.

Its also not reasonable to expect the 7970 will gain more speed than a 5870 using older drivers (it probably doesnt even work), or when using a better miner than what they used (Im guessing they used GUIminer)

As such their numbers are completely reasonable for an apples to apples comparison. There might be room for improvement for either card, but its just not likely that it will change the basic equation.

Or I find an absurdly easy optimization that puts 600-700 mhash/sec on stock settings.

I agree with Toms Hardware not being an authority, however, they used stock cards. What damns them is a stock 5870 can get 394 mhash/sec, theirs wasn't even close. They did not perform a useful test, and they didn't even say which miner with which settings.

Also, FPGAs do not seem to be entirely worth it. There is a high buy in cost and a very low resale value. Unless your power is extremely expensive, I don't see the point of owning one unless you're going to buy a 100 or more of them at a time.

Most people who mine own a single GPU, and this sits in their desktop and they sometimes game. This is where the vast majority of hash power comes from, and DiabloMiner serves people like that.

The thing is, there is, what, about a thousand GPU miners who just own a single GPU and alternate between mining and gaming? If even just every other one of them donated just 1 btc to this, I wouldn't have to worry about development costs ever again. One person doesn't need to fund this, a hundred could. 150 btc is a lot to one person, but its not much to a thousand people.

If you count the 5870 at 950mhz then you should count the 7970 at 1125mhz (at which it should do close to ~500mhash judging by the numbers). And that's with an unoptimized miner for a barely available card that was released, like, five days ago, smack in between christmas and new years eve celebration seasons.

Assuming that, with an optimized miner, the 7970 can do the same speed PER SHADER as the 5870, then the card could do ~520mhash on stock and ~620mhash overclocked. This is without looking into further enhancements made possible by the new architecture itself, if there are any.

your right and your wrong

it depends on the context of why we are comparing

if we are comparing what cards can mine faster at stock clocks then yes the 7xxx wins (according to toms hardware and his dubious unproved claims)

but if we are comparing what is going to be a more profitable card than 5870 wins hands down

so apples to apples - and oranges to oranges - we all need to realize 7xxxx series will never be profitable

and we need to take into consideration that BTC blocks will be getting halved soon

and we need to realize that FPGA is the most realistic next step - for sensible and profitable miners

TOMS REVIEWED CARDS @ STOCK.

This isn't a hard concept.  You can't compare one card @ stock to another card overclocked.  950MHz is an 11% overclock.

Look I also think the 7970 is a dud but to compare apples to apples you need to look at stock vs stock.  So throwing out overclocked numbers is worthless.   It looks like the 7970 can overclock 20%+ at stock voltage.