Topic: What flags should I use for 5830s? - page 3. (Read 11701 times)

I think this is the point you guys are talking past each other.

Catfish is saying overclocked GPU and underclocked RAM ~= same draw as stock (TRUE)
P4 is saying stock GPU and underclocked RAM < draw stock (ALSO TRUE).

If you can also undervolt the GPU you can save the square of voltage change in power draw.  Thus a 5% undervolt will cut power load not by 5% but by about 9.75%.  A 10% undervolt will cut power load by about 19%.

There is no magic number.  A lot depends on the individual user's power prices, ambient temps, ease of cooling, and time horizon.  Still one should be aware of that relationship.

Clock Increase = Linear power increase.
Voltage Increase = Squared power increase.

Overclocking card increases CAPITAL efficiency (hashes per $ of hardware) but doesn't improve electrical efficiency (hashes per watt).
Overvolting is likely never a good option unless you have free power.  Any gain in CAPITAL EFFICIENCY is offset by a squared reduction in electrical efficiency.  Given over 3 year lifespan electrical costs make up the majority of production costs that is a bad trade.


Yup and it is slow and steady.  Card may run fine for a while because you didn't have it clocked to the redline so it seemed stable but that redline was continually dropping. Suddenly when that "stability redline" hits your current clock you notice it.  The hard thing is figuring out what relationship voltage & heat have to electromigration rate.  If I can get 10% more hashes running the card hot does that reduce the linespan 10%, or 1% or 50%?  Is 50% even bad?  The "effective lifespan" of a card may be much shorter than its tecnical lifespan.  As an example FPGA are only going to get more competitive.  That will put downward pressure on the price:difficulty ratio.  Entirely possible that a card bought today will be obsolete in 2-3 years simply because you can't run it without free power due to more efficient FPGA affecting the market.

Not only that, because of a weird side effect from I *think* the caching algorithm (dont quote me on that), decreasing the memory clocks actually increases performance. Only marginally, but measurably. Saw a nice chart with the effect a while ago, Ill see if I can find it.


That is because the memory controller is on the GPU. The memory controller will draw less power if clocked lower, hence lowering your temperatures a bit.

Im not disputing it. However at stock core speed and 300 Mhz memory you may get better MH/W depending on the power draw of the rest of the machine.  Its almost certain if you combine it with undervolting (most 5850s seem happy at 1v for stock speed).


Thats mostly true when you have bad voltage regulation (power spikes) and for mechanical parts. But indeed, heat cycling can in fact cause "mechanical" failures with gpu's: hair cracks in soldering or underfill, something nVidia chips had large problems with some years ago, a problem that could often be solved by baking the card (reflowing the solder).

However, electromigration is your biggest enemy here, and heat cycling plays no role there. Think of electromigration as internal wear. Many people witness this when they notice their maximum stable overclocks reduce over time. With a new cpu they can overclock, say, by 1 GHz, and after a year or two its only 800 Mhz. Thats electromigration. Its irreversible and will over time kill any chip, slowly or suddenly. And it will happen a lot sooner with high temps and voltages, though if you are lucky, that means 10 years instead of  500. If you are less lucky, its 1 month instead of 10 years.

I've learned my lesson re: XFX - will see whether I can get replacements or money back for the DOA units, but so far the best overall manufacturer I've used has been Sapphire (which you agree with, IIRC). The best *card* I have is the Asus 6950 DirectCU II - it just *feels* like it's been engineered properly - all metal, good fans, heatsinks on all important components, twin BIOS, etc. - but I try not to buy expensive cards like this. Especially when extracting the performance requires BIOS flashes - the entire 6xxx series seems to have roadblocks in the firmware / software drivers, unlike the 5xxx series. I've ended up with two of the Asus but I can't justify buying loads of them.

I won't be buying anything from XFX again. Weirdly enough though, they have a proprietary single-slot 5770 design, which I have 4 of, and they are very good in comparison. Not only can you fit all 4 into a normal tower case without butchering it, they will deliver around 200-210 MH/s and stay between 60˚C and 65˚C. They're even quiet enough at 100% fan for me to have this tower case sitting in the living room supplying some warm air without winding my other half up. I've noticed that XFX are re-using the design for a single-slot 6770... is the 6770 basically the same as the 5770? Both have 800 SPs.

Regarding Apple, I've got more computing power than I need in both my Mac Pro and my MBP - I have a real thing for portability so I tend to use my 11" Air hooked up to a 27" display for most tasks - I've hacked the bollocks 64GB SSD (interestingly, it's got a respectably fast controller...) and now have 240GB with a 7% over-provisioned Sandforce controller. I/O is the biggest deal these days IMO with general computing tasks. The IT types at my last client were somewhat surprised (understatement of the year) at the performance of *my* Macbook Air - running financial analytics software within Windows within VMware and everything else on OS X. The only shame is that it's only got 4 GB of RAM - I've put 8 GB in the MBP and it flies (again, fast SSD). Neither has a fast GPU but I don't play games any more.

I'm not sure what to do - I'm hardly short of performance or expansion with my current Mac Pro, which was a special offer from Apple (i.e. got it really cheap) due to my Quad G5 liquid cooling system starting to fail after a year or so (Apple 'Pro' kit should last 10 years IMO, and IME it generally does, if not more). However if Apple cancel the Mac Pro, I'd really *like* to buy the very top-end model with the fastest CPUs, load it with fast SSDs and tons of RAM myself (Apple charge too much for this, in general, and also I am *very* picky when it comes to SSDs... Apple selling a '256 GB SSD' isn't enough info for me, I want to know what controller chipset it uses, whether SLC or MLC, etc. - not all SSDs are the same and many benchmarks don't tell the whole story. I speak as a very early adopter of desktop and laptop SSDs because I had the cash at the time and could try out a range - the key is *sustained* high performance across different application footprints. Yes, I've got TRIM now in Snow Leopard but this alone isn't a magic bullet), and keep it as the 'last Mac Pro', just like my 'last Powermac' (the Quad G5 still runs). But I can't justify it financially right now


If your numbers are spot on, then that's good confirmation that I'm not wasting money and time here. My current Shelf Rigs eat just over 3 kW at full tilt. Say £12 a day in electricity - though I've just had my meter swapped to a new tariff that's cheaper at night and all weekend, so the average price is potentially closer to 14p/kWh. I'm getting between 7-9 BTC per day so as long as the BTC rate stays over 1.5 I'm still profiting.

The hardware is company owned and largely expensed against the BTC income when the rate was significantly higher earlier in the year. Right now, the profits are slim enough to discourage new miners investing in hardware from scratch. However, I haven't lost money. And this wasn't a 'business plan' - it was about having a bit of fun whilst in the middle of a fundamental career change. And I've learned a hell of a lot in the process.

I don't think my mining rigs would be profitable at UK electricity costs unless they were all overclocked - the difference is very substantial (e.g. 5850s usually ship with 725 MHz cores, but most run at 900 MHz even with an undervolt. This is the difference between 300 MH/s and 380 MH/s, at the same power consumption when the memory clock is reduced to 300 MH/s). But I wouldn't consider an overvolt... if the hardware could handle higher voltage without shorter lifespan, and the higher voltage allowed higher clocks that weren't possible at normal voltage, and the relationship wasn't the typical diminishing-returns but actually *increased* the rate of change of hashrate with volts and clock, then yeah - and the OEMs would already be doing so to sell faster cards. But these things are designed to consume a certain amount of power - push more through them and they get less efficient. My rule of thumb is that if the card is having a hard time keeping cool in sensible ambient temps (i.e. not in my cellar!) then it's being pushed too far. It can be cooled in extremis but it will be wasting a lot of power.

Mining at these costs (over a tenner a day for electricity isn't a 'game' any more - it's real money!) without fine-tuning the cards to get the maximum possible efficient hashrate seems insane to me. I've tried every different version of the OpenCL kernels and found the fastest for each generation of card I'm using. Newest isn't necessarily fastest and the spread between 'standard' and 'fine-tuned' with any of the 58xx series is significant enough to be worth looking into.

However, I draw the line at using Windows Even if the tools are better, or Windows Catalyst drivers are more mature hence faster (not even sure if this is true), it's expensive and I can't stand it anyway... multiple mining rigs require multiple Windows licences - and unlike the hardware, IIRC these copies of Windows can't be re-sold once mining becomes unprofitable. And I sure as HELL don't have any use for bloody MS Windows on my network, so it'd be a wasted cost...


ETA - just noticed your reply Messy - leaving mining rigs with family members... now *that's* a good idea! It'd have to be something other than my Shelf Rigs though. Maybe a big tower PC each for my various nephews and nieces for 'extreme gaming' - that I have control over when they're not playing, and has three more GPUs than they need Hehehehe.

Thats amazing. So why dont you just buy 100.000 BTC on the market and turn it into twice that? Dont tell me you actually still work for a living when you have this secret way to print money?


Sure, but why do you buy your bitcoins for $7 in electricity when you can buy them for $3 on Mt GoX?  You can buy mine for $6 if you want You can still keep them as long as you want if you are in for the long run.


No argument there. If you have fun doing it, who I am I to comment. Just dont kid yourself or anyone else that you are making profits, because you are not. You are losing money hand over fist. Well you would be if you were paying for your electricity, but clearly you arent. Just please refrain from advising others how to mine as "profitably" as you.


Be your own judge. Reread your posts, and tell me you come across like someone who knows what he is doing.

You spent something ike an average month salary on hardware thinking every pence you spent on electricity would turn in to 7 pence worth of bitcoin while in reality its 10x less and it generates even less than what you pay in electricity. When I pointed that out, you revised your estimate to 3 pence worth of bitcoins for every pence spent and only now, after who knows how many months of mining, do you realize your are not even getting once pence worth of bitcoins. Barely half of it.

Knowingly mining at a loss doesnt make one stupid, getting your costs wrong by a factor 10x, well...
Oh, and get a spell checker. saying you are " blatently" not stupid doesn't exactly make your case .

Just be clear: the powerconsumption of your GPU will scale linearly with clockspeed (and exponentially with voltage). So overclocking does very little to improve effciency/w. It mostly helps efficiency/$. But the higher you clock it, the more power it will consume and vice versa. With constant voltage, the power efficiency of your GPU remains the same at the higher clock, in fact, it might even drop a tiny bit because it will run hotter, and hotter gpus draw more power (and require higher fan speed, which is also power, however little). That effect is marginal though, and probably more than offset by the constant power consumption of the CPU, motherboard, ram etc, which becomes a lower % of your power as you increase hash rate of the gpu's.


True that. Moreover, videocards were designed for gaming. So for a few hours per day at medium load. They werent specced to run 24/7 with a power virus.

Tesla's and Firestream cards are designed and specced for that, and no surprise, they are generally clocked much more conservatively  despite insanely high prices...

And again, I TURN MY BTC INTO AT LEAST TWICE WHAT THEY ARE WORTH! I actually enjoy mining and if you payed attention, I sa8id im in it for the long run. possesions/BTC's are more important than physical cash. I'm not your usual statsistic and i do things for reasons of my own Enjoyment, pleasure, business, whatever. Yes, Been actually interesting work prices out but i used OTT prices/amounts of power used etc etc. So i bet it balanes out more even than i worked out. And unlike your selfhish bum i actually use BTC's everyday which is helping that vslue stay at what it is. WHat are you doing? Sitting on 10,000's and actually harming the BTC network to your selfishness??? i Bet you im right

I have my reasons, You have yours but i make more like 6-12$ per BTC at least. I actually enjoy FIDDLING and OC@ing, always have done so that makes your comment void. It's TOTALLY annomonious way of getting BTC's. Soon my life wont require monetary money, and trade will be the way i live my life (BTC's are more commodity than currency at present).

Each to there own but i was helping people with there questions. The $$$ has plummeted the last month or 2, So what if i havnt checked the electric bills, i dont actually pay for it currently either as my rigs are actually at family members haha.

Im not falling out with you cause you want get a buzz trying call me stupid, When blatently im not, Just not bothered about losing like a quid or whtever a day, if it means i get BTC that i need to get along in life

You dont understand me or my principles. Probably never will cause most people are mining for greed. Mine is for the purpose and what it represents. Hence my help.advice given, Not abuse
 Not that your giving much abuse calling me out on that its not earning in bit +, probably -, that is true. but that sir is the only part you can call me out. Does it matter, is it relivant...... No, not at all Each to there own, i aint no mug though. Wont see me 50 and retired stuck in a rigged system that doesnt work,  aint for me and alot are wising up

Least life is fun and interesting, even if stupid

No offense, but clearly you do not know what you are doing. You just posted you mine 1 day per week to cover electricity cost when it turns out your bitcoins dont even cover half the electricity costs. So you dont pay less for them, you are paying almost twice the market rate, just in electricity alone, never mind the hardware costs. Your utility provider loves you for it.

Maybe you dont realise i make more money with bitcoins and dont rely on the BTC rate. And i aint spent stupid money cause i know what im doing. I need BTC's, all it means is i pay less for them. And now i have 2 rigs that play stalker C.O.P with s.m.r.t.e.r, All absolute packs and atmosphere pack. does require 3GB video ram for all this . BF3 aint all bad, and i was pretty good at BF2. Is much fun Some good multiplaying before i go india for 2 month at end of year.

So nar, i aint dispointed at all

nvm I'm not even gonna touch it. No warranty bought these beasts used.

If your card is still covered by warranty for a long time to come (and you think you can get away with voiding it), well, even then probably not. Depends on your luck on how much of an increase the overvolt nets you. Keep in mind it may take weeks before you get an RMA, thats a lot of lost revenue to make up with slightly higher hash rates.

At least if you do want to overvolt, do minor increases and keep your temps low, not 80+C. I killed a 5850 by accidentally overvolting it through the roof and hitting the thermal throttles of 100C GPU and 130VRM. It took about 30 minutes to kill it dead. Heat is bad, overvolt is bad, the combination is stupid.

I'm getting free energy, so is it still smart to overvoltage?

maybe you should have done that thinking before you spent all that money on hardware? But seriously,  you can not possibly pay your utility bill without noticing

i do understand your overclocking logic better now though; any card that fails saves you money !

I, i just noticed that one. Going think about this one

LOL. Math isnt your strong suit is it.

3 KW/H * 0.16 pound per Kwh = ~11.5 pound per day in electricity.
That nets you (optimistically) 3.5  BTC or 7 pound per day. But you think you make money for 6 days out of 7?
You are losing 4 pound every day. Well done, overclock them some more, maybe you'll make profit at 1.4v

call what you want mate, Im no B$'er.

At the minute those 8 draw around 2KW max, i currently have 4 others going, 2x5870's,16870 & 6950 so add another K there. 3KW/hour for 24/7. Thats making around 4-4.5g/hash and makes around 3-3.5BTC a day. I dont actually know how much electric costs per KW/h but id go about 22p 12 hours and 11p night rate, so say 16p and meet in the middle.

3BTC is £6
16x24x7= £20.16

mm, Your right about it not been a day anymore 3 days then. So its got go BELOW $1.30 for it to be borderline. Thats sounds good to me. I'm in it for the long haul, not a fleeter on this one. I have my own agenda's and idea's. All i know is banks out is the best thing for mankind since JFK promised us to space travel. And use your BTC wisely, im making shit loads and find myself more and more not using physical cash to get through life. Suppose im a lucky one, or just not willing be a statistic for powers that be

I dont believe that for a second. Some googling suggests electricity in the UK costs ~10p/KWh or $0.16.
Even if you would achieve 2MH per watt (which you wont with those cards at those voltages, youd be lucky to get 1.5-1.7MH/W) that works out around $3 in electricity cost per bitcoin. You are saying it costs you $0.4 per bitcoin in electricity. I call BS on that.

I live in uk (expensive) and at the rate now i mine less than 24 hours in the week to cover the electric. Its expensive here too. Very. the other 6+ days is profit. Who cares? if they die in 2-3 years they die. But i put money oin it that in 3 years they still work, Not that id want them in 3 years. They'll be crap and use to much power by then. FPGA is only logical step seen as AMD seem to be going down same route as nvidia and getting less, more complex cores. 7800 series may be last good mining cards we get. Unless AMD wakes up and sees a market and make a ubber card just for mining

And i invest with my BTC, use your head. I been OC'ing for years and im sorry but people like you are just to OTT. By the time it fails its time to ugrade. I got 8 5870's all at 965/300 @1.193V (725/1200 @ 1.088V STOCK) and they all do 1000 or more at 1.2XX but i need server performance. Im going away 2 months soon Bet you none of them fail in 3 years, but i wont have them in 3 years cause of ADVANCES.....

Buy a Kill-a-watt and experiment. It depends on your card and if you only have 1 card in your rig and it has a power hungry CPU and tons of fans, HDDs and what not, the equation will change when compared to having 4 or more cards on a sempron motherboard. In general, Id say, yes, most likely. Try 1v and 1.050v and see how far it clocks, then do the math.  I have a 5850 that will do ~900 MHz at 1.05V, thats a LOT better than the 1050 MHz it will do at 1.15V. Its better energy efficiency and on top of that, less likely to die.

Right now I'm getting power for free from my college dorm should I undervolt at home tho?

Overvolting isnt smart. Not only is it even more likely to cause premature failures than overheating (and the combination is pretty much a guaranteed premature dead, again google electromigration), it doesnt make economic sense either.

Power consumption increases exponentially with voltage, your hashrate does not, and will only increase marginally with increased voltage. Since power is the biggest cost for most people, it will make more sense to undervolt than overvolt as it can (greatly) improve your hashrate/W.

Unless you steal electricity of course.