Ethereum GPU mining?

[Madpacket]

^^ Thanks man, lots of awesome tips! :thumbsup:

I think the risers I ordered had SATA connectors, hope this won't cause any issues > I just assumed SATA = newer than molex = better.

I currently have 1 HIS-brand 480 and 2 XFX... two of the cards reported 80.9% ASIC, the 3rd one could not be read for some reason.



I figured with 70w x 5 cards, = 350W... even with a 6th card gaming (+ 150W max = 500W), that leaves 350W for the rest which should be enough?

Don't forget GPU board power. You need to add 30 - 35W for that for each card. I believe the Sata PCIe adapters are flexible in that you can take them off and use a molex adapter instead. Do this for as many cards as you can but don't sweat it too much. I'm currently using a Sata power cable to power my new Sapphire card. So far so good.

850W is plenty for 6 cards. You shouldn't be pulling more than 700W in total from the wall which keeps you close to the 90% efficiency area. subtract 10% for power supply losses and you're looking at most around 630W pulled from an 850W. These SuperFlower Leadex designs can be run at 100% loads 24/7/365. They are amazingly stable and overbuilt. Go for it!

Also thanks for the ASIC ratings. If you can check GPU-Z and see if at equal settings for the cards if the higher ASIC card draws more wattage than the lower ASIC rated card. It may only be a few watts but there should be a delta.

 

[MrTeal]

Don't mind Madpacket, he's Canadian. We just think about trucks all day.

As for risers, Sata or Molex doesn't make a whole lot of difference. In either case the connector is rated for way more than enough current, your limit is always going to be the single 12V wire, along with with the connector at the modular end if the PSU is modular.

For risers, I have a bunch of these and they've been good to me.

The nice thing with these is if you don't have enough peripheral cables laying around, you can run a two ended PCIe power cable to the 6 pin of two adjacent cards, and another dual end PCI cable to the powered riser. That way it only takes two PCIe cables to power the risers and 6 pins on two 480s.

 

[suklee]

Sorry yes the Z170 Pro4s. It'll handle five cards and can take Skylake processors. I threw in a Core i3-6100 with the expectation of reusing as a basic gaming platform. The nice thing about this board is allows for bclock overclocking so you can take a 6100 and bump it up to 4.4 - 4.7Ghz. Pair it with DDR4 3000 though (it's only a few bucks more) as the dual cores benefit tremendously from higher speed memory.

The AMD Gigabyte boards are just solid mining boards which have six PCIe ports. They use a tad more energy at idle but are easy to work with and don't have many quirks so to speak. Also you can toss in a Sempron for mining and then down the road pickup a 8320e for cheap and overclock it to 4.3+ GHz which would make for a decent productivity and gaming PC. These boards have plenty of power phases and cooling to handle the overclock.

AMD platform is tempting for the stability and handling of 6 cards.
I read some of the newer Intel platforms not detecting all cards due to limited # of PCIe lanes or something like that...

Will try to do some quick AMD mobo research before heading to the store after work.

Edit: In the approx price range of an i3-6100, I can get an FX-6300 (AM3+), A10-7700K/7850K (FM2+)... the A8-7650K (FM2+) is quite a bit cheaper.

Edit2: Back from the computer shops with a used i3-2120, new RM1000i, OEM Windows 10.. ready for test build!

Edit3: hooked up hdmi to tv, nothing showing on screen. Shorted power pins and cpu fan spins. could be the ram? It's a single corsair vengeance 1.5v stick, not on the compatibility list... Do I need to have both slots filled? CPU was definitely working when I bought it. This is the minimum hooked up:

 

[Madpacket]

Don't mind Madpacket, he's Canadian. We just think about trucks all day.

As for risers, Sata or Molex doesn't make a whole lot of difference. In either case the connector is rated for way more than enough current, your limit is always going to be the single 12V wire, along with with the connector at the modular end if the PSU is modular.

For risers, I have a bunch of these and they've been good to me.

The nice thing with these is if you don't have enough peripheral cables laying around, you can run a two ended PCIe power cable to the 6 pin of two adjacent cards, and another dual end PCI cable to the powered riser. That way it only takes two PCIe cables to power the risers and 6 pins on two 480s.

Those risers look great. A quick search on eBay brings nothing up though. Do you mind sharing where you got them from?

 

[DrMrLordX]

AMD platform is tempting for the stability and handling of 6 cards.

AM3+ has some decent mining boards, but I'm not sure what you would use on FM2+. At the most you can get 4-5 PCIe slots on them (I think). Even the Crossblade Ranger only has 5.

I have tried risers on my A88x-Pro, and at least in Win10, it will not detect video cards plugged in via 1x riser to the 16x/8x slots. So that limits its usefulness.

 

[Madpacket]

Edit3: hooked up hdmi to tv, nothing showing on screen. Shorted power pins and cpu fan spins. could be the ram? It's a single corsair vengeance 1.5v stick, not on the compatibility list... Do I need to have both slots filled? CPU was definitely working when I bought it. This is the minimum hooked up:

Hmm, hard to tell from that picture.

A few suggestions. Plug in a computer speaker if you have a spare one, it should give you beep codes that will help you diagnose the problem. Try resetting the CMOS.
Switch the memory to the other slot (no you don't need two sticks for it to work). Try plugging in a molex adapter to the motherboard above the CPU area, doubt it's needed to fire up but I'm not familiar with that board. Re-seat the 24 pin and 8 pin power plugs.
Switch to the VGA port instead of HDMI. Try adding an actual video card to the x16 slot and see if it fires up.

 

[Madpacket]

AM3+ has some decent mining boards, but I'm not sure what you would use on FM2+. At the most you can get 4-5 PCIe slots on them (I think). Even the Crossblade Ranger only has 5.

I have tried risers on my A88x-Pro, and at least in Win10, it will not detect video cards plugged in via 1x riser to the 16x/8x slots. So that limits its usefulness.

Yeah I can't recommend FM2+ boards either for mining as I have no direct experience. They are limited to 5 PCIe slots from the looks of it.

Here's a list someone put together but I can't provide a link here for some reason.

Just do a search for "best mining motherboards" in Google and you'll see it.

 

[SK10H]

Got my first ref 8GB, memory clock the worst compare to the rest, it can only mine at 2150 memory, :\ but it has the lowest ASIC rating though. ^_^

At 1025/2150 900mv, it saves 8W on GPU.



At 1125/2150 1100mv, the 83.7% is the only one throttling down as I leave the power limit at 0%.

 

[n0x1ous]

Just got my 4GB Sapphire RX 480 today. No sticker covering an 8GB symbol on this box so not sure if its really an 8gb or not. Says ATI for subvendor in gpuz instead of sapphire so still could be initial batch. Doesnt really matter now for mining but for resale value I'd consider flashing them later.

1125/2200 @ .9V = 27MH/s - same as my XFX. Dropped my mining rig wall power almost 150w over the 280x toxic it replaced.

BEST MINING CARD EVER!

 

[IEC]

RX 480 is indeed the best mining card ever. At ~100W each undervolted producing 27MH/s and at $199 (or less) a pop the 4GB model is fantastic. And you need very little spacing between the cards with reference blowers, making density in milk crates easy.

 

[suklee]

Hmm, hard to tell from that picture.

A few suggestions. Plug in a computer speaker if you have a spare one, it should give you beep codes that will help you diagnose the problem. Try resetting the CMOS.
Switch the memory to the other slot (no you don't need two sticks for it to work). Try plugging in a molex adapter to the motherboard above the CPU area, doubt it's needed to fire up but I'm not familiar with that board. Re-seat the 24 pin and 8 pin power plugs.
Switch to the VGA port instead of HDMI. Try adding an actual video card to the x16 slot and see if it fires up.

Tried VGA port on the H61 Pro, no dice and tried both memory slots. (The Molex connectors according to the manual are for multiple GPUs)

It seems to be rebooting in a quick 10 second loop, CPU fan spins up for a bit, then will shut off and restart again. I did try a 480 in the x16 slot before but it didn't boot up either. Plugged in a speaker to the 3.5mm jack but no beeps (btw, POST beeps will come through the 3.5mm? I didn't see any SPK pins on the mobo)

Will take the board/cpu/memory to the shops and see if another DDR3 stick will get it to POST. If it won't then it must be a bad mobo?

On my current Z97 Gaming 7 I so far have managed to get 4x480 cards going... 2 directly on the mobo and 2 via USB risers... You think I can hook utilise all 7 pci e slots? But my PSU will quickly run out of molex connectors, if each molex cable should only power one riser. I'm still running them ~24Mh @60-65W&C

Edit: H61 Pro POSTED! With the same memory (1 or 2 sticks, both work), and a cheapo Corsair CX430 power supply. why won't it POST with the RM1000i?
update - might be a bad stick of RAM

 

[Paratus]

Anyone have a feel for if its worth trying to do Etherium mining on my single 7970 ghz edition? Power for me is 6.6 cents per kWh?

 

[Madpacket]

Got my first ref 8GB, memory clock the worst compare to the rest, it can only mine at 2150 memory, :\ but it has the lowest ASIC rating though. ^_^

At 1025/2150 900mv, it saves 8W on GPU.



At 1125/2150 1100mv, the 83.7% is the only one throttling down as I leave the power limit at 0%.

Interesting, thanks for very much for the GPU-Z graphs. I'm starting to see the trend here with higher ASIC rated cards throttling soonest.

Hopefully after I get my hands on enough units I can compare directly between them at the exact same settings to get an idea what cards are best for mining (higher asic vs. lower asic, or maybe somewhere in the middle).

 

[Madpacket]

Will take the board/cpu/memory to the shops and see if another DDR3 stick will get it to POST. If it won't then it must be a bad mobo?

Appears as such always good to take it to a shop and have them look at it to double check.

Also for the computer speaker I should been more clear. You need to hook up a tiny computer speaker (those little black ones with the magnets exposed and are not enclosed) to the motherboard speaker pin-out. There should be a series of pins for computer speaker near where you would plug in your power, reset and hdd leads. If you have a speaker hooked up that way you should hear BIOS beep codes..

 

[Madpacket]

Anyone have a feel for if its worth trying to do Etherium mining on my single 7970 ghz edition? Power for me is 6.6 cents per kWh?

At that price yes, 6.6 per kWh is very cheap. You could even buy up second hand 290/390's and still make a good profit. After 12 cents or so it starts to get pretty expensive once you have more than 8-10 cards.

 

[Madpacket]

BEST MINING CARD EVER!

RX 480 is indeed the best mining card ever. At ~100W each undervolted producing 27MH/s and at $199 (or less) a pop the 4GB model is fantastic. And you need very little spacing between the cards with reference blowers, making density in milk crates easy.

Agreed

I wish I could get my hands on 4GB units. In Canada they're basically nowhere to be had unless you were around for the 15-20 minutes NewEgg had them in stock a few days ago. I'm aiming for 6x480's in a single milk crate, not sure if it'll work but I have to give it a shot. 160Mh in a single milk crate consuming 650-700W from the wall would be awesome.

 

[suklee]

Appears as such always good to take it to a shop and have them look at it to double check.

some good news! I 'found' an old Crucial M4 128gb ssd laying around and for some reason the board now works with 2x4gb memory sticks installed... I got a stick of Kingston 4gb as back up in case. Installed w10 and Now hashing with 2 cards on h61 + 4 in my rig.. Trying your settings for 27mh and working nicely!

 

[IEC]

What's up with the recent ETH price movement?

Not that I'm complaining, because I basically recouped the cost of 1 of my video cards already...

 

[EightySix Four]

What's up with the recent ETH price movement?

Not that I'm complaining, because I basically recouped the cost of 1 of my video cards already...

There was a huge project on the Ethereum blockchain called the DAO.

The DAO was hacked and the ETH was stolen. Think like ~15% of all ETH vulnerable.

The hack had a waiting period before the funds could be withdrawn by the attacker.

The ETH developers built a hardfork for the blockchain which returned all of the vulnerable ETH to the holders of the DAO tokens.

The deployment of this completed on Wednesday, removing a ton of market uncertainty.

 

[thilanliyan]

I think it has to do with the hard fork that just happened.

EDIT: Beaten to it.

 

[IEC]

Makes sense. So 15% restored, price goes up just about as much, discounted a bit for the uncertainty. Seems about right.

 

[n0x1ous]

Makes sense. So 15% restored, price goes up just about as much, discounted a bit for the uncertainty. Seems about right.

It was at $20 per eth right before the hack so it still has a ways to go to fully recover, but its been a nice steady climb upwards since wednesday

 

[Trends]

Those risers look great. A quick search on eBay brings nothing up though. Do you mind sharing where you got them from?

For what it's worth Bitcoinware.net in Toronto has risers in stock @ $13

 

[n0x1ous]

Mr. Teal - still wondering if you can link us to those risers from yesterday that had the 6pin pcie power plug?

 

[Madpacket]

For what it's worth Bitcoinware.net in Toronto has risers in stock @ $13

Yes I've ordered dozens of risers from them. However yesterday eBay had a $20 off $75.00 coupon. I ended up ordering the identical risers from eBay. Sure they'll take a month to get here but it only cost me $73.00 in total for 12 risers