Ethereum GPU mining?

[Erenhardt]

Thanks for the feedback. 400-450W seems pretty high for only 52Mh?

high idle, but hey. Power is relatively cheap here! I could put a dedicated mining rig with low power two core CPU, but then I couldn't game in the mean time

 

[Madpacket]

high idle, but hey. Power is relatively cheap here! I could put a dedicated mining rig with low power two core CPU, but then I couldn't game in the mean time

Fair enough!

 

[SK10H]

Im running 1050MHz at 0.9V (you actually set the core voltage at the memory voltage settings in WTFmann)

I agree.

Finally can undervolt, although core setting still sort of applies.

 

[suklee]

You using 390s? You may have to edit the BIOS with HawaiiBIOSReader or something like that.

It's a MSI Gaming 290x. Never used that BIOS reader before, will check it out.

A couple years back Stilt released some custom BIOS for the 290s... do you guys still use those? https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=12830.msg121827#msg121827

BTW, I just picked up a HIS Radeon 480. Would it matter which card (290x or 480) goes on the top PCI e slot? The 290x is water cooled with a Kraken G10, so should run cooler than the 480... maybe the cooler card (290x) should be placed on the bottom?

I'm very satisfied with 290x gaming performance at 1440p, and the 480 will be used as a dedicated mining card.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I have used The Stilt's BIOSes . . . they didn't seem to help that much, but then I might just be an eegnoramoos. Some of my cards did not like using those files. And a 290x is definitely something you can use with HawaiiBIOSReader. Does it have a dual BIOS? If so then you're pretty much guaranteed an out in case something goes wrong.

Which card you put where has to do with the cooling and airflow situation in your case. Ideally the hottest card would go into whichever airstream is a). fastest and b). has the most direct line of exit from the case.

If the air is stagnant, then yes put the hotter card on top.

 

[suklee]

My card does have dual bios switch- http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/msi-radeon-r9-290x-gaming-oc-review,3.html

I have a corsair carbide 500r case but no where to mount the radiator for the 290x (giant noctua nh-d14 cpu heat sink gets in the way) so my case is open for now... I guess that will qualify as stagnant air!

Just ran DDU and will pop in the 480 at the top slot. if I game using the 290x in the bottom slot, do I lose 'some' speed because it's not full pcie 16x?

PS. Is it possible (or desirable) to set up each GPU as a separate 'worker' as I mine?

 

[DrMrLordX]

You may lose some bandwidth using the bottom slot, but actual performance loss won't be that great.

You can set up each GPU as a separate worker depending on how you do things. I do that in Win10 on my daily driver by logging in separately and having a separate copy of the DAG so there is no conflict there. If you use Claymore or one of the 110-branch builds of the Genoil miner, you can avoid that requirement (both generate that DAG on-card directly).

There might not be much benefit to setting up each GPU as a separate worker in an extra client session unless you want to be able to bring down your mining operation on a card-by-card basis instead of having to kill the miner and relaunch it with one less card whenever you need to shut down a particular piece of hardware.

 

[suklee]

Got both cards installed now but 290x hashrate has gone down, compared to when it was the only card.

I tried running two instances of claymore but got a socket 10048 error. I'd like to keep the 480 running 24/7 and turn on/off my 290x as I game or for general usage. Maybe the solution is to try logging in as another user like you do?

And I'm having the same issue as before.. In Wattman I can't downclock the memory. I can underclock gpu to 900 but memory is stuck at 2000.


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[DrMrLordX]

Were you using the same drivers when you had only the 290x running solo?

Also, you can try the extra login trick, though be warned that sometimes the "background" user may lock up/temporarily lock up (under Win10 anyway), causing the miner software running under that login to halt operation. All it takes to restart it is to log in as that user, highlight the terminal containing the miner, and press some keys until it starts back up (sometimes ctrl-c starts it up, which is odd). You will have to monitor it somehow, such as through your pool's account page, to see which miner is down (I recommend assigning a different miner name to the client running under the other account).

Alternatively, you can just put together two batch files - one for two cards and one for a single card - and kill/restart the miner whenever you want to activate or deactivate the 290x. Claymore can run using only particular cards in your system. If you have no iGPU (or if your iGPU is non-GCN) then you can actually do the same thing with ethminer, though ethminer's startup time is long enough that you might not want to do that. Claymore starts up pretty quickly, as does the Genoil miner.

I have no experience with Wattman or the 480 so you may have to wait for some decent BIOS editing tools/info to get the memory speeds you want out of that card.

 

[Accord99]

I tried running two instances of claymore but got a socket 10048 error. I'd like to keep the 480 running 24/7 and turn on/off my 290x as I game or for general usage. Maybe the solution is to try logging in as another user like you do?

I would just create two batch files, one that tells the miner to use both GPUs and the other that only uses the 480 and run which ever one is applicable at that time.

The command line option in Claymore is:

-di GPU indexes, default is all available GPUs. For example, if you have four GPUs "-di 02" will enable only first and third GPUs (#0 and #2).

 

[Madpacket]

So spent some time tonight tweaking a bit more. Pretty great results for this card. I think its better than average from reading other people's feedback.

http://imgur.com/a/51luW

27Mh @ 155W from the wall. 70W From GPU-Z core voltage so add another 35W board power or so you can see after 10% loss for power supply (assuming 90% efficiency) I'm just under 100W for this card.

tldr; 27.2Mh just under 100W. Old 290 severely undervolted card 25.4Mh around 170W.

Now imagine power savings when I replace twenty cards with these new 480's.

Fun times. No stock in Canada at all for these Rx480's.

Zotac Geforce 1070 sitting in unopened box. I want to open but silly issues like massive DPC latency, and hacks to get Vive working due to lack of HDMI ports. Not cool.

If it could mine running at 30+Mh I would consider keeping it but all I keep reading about is silly hacks under Linux to maybe get it going. No thanks.

 

[suklee]

Were you using the same drivers when you had only the 290x running solo?

Oh yes I totally forgot about that.. Had 15.12 before and was doing about 29/690 eth/sia but now with the driver upgrade I'm getting 26/600. I can't do -100mv on core voltage anymore either as it has hard locked couple times already.

480 is only doing 22/430, disappointing but lots of tweaking ahead. Eth only the 480 is doing 24Mh.

PS is it just me or does Wattman not work very well? Half the time I can't even change the core freq properly. Afterburner beta doesn't support 480... Is there another util 480 users can use for tweaking?




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[suklee]

By the way... *suppose* I could get my hands on 6x 480s, what mobo/ power supply would rig builders recommend?

 

[Erenhardt]

So spent some time tonight tweaking a bit more. Pretty great results for this card. I think its better than average from reading other people's feedback.

http://imgur.com/a/51luW

27Mh @ 155W from the wall. 70W From GPU-Z core voltage so add another 35W board power or so you can see after 10% loss for power supply (assuming 90% efficiency) I'm just under 100W for this card.

tldr; 27.2Mh just under 100W. Old 290 severely undervolted card 25.4Mh around 170W.

Now imagine power savings when I replace twenty cards with these new 480's.

Fun times. No stock in Canada at all for these Rx480's.

Zotac Geforce 1070 sitting in unopened box. I want to open but silly issues like massive DPC latency, and hacks to get Vive working due to lack of HDMI ports. Not cool.

If it could mine running at 30+Mh I would consider keeping it but all I keep reading about is silly hacks under Linux to maybe get it going. No thanks.

I have similar settings and speeds, but WTFman doesn't let me set voltage under 0.9V.
The power delta from idle to mining is around 120Watts for 480.
my 290 with -200mv at stock locks has power delta oif 180watts and mines at the same rate.

So a single 480 gives 60 watts power savings over r9 290. That is 30% less power.

 

[DrMrLordX]

suklee, your experience with driver version updates on your Hawaii mirrors my own. I have yet to get full performance from any driver past 16.2.1 with Hawaii, even using Claymore. Getting Hawaii and Polaris to play along together on the same system for mining may be tricky.

You can try to run DDU to wipe clean all previous driver versions and clean install the latest Crimson to see if that will work with Claymore.

By the way... *suppose* I could get my hands on 6x 480s, what mobo/ power supply would rig builders recommend?

Depends on how much juice you're gonna pull per card. Assuming a peak 150W each, that's "only" 900W from the PSU, so a 1200W-1300W PSU will do nicely. Cue the usual EVGA 1300W g2 recommendations.

As for the board? You'll need something like the ASRock H97 Anniversary. It's relatively cheap and has 5 PCI-e 1x slots (plus one 16x slot).

 

[Madpacket]

I have similar settings and speeds, but WTFman doesn't let me set voltage under 0.9V.
The power delta from idle to mining is around 120Watts for 480.
my 290 with -200mv at stock locks has power delta oif 180watts and mines at the same rate.

So a single 480 gives 60 watts power savings over r9 290. That is 30% less power.

Maybe it depends on ASIC rating but I'm getting at least 70W savings and 1.6Mhz higher mining performance with my 480 over a reference 290. Difference is even larger with 390's.

That's a significant difference!

Perhaps a custom Stilt BIOS flash may lower the 290 wattage another 10 or 15 but it's still significantly behind on performance per watt.

Wattman is quirky but I think I figured it out. You just need to ignore the GPU voltage and set the memory voltage (which controls both?). I can't go under 800mv, but no problems going under 900mv. Perhaps your default voltage is much higher? What's your ASIC rating and default voltage?

Should be interesting to see how a 1060 performs. I'm guessing no more than 21/22Mh at around the same wattage as a properly undervolted 480. The Rx470 will probably match it but cost $100.00 less.

 

[Madpacket]

By the way... *suppose* I could get my hands on 6x 480s, what mobo/ power supply would rig builders recommend?

ASRock H97 Anniversary as already recommended by DrMrLordX.. This board is actually available on NewEgg for cheap and you can pickup a celeron for $50, and a 4GB stick for $15 but grab a single 8GB stick instead as it's not much more and will speed things up a bit. Buy a 1.35v DIMM to save watts. I also recommend a 120GB MLC SSD. It'll save you setup time for interruptions from critical patch installations etc, this will make up cost difference from using a mechanical drive. Although a tad cheaper, the TLC drives tend to use a bit more power under load but idle power is most important.

I havent done the research on which drives have the best idle power states so I don't have specific recommendations sorry.

Make sure you buy quality powered risers or you'll have a tough time getting all the cards to be recognised by the OS. Add one card at a time. Make your primary card use the x16 slot. Disable onboard crap like extra drive controllers, sound, etc. Undervolt and underclock your CPU as well. 2Ghz is plenty. This should get you to under 30W idle.

The nice thing about the Rx480 is you can save money on the power supply. 850W is plenty for 6 cards. EVGA G2 or Corsair RMX would fit the bill. Of course if you catch a good deal on a 1KW EVGA G/P2 grab that instead but don't bother if it's more than $25.00.

 

[MrTeal]

ASRock H97 Anniversary as already recommended by DrMrLordX.. This board is actually available on NewEgg for cheap and you can pickup a celeron for $50, and a 4GB stick for $15 but grab a single 8GB stick instead as it's not much more and will speed things up a bit. Buy a 1.35v DIMM to save watts. I also recommend a 120GB MLC SSD. It'll save you setup time for interruptions from critical patch installations etc, this will make up cost difference from using a mechanical drive. Although a tad cheaper, the TLC drives tend to use a bit more power under load but idle power is most important.

I havent done the research on which drives have the best idle power states so I don't have specific recommendations sorry.

Make sure you buy quality powered risers or you'll have a tough time getting all the cards to be recognised by the OS. Add one card at a time. Make your primary card use the x16 slot. Disable onboard crap like extra drive controllers, sound, etc. Undervolt and underclock your CPU as well. 2Ghz is plenty. This should get you to under 30W idle.

The nice thing about the Rx480 is you can save money on the power supply. 850W is plenty for 6 cards. EVGA G2 or Corsair RMX would fit the bill. Of course if you catch a good deal on a 1KW EVGA G/P2 grab that instead but don't bother if it's more than $25.00.

I wouldn't spend an outrageous amount more on a bigger power supply, but outside of the obvious benefit going with a bigger one (saving power due to higher efficiency), you also generally get more cables on a larger supply. IE, the 1000G2 has six PCI-e cables and six peripheral/SATA cables, while the 850W has four PCI-e and four perif/sata cables. Electrically I wouldn't be worried about the PCIe at all, but depending on your powered risers (isolated vs shared 12V) it'd be nice to have a separate cable to feed each riser since the peripheral and sata cables only have one 12V wire each.

That being said, you can't go wrong with the two you recommended. In Canada I'd be really tempted by the Zalman 1250W platinum unit that Amazon is selling for $150 no rebate (with free shipping if you have Prime). Not only is probably around 4% more efficient than something like an 850G2 at an 800W DC load (which translates to about 24kWh a month) but it's $10 cheaper and has a buttload of cables. The only thing to watch out for is the crappy 18 gauge power cord they ship with it.

 

[RussianSensation]

Should be interesting to see how a 1060 performs. I'm guessing no more than 21/22Mh at around the same wattage as a properly undervolted 480. The Rx470 will probably match it but cost $100.00 less.

I am starting to think the RX 470 overclocked could be an awesome mining card if the memory can overclock as well as on the RX 480. It seems the mining speed on the RX 480 isn't that sensitive to shader speed/GPU clocks?

RX 470 = 2048 SPs x 1206mhz = 4.94Tflops
RX 480 = 2304 SPs x 1266mhz = 5.83Tflops

That's an 18% disadvantage in theoretical performance. That means if the memory on the RX 470 can be overclocked to RX 480 speeds, it should mine similarly to a 1073mhz RX 480. At $149, that would be a sweet deal!

Can you test the hashing speed difference between a 1266mhz RX 480 and a 1073mhz RX 480? Just curious as to what the differences are with 8000mhz memory speed.

---

Any news on GTX1070's mining rate under Windows 10? I am interested in putting 1070 SLI into my main rig and mine on the side but I want to do it under Windows not Linux.

 

[thilanliyan]

Any news on GTX1070's mining rate under Windows 10? I am interested in putting 1070 SLI into my main rig and mine on the side but I want to do it under Windows not Linux.

Haven't seen anything different from what it was before...meaning it's extremely slow (like 4MHs or something like that) in Windows.

 

[codyray10]

suklee, your experience with driver version updates on your Hawaii mirrors my own. I have yet to get full performance from any driver past 16.2.1 with Hawaii, even using Claymore. Getting Hawaii and Polaris to play along together on the same system for mining may be tricky.

Sounds like I've had the opposite experience from the both of you. I'm mining with a 290 + 480 with no issues at all. The 290 is my primary card, the 480 is only mining. I'm using the latest drivers, with Claymore 4.5. I'm running -10% core @ 1v/2250 memory at .980. GPU-Z power draw reads 85W. 290 is overclocked and undervolted. Pulling 57-58 Mh/s

 

[Erenhardt]

31+27 same as me. But I run 480 as a primary card. I can even play games while mining on it

 

[Erenhardt]

Maybe it depends on ASIC rating but I'm getting at least 70W savings and 1.6Mhz higher mining performance with my 480 over a reference 290. Difference is even larger with 390's.

That's a significant difference!

Perhaps a custom Stilt BIOS flash may lower the 290 wattage another 10 or 15 but it's still significantly behind on performance per watt.

Wattman is quirky but I think I figured it out. You just need to ignore the GPU voltage and set the memory voltage (which controls both?). I can't go under 800mv, but no problems going under 900mv. Perhaps your default voltage is much higher? What's your ASIC rating and default voltage?

Should be interesting to see how a 1060 performs. I'm guessing no more than 21/22Mh at around the same wattage as a properly undervolted 480. The Rx470 will probably match it but cost $100.00 less.

My on stock is running at 1.075V. I can set it in Wattman down to 900mv, typing lower values doesn't do anything. I figured out voltage control for the whole card is at the memory settings.
My asic is 82,1%

My best settings is 980mhz core 2200 memory giving me 25-26mhs at 73watts reported by gpu-z

But I run it at 1020-1050 on core with 0.95 to 1v and 2250 memory mining 27+ mh/s. It got cold outside, so why not have some heat

my 290 is running 1100core/1150mem with -75mv undervolt which is 30+MH/s
on stock I can mine with -200mv O_O which gives 27MHs

 

[DrMrLordX]

Sounds like I've had the opposite experience from the both of you. I'm mining with a 290 + 480 with no issues at all. The 290 is my primary card, the 480 is only mining. I'm using the latest drivers, with Claymore 4.5. I'm running -10% core @ 1v/2250 memory at .980. GPU-Z power draw reads 85W. 290 is overclocked and undervolted. Pulling 57-58 Mh/s

Odd. I might have to run DDU myself and give newer drivers a spin one of these days, but for right now, I have no incentive to do so.

 

[codyray10]

My on stock is running at 1.075V. I can set it in Wattman down to 900mv, typing lower values doesn't do anything. I figured out voltage control for the whole card is at the memory settings.
My asic is 82,1%

My best settings is 980mhz core 2200 memory giving me 25-26mhs at 73watts reported by gpu-z

But I run it at 1020-1050 on core with 0.95 to 1v and 2250 memory mining 27+ mh/s. It got cold outside, so why not have some heat

my 290 is running 1100core/1150mem with -75mv undervolt which is 30+MH/s
on stock I can mine with -200mv O_O which gives 27MHs

Our 290 clocks and undervolts are similar. What power limit do you run at? I run 1100/1200 -62mv core and -20% power limit for 30.7 Mh/s