Bitcoin Forum

For those of you who are wondering how much difference the right combination of OS, SDK, mining software, and overclocking can make, learn from my tale as illustrated by this graph:
http://ryepdx.com/bitcoin/mining_rig_evolution.png

Section 1:
This is where I began setting up my rigs. One 2x6990 running Ubuntu 11.04, SDK 2.3, Diablo Miner. Clocked at 950/300. Probably throttling a bit due to overheating.

Section 2:
Rig #2 comes online. It's a 3x5970 running Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit, SDK 2.1, and Diablo Miner. Stock settings in the first section. With each break you can see where I took the system offline to try retooling things. The software stayed the same, but I experimented with different core overclocks and memory underclocks. At the end I was running 900/175 on the 2x6990 and 850/300 on the 3x5970. Overheating is a pretty big problem for a couple of the 5970s, even though I'm using PCIe extenders. The 6990s are cool and stable, though only giving me a combined output of 1Gh/s.

Section 3:
A gap where I take the whole system down again to install SDK 2.4 on the 6990 machine. Clocked at 900/300. I also switch to the phatk kernel on phoenix. The part of this section after the gap is my 2x6990 rig all by itself.

Section 4:
I put a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit and SDK 2.1 on my 3x5970 box and start using the poclbm kernel on phoenix. Clocked at 825/175. Everything's running cool, with a peak temperature of ~79 degrees celcius on my 3x5970.

Full disclosure:
Both rigs are caseless. The 6990 rig runs in the upper 60s to mid 70s range with 3 fans. The 5970 runs in the upper 60s to 70s range with 2 fans. All fans used are Scythe Ultra Kazes. I also have a table fan blowing directly on the 5970. Both rigs sit beneath an open window. It gets to be around 49F/9C at night where I live, which keeps things nice and cool. So far I've noticed a slight difference between my daytime hashing power and my nighttime hashing power due to the temperature changes.

Have you tried phatk with 2.4? I wish Newegg and Amazon would restock their cards so I can expand faster.

I haven't tried phatk with 2.4 on my 3x5970 rig, though, primarily because I can't get pyopencl to accept the 2.4 SDK on Ubuntu 11.04 64 bit and I can't get my three cards to work with Ubuntu 32 bit. Otherwise I'd probably be 2.4 and phatk all the way.


Yeah. It's hard to come by cards at a decent price these days, for sure.

Link to Pic?  Full Specs?  pls and ty ;)

Nice writeup. What are you using to get the data into MRTG/RRDTool?

Forthcoming. At work right now.


I mine at Eligius.

I'm confused.  All I see is you stacking your rigs on the graph and can hardly see the difference in performance boost. 

Can you post numbers?  The graph is very misleading IMO.

Sure, though I have to admit I didn't keep any raw numbers so I'm just going off the graph myself.

Sections 1 and 3 are really just incidental. I included them for completeness. You can really see the effect of the software between sections 2 and 4, where I have both miners running. In section 2 I was getting an average of around 2.4 Gh/s. That was running Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit, SDK 2.1, and Diablo Miner on the 3x5990 rig and Ubuntu 11.04, SDK 2.3, and Diablo Miner on the 2x6990 rig. In section 4 I was getting an average of 3.3Gh/s. That was running Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit, SDK 2.1, and phoenix with the poclbm kernel on the 3x5970 machine and Ubuntu 11.04 32-bit, SDK 2.4, and phoenix with the phatk kernel on the 2x6990 machine. My clock settings in section 4 were comparable to the clock settings I used in the last part of section 2. As you can see, there's about a 1Gh/s difference between the two sections.

link broken...