Bitcoin Forum

I'm looking at some HD 6770s starting @ $79.00 and below (depending on qty). IIRC, hashrate is > 200MH/s, but what is wattage?

I can get a bundle of these cards on the cheap-cheap, and they seem decent for the price... only concern is power consumption. But I can't find it online and I'm browsing on a piece of junk phone. Can anyone tell me the power consumption ASAP?

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/asus_radeon_hd_6770_directcu_silent_review,5.html

Thanks, I bought one to try it out. 230MH/sec @ 88W for < $80 didn't sound bad at all, considering that my GTX-580 is only doing 140MH/s @ 240W!... That's about 3MH/$ and 2.61MH/W, which is pretty cost-effective for a GPU... If I like this GPU I can get bulk pricing on them for much, much cheaper... would be able to assemble a nice farm and sell the cards when I'm done with my investor demo.  8)

Just to be sure: There will not be any conflict running my GTX-580 and this new HD-6770 on my Gigabyte mobo, right?

http://dev.bitcoinx.com/profit/ is your friend. Plug those numbers in (230Mh, 88watts, $80), and you can see your estimated earnings. It shows for me 0.03BTC/day, and would take over 3 years to break-even. I expect you will end up never breaking even, as that time frame does not take into account the 10x (minimum) increase in difficulty that will be as result of ASICs over the next 6 months. My 2 cents.

Unless you want to upgrade your PC to play around and you have free electricity, I would suggest purchasing coins.
As for the GPUs playing nice together, try it and see. I know some that mix as you want to do with good results while others complain of constant issues. Personally, I have never tried it as I have several boxes with only 1 brand in each. Good luck with whatever you decide.

Thanks!  :)

I'm not trying to profit from this HD 6770. It's just for a live demo to show our shareholders how Bitcoin mining works, and prove to them that the Bitcoins produced can actually be converted to cold, hard cash.

Also, I view a GPU or any other mining equipment as part of the company's capital. The card can be re-sold to someone else to get back a portion of the initial investment (perhaps a bit more, because I can get em very cheap). So the card only needs to return a few bucks in a couple months time to be in the black. The important thing, however, is that my shareholders get to see the rig in person and see how it works... it would be hard to otherwise convince them I can spend a bunch of money on little computer chips and manufacture some strange new form of money called "Bitcoin" -- unless they see it for themselves.

@ crazyates ::

Oh yes, that calculator has already become my best friend. It was one of the first things that sold me on the idea of Bitcoin. ;-)

EDIT ::

Just installed the 6770 beneath my GTX-580 but the system doesn't detect its presence. The instructions didn't say anything about connecting a PCI-E power cable to the card, but it looks like it does indeed need one, correct (which explains why it ain't juicin up lol)?

Also, I haven't shopped for GPUs in a good while. Head-to-head, how does the 6770 compare to my 580? Is it a better card? Would I be better off running 2x 6770s in "Crossfire" mode (seems likely)?

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

Nevermind, I got it... for some reason the card didn't come with ANY of the necessary cables. Luckily, I had the right adapter in my desk drawer. Card now working fine.

Well, no it isn't... The system detected it when I first booted it up and said it was installing drivers >> "Your device is now ready to use"...

But GUIMiner doesn't even detect the HD 6770... WTF...  :-\

Download the 11.12 drivers directly from ATI, as those were the newest drivers that included the 2.5 SDK. Install the drivers and the included SDK, and see what GUIminer says.

You got a link for that? I can't seem to find 11.12 drivers.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonaiw_vista64.aspx#1

That page shows me only v12.11 Beta drivers... Can't seem to find it anywhere else on the AMD site either...

EDIT ::

Note that at first the card was not working or even being detected by Win7... So I checked device manager -- it was showing the yellow exclamation mark for an unidentified graphics device. I then clicked "Update Driver" and it successfully downloaded and installed driver. Then it popped up as "HD RADEON 6770" as a new graphics device, and it says "Device is working properly" and shows "No conflicts". But GUIMiner still won't detect the card. Now I'm trying ATI's "auto-detect" driver installation tool to see if I have the latest/proper drivers. If that doesn't work either I'll have to manually find this v11.12 like you said...but I dunno where/how to find it.

LOL! Ok, I used ATI's auto-detect driver installer tool... then I reboot my system and fire up GUIMiner... Now it shows my Intel i7 processor as a selectable device for mining; whereas before it only showed my GTX-580! Dunno why on earth installing ATI drivers for this HD 6770 would suddenly make GUIMiner detect my CPU but NOT the new GPU... WTF LOL!!!!

BTW, I'd actually prefer to use CGMiner over GUIMiner... I've used it for Litecoin mining before. As a matter of fact, I had my own batch file to run it and mine Litecoin on my GTX-580... But since I've installed this HD-6770 that suddenly stopped working. When I try to run the batch file ("Launch_LTC.bat") CGMiner just immediately returns and the console closes. Same thing if I click on cgminer.exe.

This is some weird stuff...

The 11.12 driver I was telling you about can be found here: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/previous/11/Pages/radeon.aspx?os=Windows%20Vista%20-%2064-Bit%20Edition&rev=11.12

Open up a cmd prompt and run "cgminer.exe -n". You need 2 main things installed, a driver and an OpenCL runtime. Just installing the driver thru device manager will not install a runtime (or SDK). Device manager will tell you what driver you're using, and that command will tell you what runtime you have available.

http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/521/cmdcgm.jpg

 lol :'(

So the Runtime is installed. Sounds like a driver issue?

Another random thought. I doubt very many headless rigs are running the 12.11 beta (which you said you installed), so maybe you need a dummy plug with that driver version? Try plugging an old/spare monitor into the 6770.

also it looks like he installed not 11.12, but 12.10 (or something like that), judging from the amd app version.

Dunno why your 6770 isnt detecting. I got 32 gpus spread across 6 rigs and they all mine. Using 11.12 or 12.1 driver, ATI Stream SDK 2.1 installed in addition to whatever sdk is normally installed with those drivers. I select "gpu-platform" : 1 in my config file, uses the older faster sdk, mines away happily.

But I'm also not using any nvidia. Try just the 6770.

I dunno if I have a dummy plug... Well, I'm sure I do but it's buried under tons of fossilized computer parts (like DDR RAM chips and CRT monitor adapters lol).

But that does make sense, and I'll bet you're right. I'm sure switching my TV's HDMI cable to the 6770 would have the same effect? And if that doesn't work try switching my monitor to the 6770?

I tested my game engine against the 6770 and it says there's nothing wrong with it... My engine has what's called a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer), and I ran the implementations based on DXGI (DirectX Graphics Infrastructure) 1.0 and 1.1. Not only can it detect the card but my code can read all of its CAPs -- from amount of VRAM to VendorID. I didn't try but I'm also quite positive it would be trivial to run compute shaders or PhysX on it. So I firmly believe I've installed the card properly...

I'll try these recommendations and report back with the results...

Thanks,

--ATC--

First tried my HDTV w/ HDMI connected to the card, then switched my actual monitor over... still no change -- the 6770 is not detected by GUIMiner and I can't get any other miner to work. I can't even mine Litecoin on my GTX-580 anymore with cgminer. Only thing that works is CPU mining or GTX-580 mining with GUIMiner.

Now I'm also seeing some queer things... when I start Windows a lot of programs are just crashing for no reason now. WTF!!!  ???

You will need a dummy plug and welcome to the world of mixed GPUs. You can make one pretty cheap. I would put it on the Nvidia and the monitor on the AMD and see if mining works.
http://www.overclock.net/t/384733/the-30-second-dummy-plug

Yes, I've heard about the multitude of mixed-GPU problems...  and this is my first time doing it... :-[

How about this... Would TWO of these HD 6770s setup in "Crossfire" mode out-perform my GTX-580 in gaming? Because I'll go buy another one today and do it in a heartbeat; would give me both a bad ass game development rig and a decent miner with low power reqs.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/his_radeon_6770_iceqx_turbo_crossfire_review,1.html  Crossfire for mining, I wouldn't. If you don't crossfire you will still need a dummy plug.

I'm gonna shut down, remove my GTX-580 and try the 6770 solo to see what happens...  :P

Ok, that works... Now GUIMiner shows me a new GPU device named "Juniper"...

But... It's only pushing about 127.5MH/sec???  ???

The mining hardware comparison page said this thing should hit over 220MH/s.... which is the only reason I bought the damn thing... If it's only capable of 127 then it was a total waste of money and I'll need to go return it immediately.

This is actually slower than my GTX-580...

6770's will do over 200 with mild overclocks. I operate two Sapphire 6770's w/ bASIC-MINING and both exceed 200MH/s. One does 1020 core @ stock voltage. Just fiddle with them awhile till you find the right overclock. You want them right on the edge of instability.

Oh, ok... I thought those stats on the page were for right out of the box, not over-clocked.

Should I use Afterburner?

I haven't done the math in awhile, but I believe they're still the most efficient cards I run and the fact that they only use one PCIe connector is a plus. The only downside is that they offer relatively low hashes while using a PCIe slot on your mobo. A slot that could be taken by a 79xx, 59xx, or 58xx.

I've never really been into over-clocking... I've always left my hardware at manufacturer settings for a few reasons:

1) long lifespan and resale value
2) I'm a DirectX dev and need to test on "stock" hardware -- which most people are running
3) system stability
4) etc, etc...

So this is a new challenge for me. Should I tamper with Afterburner as my mining app is running, or is it necessary to shut it down, change settings and try again?

Also, could you tell me how you have yours clocked so I can copy your profile and test it?

Just guessing off the top of my head I'm thinking:

920Mhz for core clock
1300MHz for mem clock

 Sound like a good starting point? ???

EDIT ::

920 & 1300 got me up to 140MH/sec, which is almost even with the "stock" GTX-580... So I guess I just keep on tweaking it upward...

This does make me kind of nervous though lol, cuz I'm a n00b to overclocking. How do I know the "red zone" at which I could damage my hardware?

Underclock the snot out of the RAM for lower temps and zero affect on performance.

I just committed a major boo-boo... crashed the card... Thank God I didn't scorch it lol...  really... don't... know what I'm doing... lol ::)

You will likely have to unlock afterburner with the EULA config mod. After that do as suggested and lower memory clocks as low as possible(start with 600). This lowers power consumption and reduces heat. This can usually be done without exiting the mining program, just check it before you leave. One of my cards does 970 and the other does 1010 happily.

Ok, it makes sense to me why I should lower the RAM speed... Bitcoin mining uses SHA-256 and we barely even use our GPUs' RAM (quite the opposite with Litecoin/Scrypt) -- so lowering clock speed on the RAM will keep my card cooler and more efficient...

But... What settings do I need on my core? What's the "danger zone"?

Uh oh... GUIMiner no longer detects my GPU...  ???

That's card specific and can vary wildly from card to card. That said, it's probably safe to assume they'll do 950ish. 6770s don't get very hot at all either.

Edit: The latest versions of BFGMiner are very nice, I tend to use it for BTC mining and have CGMiner set up for LTC Mining.

Yeah, something is very wrong here... "Juniper" (the HD 6770) is no longer a detected device and I can't use it anymore... It was all working fine until I tampered with clock settings and my card crashed...

However, I'm using the card now and it does display and seems to be working ok.... WTF...

EDIT::

I ran a D3D11 sample (rendering rotating triangle) with my game engine to ensure the card still works for 3D/gaming... worked fine... Ran ArmA II: Reinforcements for confirmation and it also worked fine. So it doesn't appear that the card has been damaged at all. I also put everything back to factory clock settings. But it's still gone as far as GUIMiner, cgminer or any other mining app is concerned...

Ok, I re-installed AMD Catalyst package with .NET 4.0 support and now GUIMiner can detect "Juniper" (the HD 6770) again... Whew... Glad to have that fixed. Now I can get back to trying to over-clock at get > 200MH/sec performance...

Still open to suggestions on core clock speed and mem clock speed. Also, how about fan speed? Should I just leave it on "auto"?

Maxed out the core clock @ 960MHz and the best it can do is 145Mh/sec...  ::)

Because you're using the newest AMD APP, which is probably 2.7. 2.7 and 2.6 blow HORRIBLY for anything that doesn't absolutely require it (see radeon 7000 series). Use 2.1, 2.4, or 2.5 (I recommend 2.1, but you won't be able to use it on that driver. I think the newest driver that supports 2.1 is 12.3, but you should still probably use 11.12 or 12.1).

Uninstall the entire thing, delete amdocl64.dll, amdoclcl64.dll, and OpenCL.dll from C:\windows\system32 and amdocl.dll, amdoclcl.dll, and OpenCL.dll from C:\windows\SysWOW64. For whatever reason, amd app and opencl aren't properly uninstalled when you uninstall the driver.

Download and install 11.12. Link is here. http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/previous/11/Pages/radeon.aspx?os=Windows%20Vista%20-%2064-Bit%20Edition&rev=11.12
Driver is mandatory as well as the amd app. Catalyst control center not necessary at all. Reboot for funsies.

Recommended to install SDK 2.1 as well, but you only need to install ONE THING from the package. Unfortunately I can't find a link on amd's site. You can either download and install the only package you need from my dropbox here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9768004/ATIStreamSDK_dev.msi or you can google for ati-stream-sdk-v2.1-vista-win7-64.exe and extract contents and navigate to Packages\Apps\ATIStreamSDK_Dev_win764a\ATIStreamSDK_dev.msi. This will create a second openCL platform called "ATI Stream" that many have found a little faster than 2.4/2.5 (I believe 2.5 comes with driver 11.12). Note: Most miners will NOT find the ATI Stream opencl platform unless AMD APP is also installed. Also, ATI Stream -must- be installed after AMD APP is installed.

After you install ATI Stream, you should be able to mine at proper speeds. You should get something like 195 mhash on a stock speed 6770. 1GHz would push about 230 mhash. Make sure you select the proper platform with your miners settings. With CGminer or BFGMiner, this is with the "gpu-platform" argument, followed by a number. 0 is the first platform, 1 is the second platform, etc.

Make sure you are using the phatk (or phatk2 if you are using phoenix) kernel, BFI_INT if using something other than CGMiner/BFGMiner, worksize of 128, and vectors enabled or set to 2 (depending on miner). Also it is recommended to set memory low, usually in the area of 160-190MHz depending on core speeds; the optimum ratio is close to a 5:1 core speed to memory speed. It takes some fiddling around, but you will see much lower temperatures and likely higher mhash than stock memory speeds.

Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111!!!11!one!!11elleven!!!!!  :-*

 :D

That's a bit too much work for me to do tonight, but I will definitely take a crack at it (prob tomorrow morning)!

Anyhow... I'm running this card with cgminer right now mining some Litecoin, and it's actually running more than 2x's faster than the GTX-580. I know Litecoin uses Scrypt and it's a different ballgame, so could anyone explain why it's performing so much better for LTC mining? And would over-clocking the card's memory speed it up for Litecoin?

Also... Is it safe to tweak clock settings while your GPU is mining?

Most cards will play nice with clock changing when there is a load on it. Some are temperamental, some damaged ones may throw a fit too. None of it with permanently damage a card though. Worst case your computer will freeze.

In general, you should underclock your GPU RAM when mining BTC, and overclock your GPU RAM when mining LTC.


As for Nvidia vs ATI, see this article: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU#Why_are_AMD_GPUs_faster_than_Nvidia_GPUs.3F

As for changing clocks while the card is in use: in general, yes, it's fine. Actually, CGMiner does this automatically, by changing your clocks on the fly with dynamic overclocking to prevent overheating (if you set it up). I have had some issues with MSI AB and unofficial overclocking locking a card into low power mode when you change a setting while mining, requiring a reboot.

Some cards are OEM models and will only run half speed (or not at all) with AMD drivers. You need to use the driver from you card manufacturer.

Just got "OEM brown box" 7850 crossfire for Christmas and I was like WTF they run slower than my old 5830s!

After a while I figured out they were running 430/600 instead of 860/1200 and it was only fixed with the manufacturers driver disc.

The 6770 is not a good card, had one, it runs hot and dies if you get a hot summer. It too is an OEM card!  ;)

What?! I'm not saying I'm the know-all source for GPU drivers, but I've never heard of anything like that.

When the GPU is seen as idle in the OS, it underclocks. I usually see half the core and memory speeds.

The 6770 was intended as an OEM ONLY RELEASE but XFX fecked up and boxed it for retail.

"6770 will not install"
>"From what I understand the 6770 is only supposed to ship to OEM's for use in Pre-builts, how did you get one from Best Buy?"
>>"Just to give everyone a heads up. I just spoke to AMD and they are not supporting the 6770 card for retail. Mark stated they have talked about releasing it to retail but have not made this step as of yet. He also checked all driver files to see if they had a driver for the 6770 and the 6750. He stated they do not have any support for these. He also checked the beta 11.4 and there is no plans to have a 6770 driver on there either."
>>>"Having just purchased this card and successfully installed it, I can say that there are drivers on the disc. One would assume the latest drivers straight from AMD would support this card, however that was not the case. I had to rollback my drivers to those from XFX's site to get the card working after I updated with AMD's most recent release."
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/314448-15-6770-install

IIRC the 6770 is basically a rebadged 5770 with some minor updates. They normally run quite cool.

My 6770 was running about 76c at stock. This was okay back when we were allowed to use lead in solder! But a really hot summer killed it on that damn EU lead free solder that was also killing early XBOX 360s and PS3s with "ring of death".

My 5830's ran at 60c, and my 7850's run at 50c!

Really the 6770 sells for the same price as a 5830 and that's a much faster, cooler, quieter card with no OEM driver issues.

Video of a 5830 running Battlefield 3 in 1080p Ultra 0xAA with FPS and Temp counters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjCOwK3VJDc

The 5770's that I have had were stock cooling and running Boinc wide open and overclocked yet they stayed under 70c. (alt fan profile was used)
I believe they will withstand 100-104c before disaster strikes, just not sure how long one would last at that level. Cramped case or poor cooling perhaps? Lead free solder is crap IMO.

My testing rig runs 2 * 6770 for BTC & LTC mining in Australia.

The cards have been flogged for nealry 18 months now with card temps in the mid 80s celsius for a smooth 205MHs / 200KHs (BTC/LTC).

I have used cross-fire but then the slave cards only run at ~90% however, if crossfire is removed, they runn ~99%

I found cgminer was essential to smooth running.

Overall, they are very sturdy cards for Australian conditions.

6770s are the coolest running cards I own. They aren't powerhouses, but they are power efficient and reliable.

I'm running 5770's specifically because they play nicely with the 300W PSUs in the spare machines I had to plug them into.