Bitcoin Forum

I am curious as to the status of the most recent AMD driver and it's compatibility with ETH mining. A few drivers back ETH mining was cut down by a lot, leaving most of us mining ETH having to use the late 15.x drivers. Has anyone tried out the newest driver "AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition Display Driver version 16.15.2211" "Crimson Edition 16.5.3" ?. I ask this because I also use my GPU for gaming and other graphic intensive purposes, and the newer drivers contain a lot of upgrades and fixes that I would like to have, but the hash rate of the earlier 16.x drivers was too low.

I am using an R9 290. Anyone with info on your usage of this new driver and its hash rate would be appreciated.

Sapphire r9 290X tri-x, 1140/1200, Win7, Crimson 15.12 ~ 28-29 mhs

Crimson 16.x is up to 20% slower, Win7 and Ubuntu 14.x

I run 15.12 for best results on R9 Nanos 16.x versions are slow.  I run custom bios and 120-123 mh/s on 5 card rigs with 700 watts dual mining.

AMD changed their driver structure in the 16.x series, which seems to have had a negative effect on a LOT of computational-specific projects (many of the 16.x drivers have been noted as being a LOT slower on Folding, for example, with 1 or 2 specific exceptions).

 It's too bad the Nano is so bloody expen$ive for the hashrate it delivers - even though it's very EFFICIENT it's $/hash is so poor it's a very poor candidate to achieve ROI on.

 If it could scale the hashrate up with it's cores, it would be KILLER - instead, it's beaten out by quite a few older cards that are MUCH less expen$ive....



 I might try playing with driver versions on my next single-card build - which will be an R9 290 as it happens - just to see what's what.

Well I installed the newest driver from AMD the other day. On my R9 290 I do not see any change in the average hashrate. In my tests both drivers were in the 26MH/s range +- 1MH/s. That is default clock speeds. Not sure what they changed, but between 16.2 and 16.5.3, the difference is crazy. I am going to mess around with voltages and overclocking to see if I can squeeze more out of it, but I am satisfied with the newest driver.

Agree with the 16.2

I have no experience with the Linux drivers but on both Win 7 & Win 10, with 5 cards I have zero difference in mh on version 15.12 vs 16.2.1.

When I tested both 16.3.x & 16.4 they knocked off a good 20 - 30% of MH.

I have read a few people (over on ETH official forums) mention that 16.5 has fixed this and that there is no drop in MH however I have not tested 16.5.x myself.

With all that said, how bout you go test 16.5.x for us and report back results? :)

I'm using Crimson Edition 16.5.3 Hotfix 5/23/2016 clean installed with 2 R9 370 and one 280 with win 10. no issue to me the one before that i had issue with.!!!


not really sure what MH to expect  my 2 370 do 27 to 37 mh or so with out the 280 , the 280 is for every day use so i don't use it much to mine with.

I also have a 7870 i may fire back up in a few days that's WCed .

I am gonna set it all up in a open frame once the frame comes and might buy eth OS to see how well that does sense i don't care much for win 7 .

Hey Psipherious, check out my answer above. The newest 16.5.3 Driver works perfect. They must have fixed it in the hotfix. Not sure if it was a by product of another fix or intentional. In any case I am happy. ;D

Edit: Fat fingered a word.

What drivers should I be using?

I'm on 16.11.5 but i'm wondering if i should switch to 16.12.2

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous?os=Windows%2010%20-%2064

I've been using EthOS on two rigs for nearly a year now and it's great - I recommend it. I tried using Win7 and Claymore for a while because I wanted to easily swap to mining XMR and ZEC but now EthOS has that covered too.

Using SGMiner-GM in EthOS to mine ETH I get a better hash-rate than Claymore but with no fee and similar (actually slightly lower) power consumption. I think that Mining ZEC and XMR I would get better hashrates with the Claymore miner (which EthOS has for ZEC but not XMR) but with the ETH price where it is I'll keep mining it until it goes POS or if it's price dumps too much.

If I had the Linux skills to just do it all myself I would, but EthOS is a great way to have a really stable solid Linux rig without having to learn a whole lot of Linux. It's pretty easy to set up and use if you have ever used Linux even a little.