Bitcoin Forum

I realize with the low CU count and whatnot it won't be a power card for mining, but does anyone who knows anything about the underlying microarch know if it'll up the compute performance at all? Anandtech just had an article on it, but it seems very similar to the old 7xxx series.

It's actually a very nice miner for it's expected price and power consumption.

http://media.bestofmicro.com/C/7/377575/original/Bitmining.png
http://media.bestofmicro.com/7/O/377412/original/Power.png

If ASICs don't start taking over soon, 8 series Radeons are going to be really nice miners.

I suspect it will be running screaming hot, noisy and will have no headroom to overclock!

7790's 896 Stream processors is less than the 1024 stream processors in the 7850

It's the same price as a 7850, trust me get a 7850,

The chart is bullshit saying a 7850 does 232MH/s

Mine hash at..
80w 250MH/s reference 860/1200 clock.
100w 300MH/s stable 1050/1450 overclock with no volt mods.

add 100w for the system.

If they are really getting 250MH/s for 38w that would be amazing, but the specs say 85w!

Agreed. The base clock of the 7850 is 860, but they seem to easily overclock up to 1000 or higher. I have one that does 1050 and another that does 1150.

At equal clocks (1000 core), the higher number of stream processors in the 7850 will result in a higher hash rate.

And if you want to switch to LTC at some point, a 2 GB 7850 will allow a higher thread concurrency, which will also result in a higher hash rate.

Why would you OC your RAM to mine BTC?

LTC :p

I don't notice any difference in hashrate with memory at 1000 vs 1200, with cgminer... I haven't tested if it makes a difference with reaper, though. Can anyone confirm or deny?

If he's getting 300MH/s @ 100W while mining LTC, I'll buy his card right now for 500BTC.

You talking LTC or BTC? While mining BTC, I notice very little difference in hashrate if I change the RAM speeds from 1500 to 950, or even down to 410. I DO notice much lower temps, however, and lower power draw.

I've only tried lowering memory down to 1000 from the default 1200 on my HD 7850. I haven't noticed any significant hash rate difference with either LTC or BTC at 1000 vs 1200, but I agree that there's a significant lowering of temperature and power draw at 1000 vs 1200.

I see no power difference measured at the wall by underclocking the memory and as it's used for gaming, it's a hassel to keep changing it.  ;)

What about temps? I notice a -3C difference switching from 1500 to 950, and then another -2 or -3C going down to 410.

Hope you don't mind a newbie question here!  ;)
But does it still make sense to buy a Radeon 7850 for mining?
How long does it currently take for you guys to mine 1BTC with such a 7850?

Since I'm totally new to mining I run a test with my gforce at about 80Mhs and didn't make even 1 satoshi in days. So when I multiply times 3.5, which is about the performance of a 7850 (280Mhs), whats the gain? It still would take months to make 1BTC. Am I wrong?

All the 5830's in my rigs are getting sold for this 7790 for BTC and LTC.

lower temps, lower wattage... overclock the core to get 300Mh/s BTC or 300Kh/s LTC... I like this!!!

I get approx 0.1 BTC a day, but I also stop mining to game and whatnot at various time during the day. This is with an HD7970. I get another 0.01BTC or so from DVC/IXC/NMC merged mining I estimate. Depends on the exact rates on any given day.

My old HD5870 are still doing very well for the costs.

I think my OEM Sapphire 7850 2gb Dual-X are self power saving. They wouldn't work on AMD drivers, ran at half clock/mem speeds, only work correctly with Sapphires own drivers.

when can we expect the 8 series to be out?

AMD screwed the pooch. As I understand it, the architectural changes that would have been 8xxx series are actually in the 7790. I'm not sure what they're doing or thinking. I would like to see something I can upgrade from my HD7970 to though. An 8970 would be the logical choice, but a 7975 with this "new" GCN1.1 would work too I guess. I game as much as mine, so any improvement is worthwhile to me.

tomshardware benchmarks look promising.

Especially when you factor in that he isn't running the optimal settings on that stock 7850. He should be getting ~300 Mh/s all day long with the standard -v -w128.

This is just pure speculation, but if you opt for the Sapphire 7790 OC(1075MHz from 1000MHz) and if other early reviews mean anything(hard capped OC at 1200MHz, still working under 70c load), this *could* be a 400+ Mh/s card... for 2.1BTC/$150 And running ~120 watt with those overclocks.


 Niiiice. 

You think the 7790 is capable of 400MH/s? Or did I read that wrong?

I'm thinking it's possible. But the real question is, how far will it OC? With those temps at load, and being the new Bonaire Pro chip, this card has some decent overhead. If 1200MHz on the core is all you can squeeze out, that would be what? Based on tomshardware, yeah, close to 400. He's getting 280 without -v on stock clocks. vectors switch and the right workload in theory would be around 310-340 Mh/s. If bonaire reacts as well as the architecture it was based on, the fastloop flags should eek out a little bit more.  Then in theory again, the overclock could get you to/past 400.   The temps are very nice on this card, so are the specs/price.  

After all that is considered, just how durable would this card be under load?  IMO, this looks promising.

And of course. I could be wrong myself. I have been burned by some bad/biased tomshardware reviews before, who knows if they didn't "phone in some of those benches". LOL

The newer architectures based on GCN don't like vectors, so don't assume anything.

NO way in hell Bonaire will hit 400 MH/s... 360 is a possibility and that's with the noted 7.4% increase due to arch and pushing the core to 1300.

Yea, once AMD releases new drivers and OpenCL stuff that targets the improvements in the architecture the increases will come. I'm with you though, I don't think it'll be more than about 10% clock for clock. But apparently they did manage to do some slight tweaks to get power consumption down. I really want TSMC to get their asses in gear and get the node below 28nm up and running.

These are up for sale on newegg now. Anyone picked one up yet?

Do it! I want to see what these things can do.

They have fewer cores than the 7850, but are clocked higher. They should be about the same performance, but without any overclocking headroom, and $20 cheaper, right? They also have a narrower mem bandwidth, but higher mem clocks. Meh.

So really, and performance increase would be architecturally, right?

I was going to repleace my 5k cards with these, but then I found a deal on 7970's.

I place an order today for 4 pcs of these 7790. Will see tomorrow when they will ship.

They delayed it until the end of 2013 / early 2014,

EU wasn't very happy about power consumption,

They won orders to produce 7850s for the PS4,

and I guess they have plenty 7xxx left to shift.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1358754/vc-amd-confirms-no-radeon-hd-8000-series-until-q4-2013

I got my 7790 today.  It's the real deal, the numbers from tom's are legit.

This is pure stock just using the same settings I used on my old 5830 card, it's probably possible to increase significantly with optimizations and overclocking-
https://i.imgur.com/RQmKYtg.png

Note that cgminer didn't get close to these results, might be some bug involved or a setting I needed to use.

Power usage, measured from the wall, increases by about 38W while mining.

In my crowded Dell XPS 8500 case, it's running at a cool 58C at full load with no increased fan settings.

For comparison purposes, my old 5830 ran at 70C, did about the same or slightly less MH/sec (stock, I know I could have done more with overclocking), and used about 110W at full load.  Next gen AMD cards are awesome miners, it's just too bad that the time of ASIC is almost upon us.

I'll do some additional testing and see how it does overclocked, since it's running so cool and using such little power I'd be shocked if I couldn't get some more hashing out of it.

FYI, initial test at mining litecoin was a total failure, seeing like 7kh/sec, obviously my configuration is all wrong but I'm not sure how to optimize it.

Without changing anything else, increased clock speed to 1200mhz in msi afterburner, and getting 285MH/sec.  Power usage increased to ~55W  Temperature 60C

edit: with mem downclocked to 750mhz, power usage goes down 5W or so, and temp goes down 1-2C, while MH/sec remains about the same 285-290

What card did you get?

What are stock settings? (core/mem/voltage)

Can you increase AND decrease voltage?

Sapphire 100356L
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202028

Stock Core 1000mhz Mem 1500Mhz, not sure about voltage, not showing properly in MSI afterburner.  I suppose I should try the beta version, it may have support.

Edit-

With GPU Z,

ASIC Quality 66.5%
VDDC 1.231V
Current 81-89.9A
Power 96W  (this is wrong, my total system power measured from the wall is only 120W, I know my CPU and other peripherals are using more than 24W)

44% fan speed 1900RPM

It confirms the overclock is working and core is at 1200mhz, and mem at 750mhz base.  Interestingly it looks like the card periodically under-clocks the memory down to 150mhz, I guess it's a power saving feature to reduce power usage.

Even with the beta 3.0.0 MSI Afterburner it doesn't show nor allow change of voltage directly.  Can adjust via the power limit though.

I did try exceeding the normal clock speed limit.  At 1300Mhz, I was getting 312MH/sec, but seeing a few artifacts so I immediately stopped.

1250Mhz core seems stable without artifacts though, and I'm getting a solid 295MH/sec

Keep us updated. I'm looking at building 2 rigs with 6 of these cards for Litecoin mining... Very interested if they can get a solid 300 khash on LTC.

Can you test with these switches? Up the worksize to 256...

-v 1 -w 256


I'm just curious if that helps at all.

Also, try 0-4 affinity checked in. AMD+AMD with 1/2 core affinity has helped me cover spikes, maybe the Bonaire chip will benefit? It's a longshot to get a few more hashes, but again, just for shits and giggles.

I got 222kh/s using guiminer-reaper with the default 7770 settings.  I don't know enough about litecoin mining to optimize further.  Oddly, when overclocking, even if I raised mem and core speed, kh/s seemed to go down instead of up.  I'm not sure why.

I am going to get 3 of these (ordered 4 but... 1 is missing on stock) tomorrow... same sapphire.

see if you can find an app that monitors voltage, possible the software is dropping voltage to protect the card.

http://dustcoin.com/mining


if you are using a PPS pool, you can put in your hash rate in that site and it'll tell you CURRENT DIFFICULTY AND EXCHANGE RATE income per hour/day/week/month

300mhash card should give you about $2.50 a day right now mining BTC.

how about power consumption at 295Mhash :D

I just got my first 7790 up and running ltc, and while I was a little disappointed with the results initially (246 Khash), the card is really freaking quiet and draws very little power. I can run the card at power -20% and still get the same results, so I'm guessing I'm probably only consuming 65-70 watts tops. Also I have the card in a case with fan speed at 40% and the temp hovers at 53c. I decided to triple down and order two more. I plan to have a very low power rig that is going to bring in around 730 Khash, but only draw around 300 watts or so for the whole system. As an added bonus, it will be super quiet and won't heat up my house during the summer.

I figure that as more gpus turn to ltc mining, the only sustainable way to profit will be to have the highest hash/watt. I bet that the newer cards coming out  (gcn1.1) are going to make older power, hungry cards useless. These cards cost me 125 each off newegg with the mail in rebates, and I have three games to sell. I was really tempted by the 7850 for close to the same price, but the heat, noise, and power waste would have been unacceptable for a home desktop miner/gaming rig.

Also thought I'd add that the card automatically down-clocks when mining btc if I add -v flag. I was having a heck of a time figuring that out. I also get the highest Khash using the settings in the ltc hardware comparison wiki (830/1500).

Hey, what was ur BTC mining speeds?

297 MHhash/s In GUI Miner with flags set to “-v -w 128 -f 1”

GPU Clock: 1200 MHz
Memory clock: 750 MHz (not sure if this changes anything, as the card seems to down clock memory to 150 MHz all by itself anyway)

just got 7790 from powercolor a week ago, the hash rate I have with -v -w 128 -f 60 is ~260M, this card has the core freq of 1075MHz, while with -w 128 -f 60, it's showing ~244Mh/s, with -v -w 256 -f 60 I got exactly ~260Mh/s, this card is really quiet so I put it in my desktop and can barely notice the noise even I'm surfing while mining.

What are your settings to get above 230 Khash on the 7790 for litecoin mining? I cannot seem to get mine high enough.

Thanks,
-DM

Try this

gpu-engine 800
gpu-memclock 1500
thread-concurrency 8000

gives 240+ khash/s

Thanks for the advice, I've already tried that.

Here's my current spec's - give me any advice you'd suggest.

GUIMINER_SCRYPT

Thread concurrency - 8000
Worksize - 128
Vectors - 1
Intensity - 18
GPU threads - 1

GPU core clock via overclocking software (800 MHz)
Memclock - 1500 MHz
Fan speed (Custom)
Core temperature  - 60 degrees Celsius.

What am I doing wrong?

change core to 830 and i to 17

Already tried that.
Same results - Khash reduced by 3

Thanks for the help!
-DM

Edit* Currently trying that on my main card, but the last time it was reduced. We'll see :)

WAIT A MINUTE!

I just reached 240 khash! EPIC WIN!

I reset my thread concurrency (I've been messing around with it and forgot to set it to 8000)

When I just checked my computer, 240 KHASH! EPIC WIN!

I'd give you guys some crypto, but even at 240, I'm still waiting for my first litecoin :P

I cannot thank you enough!

-DM

No problem. The 7790 is a bit finicky for litecoin.

Just wanted to throw an update out there, had a moment to test a 7790 on a machine.
Configuration: win7 64, 7790 specific drivers on amd's website, cgminer 3.0.1
-k diablo -I 11 -v 1 -w 64

Surprisingly, during mining, powerplay is keeping the memclock @ 150mhz(2d clock)
Its keeping the gpu at its appropriate 1050mhz(3d clock)

in cgminer I put core on 1150mhz(mem still stayed at 150mhz) and hashing @ 300mh/s(not to bad!)

By far the easiest card configuration Ive ever done to get appropriate clocks =P

UPDATE: its wattage at this clock is only 90watts! holy cow, thats greater than 3mh/s/W ! thats really nice