Bitcoin Forum

Hello all,

As far as i know the 7990 is already out on the market, but now they are releasing a dual GPU varient called Malta?

is this correct? do we have any idea what mhash and wattage?

http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-hd-7990-malta-final-specifications-disclosed-dual-tahiti-gpus-clocked-1-ghz/

Malta is a reference 7990 designed by AMD, the others were custom made chips by AIBs.

TDP should be around 375W, same as the 6990. No performance benches have surfaced yet but it should perform similar to two 7970 while pulling considerably less wattage.

with the diff at 8.9m do you think it would be profitable?

Would there be any driver issues running three 7990 cards (six GPUs total) under Windows 7?

I keep reading mentions that over five GPUs on a single box are causing problems. But I have not seen details; anybody go a link?

Thanks.

i would be curious too.

IIRC, the AMD drivers limit you to 8 GPU cores. People could previously use 4 dual-GPU cards, as that added up to 8, but could not add a 5th card. I've heard of people running 6 single-GPU cards, or up to 4 dual-GPU cards with no issues. You should be fine.

I've got my eye out for this. Not a pro miner, just a hardware enthusiast. They finalized the release date... I wonder when I'd be able to get my hands on one.

Hypothetically speaking... If I got my hands on one right away, what are the odds that it would be able to mine right out of the box?

Anyone have any experience with the transition from the 5xxx and 6xxx to a dual GPU model?

At this point, I would suggest buying them only if you plan on gaming, with the intent of mining as a side "hobby"
 
If they're approx equivalent to 2x7970s, then I mine approx .06btc per day with my 2x7970s running.  So at current difficulty with 2x7990 that's around .12 btc per day.   Again, if you're wanting to mine with them, I'd suggest only if you're willing to use them for another major hobby, such as gaming.

Agreed. I currently have two 7970's setup in overkill mode. I'm a very casual gamer, but why not mine away when I'm not sitting in front of the comp?

But will this Malta work right out of the box?

It really depends what pool you mine on.   I mine ~970 - 1000 megamash/sec  or 1giga hash.   on btc guild I make very little btc.  on slush mining pool i make at least .1btc a day usually around .12btc/day.

Why would you make less on BTCGuild as opposed to Slush's pool? You may have had an exceptionally lucky day on Slush'd pool to get 0.1+ BTC with a 1gh/s rate, but averaged out over a few days you will get what everyone else gets (~0.056 BTC per day at ~1gh/s at current difficulty).

Cool, thank you. Good to know.

that is incorrect.   i get .1 to .13btc about every single day from slush's mining pool.   the pps fee on slush  is 2% and btcguild is 3% or more I believe.
secondly member hash rate has a huge variance between both pools.

The only bad thing is slush's mining pool was hacked 1-2 days ago by a inside person.


So to sum it up your .056 btc calculator estimate is way off.

I also have 2 non malta 7990s.

I get 1280 per board with 1050 cores although also undervoltaged. Power consumption was 850ish from the wall, so - system and psu thats about 310W per GPU.

So even though my partner boards have 3x8pins, they have the same power draw as these 'new' cards, and cheaper. These are $1000 release cards, so £800 with VAT added. I paid £680ish, although there are more games with this.

However I see a serious problem with these cards:
They've put them in dual slot coolers. At stock clocks they were loading just below the 80s, horizontally mounted in an open air, single card system. This was on GPGPU computing. ZERO air is exhausted and its all left to be removed by the case.

My 3 slot cards and their 3kg of heatsink struggle together, even with a riser'ed slot gap. The bottom card loads at +45-50 above ambient, and the top card +55-65 above ambient. [Note I don't have voltage control of the 2nd core on each card for some reason, hopefully this will arrive with newer drivers as I have control when there is only ONE card - this will improve temps slightly]. This is with a 1050 core.

Now I can honestly say there just isn't going to be any way that you could put 2 of these cards in a case and expect the top one not to overheat. I have 3x250mm, 5x240mm of fans removing heat from cards that semi exhaust - these don't at all. You will have to open air, just have to.

I'm more than happy with my 3 slot non Maltas, think I got it right.


Tldr:
Partner cards (PCs) with the same hardware but better cooling already existed
The PCs have a higher extreme range due to 525 rather than 325 power delivery
The PCs struggle to dual card [hottest cards touching 90, throttling at 94ish], these new cards will be REALLY REALLY hard
The PCs had triple slot coolers, these are 2. The PCs exhausted a good portion of the heat, these don't.
Same performance, I get 1240Mh per card at 1050 cores.
More expensive than the PCs, surprisingly...

hey dogie,

thanks for taking the time to write all that out, i am curious how hot the computer cases will get. As you stated we may need to open our cases and put a large box fan right over where the front panel would have been.

im going to wait for the cards to drop in price and probably pick up two. i am into gaming and have two 6900s right now which are barely keeping up. i would like to go with two Maltas but we will see how other people fare first.

It will take even the most experienced vets by surprise just how much heat 600W is when its no longer exhausted. The actual metal on the case of my machine hits 80C because the limit of cooling is actually the ambient. So many fans on high and it just can't get rid of that much heat and keep case even <40C.

Still don't buy it. You've got something wrong. I didn't make up the calculator number. Go to the following link and plug in 1gh/s (i.e. 1000 mh/s):

http://dustcoin.com/mining

You will get 0.056 BTC per day. Pool hash rate has no effect on BTC earnings over time (it averages out). So you are either mining at ~2 gh/s or you are not understanding the numbers.

Man, what a disappointment. I can't believe they priced the card at $1k, that's more than the custom 7990s and it's been over a year since the 7970 release. Moreover performance seems similar to 2x7950 even though specs match the 7970 apart from a 50MHz drop in clock speed, quite odd... must be some kind of internal power limitation kicking in which isn't good if you intend to use this card for mining.

I just think you are naive and you confuse theoretical numbers from mining calculators with real outputs.   Mining calculators can be significantly off.  Try both pools then talk.

If Slush's pool somehow magically gave twice the BTC rate of every other pool then everyone would be on Slush's pool. Anyways, whatever floats your boat...

....ssshhhh..I know you are correct I have also mined both .....the Calculators are never correct...but reality is correct .