Bitcoin Forum

Hello mining community,
I have a mining rig with 6 RX480s and I want to get the highest hashrate I can get.
My cards are:
2 XFX RX480 GTR 8GB
4 Powercolor RX480 Red Devil 8GB
I have Bios modded the cards and the rig got a hashrate of 165 Mh/s on Ethereum. MSI Afterburner doesn't want to start since the cards are Bios modded (no clue what I did wrong to cause that issue). My Drivers version is currently 16.9.2.

Now my question is:
Should I reinstall the original Bios and install the new mining driver beta from AMD and overclock the cards
or
Should I keep the modded Bios and try if the mining driver work?

I switched from ETH to ETC yesterday and my hashrate dropped from 165 Mh/s to 135 Mh/s and I hope to get back to my usual hashrate or even more with overclocking and new drivers but I'm not shure how the Bios mod reacts to this.

To mine ETH or ETC you need to use the AMD blockchain drivers. Those are the only drivers that fix the epoch Dag hash rate drop. You also need to use Afterburner 4.4.0 beta 16 or higher with the blockchain drivers or the AMD Relive drivers 17.7.2 or higher, since AMD changed the API starting with that driver. You may also need to use the pixel patcher to bypass the driver signature check with a modded Bios. Otherwise the cards will show a code 43 in the Windows Device Manager and they won't work.

https://www.monitortests.com/forum/Thread-AMD-ATI-Pixel-Clock-Patcher

I don't use the original driver AMD. Before the upgrade I also ran the patcher to resolve the error 43. The new driver has no conflicts. The BIOS I installed updated. Each GPU RX 480 8 GB Sapphire provide a stable rate 29.850 Mh/s + 840 Mh/s DCR. 6 GPU 165 Mh/s in dual mining it is normal.

Okay thank you very much for your answers.
I'll install the AMD Mining drivers and run PixelPatcher and hope it works fine with my modded bios.
I'ne not heard about the AMD Relive drivers 17.7.2 before in terms of mining, I guess the Blockchain drivers are far better anyway?

yes, BC drivers are the fastest atm

- Uninstall all drivers with DDU (https://www.wagnardsoft.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=879)
- Download and Install AMD Block Chain Driver from official AMD site (http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-Software-Crimson-ReLive-Edition-Beta-for-Blockchain-Compute-Release-Notes.aspx)
- Run AMD/ATI Pixel Clock Patcher (https://www.monitortests.com/forum/Thread-AMD-ATI-Pixel-Clock-Patcher)
- Reboot Your Rig
- Download , install MSI Afterburner 4.4.0 Beta 18 (http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/msi-afterburner-beta-download,32.html)
Overclock your mem's / underclock your GPU's , with proper undervolting , and enjoy mining with full speed ;)

Is this your guide working on any Windows build?
I mean Is it working only on Windows 10, or can I use it on Window 7 too?
cheers.

To be honest with you , i don't have much experience mining with win 7 rigs , i give up win 7 last year when i tried to get 6-7-8 vga cards working on win 7 , and i was not able to build a stable running rig at all. Then i switched to win 10 and linux ...
So i know for sure its working on windows 10 , im not sure about any of the other windows version.
Someone with more win 7 experience might join to this topic and can tell you more about this.

From official AMD driver dowload page :

I installed the mining drivers and I've run Pixelpatcher. All 6 GPU's show up fine in device manager.

Afterwards I installed Afterburner 4.4.0 beta and RivaTuner.
I run Afterburner but the program froze immediately, no way to end it. I restarted the rig to close the program and tried to run Claymore Miner v10.
It gave me an error message that something's wrong with my screen settings.(I had plugged my monitor in the motherboard HDMI to update the drivers) so I put my HDMI dummy plug in the GPU that's connected to the x16 slot on my mobo.
Then, Teamviewer didn't start anymore and I found out, that my screen and my hdmi dummy plug don't work anymore when plugged in the GPU and when plugged in the mobo, only the screen works, not the hdmi dummy plug.
Any fix for that?

This is the error message and the file that causes the problem. Should I delete the old files and only keep the 2 newer ones?
https://i.imgur.com/2tQKzXB.png    https://i.imgur.com/nmuGQNA.png

Is your OS Windows 7? After everything I have try, until now I cant get Blockchain Driver works on Windows 7, thats why I change to Windows 10, and it works perfectly.

Yes I'm on Windows 10. Currently I have some serious problems to get my rig started, it takes ages to start. If I can't fix that, I'll reinstall Windows 10 and start from the beginning I guess.

I am advocating to use for the extraction of old equipment for 4 GPU. This gives substantial savings when buying a motherboard CPU and power supply. Two sets for 4 GPU will cost less than one set for 6 GPU. You can use any OS. Also you share the risks from the fact that your equipment will fail. In case of any problems with the equipment you will be half of the GPU or all 6 GPU will not work. Which option is better?

The rig has been working fine for over 6 months, I'm not going to spend more money when I already know that it can work fine.

Harddisk problem maybe? If corrupt windows, fresh install will fix it.

Are you sure you let driver installation gone through ? if all cards plugged in during driver install , Its sometimes take 10-15-20 minutes with black screen , flickering screen , sometimes computer unresponsive for 2-3 minutes ... during that time you can not log in with teamviewer , if monitor connected you get a black unresponsive screen ...
Did you had to hard reboot the computer ? during/after amd driver installation ?
Did you turned off the on board graphics in the bios ? ( make sure you can not see in windows device manager )
Do you need riva tuner ? Why you installed ?

Try one more times ... this time dont install any tune software , dont install Afterburner  , wait at least 20-30 min after you started the driver installation ...

- Uninstall all drivers with DDU (https://www.wagnardsoft.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=879)
- Download and Install AMD Block Chain Driver from official AMD site (http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-Software-Crimson-ReLive-Edition-Beta-for-Blockchain-Compute-Release-Notes.aspx) - wait at least 20-30 min after you started the driver installation if all 6 cards pluggen in during install
- Run AMD/ATI Pixel Clock Patcher (https://www.monitortests.com/forum/Thread-AMD-ATI-Pixel-Clock-Patcher)
- Reboot Your Rig
- Download , install MSI Afterburner 4.4.0 Beta 18 (http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/msi-afterburner-beta-download,32.html)
- Start your mining software , let see what happening

I reinstalled windows and wiped everything that was installed.
THen I downloaded the Blockchain drivers, teamviewer and ati patcher.
I did this with the mining drivers on my GPU's and the screen was lagging, I checked in device manager and only 5 cards showed up. To find if the error is in the hardware or software, I installed the latest AMD driver for my GPU and the PC recognized 6 cards. Afterwards I reinstalled the blockchain drivers (with AMD uninstaller, not DDU) and the PC regognized only 5 cards anymore and 1 Intel HD Graphics. Do I need to turn these Intel HD graphics off in the mobo bios settings?

How many GPU does Windows 10 support?

Up to 8 as far as I know.

Can you give us a full system spec please ?
what motherboard you have ? Bios settings for pcie ? GEN 1 / GEN 2 /GEN 3 ??? what is your psu wattage rating ?
with the new drivers your cards might pulling much more power than before...

Hardware:
The 6 GPUs are:
2 XFX RX480 GTR 8GB
4 Powercolor RX480 Red Devil 8GB
Motherboard: AsRock H81 BTC Pro Gen1
GPU G3460
120GB SSD Sandisk
8GB DDR3

Software
Bios settings for PCIE2 Link Speed is GEN 1.
Because I made a fresh installation of windows 10 x64 and the cards are not working fine I did not run Claymore yet with the new mining drivers, therfore I can't tell you the wattage yet.
Currently, the PC recognizes 5 RX480 with driver version 22.19.662.4 and all 5 with error 43. It also regognizes 1 Intel(R) HD Graphics.

I made some settings:
Increase virtual memory (Min 1879 Max 16000)
Power plan --> High performance
Windows 10 registry tweaks for mining
Disabled windows update

Then I ran DDU in safe mode and it still only recognized 5 devices. Now I switched PCIE5 and PCIE6 and magically the PC sees 6 cards.
Now I have 6 Microsoft Basic Display Adapters in device manager and all of them show error 31:
This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device. (Code 31)
The driver trying to start is not the same as the driver for the POSTed display adapter.
How should I proceed from this point?

Bios settings are fine, I had 6 cards running perfectly fine until I started messing with the mining drivers.
I have 5 cards up and running now on mining drivers but they have a very low hashrate of 23,5 each with a slight overclock and Bios mod and the sixth card is somewhere in Nirvana, no clue why the PC doesn't recognize it anymore.

Would you like to share your settings with us? What does "proper undervolting" mean?

With proper undervolting he means that you should not only decrease the power to 80 or 70% but that you should the decrease the voltage from the GPU from 1 to 0.95 for instance.

I highly suggest you to find a decent clock and voltage for your gpu and then use polaris bios editor to edit fan speeds and clocks , then apply them to your entire rig.

And what driver would you use with your custom bios mod? The AMD mining driver/blockchain drivers?