Bitcoin Forum

Anyone successfully flashed a XFX 7970 FX-797A-TDKC with a bios getting it a better hash rate?
I have tried about 10 different suggested bios flashes, some of which previously worked on other XFX 7970 cards, and it just bricks the card.
Help!

UPDATED info for FX-795A-TDKC model number, instead of type for FX-795A-TDKC originally posted.  ;)

If you are trying to squeeze some 20-30-50 khs out of your gpu, at the cost of damaging the hardware, or trashing its warranty, or wasting a lot of time and effort troubleshooting issues, take this advice from me - LET IT GO THE WAY IT IS. Totally not worth the time, unless you have at least 10x 7970s

+1

What kind of numbers are you getting now and with what settings ?

I get 788 per card on two of these.

im going to try it on my since it has dual bios.

Hang on a min. That card is not a 7970. It is a 7950. Could be why you are bricking your card.

was brought brand new from distributor as 7970 model.
XFX 7970 bios working fine on it.
getting 530/khash now, was trying to get 680/khash as with my other XFX 7970 cards.
did anyone get 7950 bios working on it (Gigabyte maybe...)? if yes, which one?
Not that 7950 flash will improve much on my existing 530/khash, if this is really a 7950 card
?

Apart from the two posts that you made on this and another forum. You can see that the card is in fact a 7950. Unless of course you have the model number wrong.

https://www.google.com/search?q=XFX+7970+FX-795A-TDKC&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a


Also here for the final word on this:

http://products.xfxforce.com/en-us/Graphics_Cards/AMD_Radeon%E2%84%A2_HD_7950/FX-795A-TDKC



This is the 7970:

http://products.xfxforce.com/en-us/Graphics_Cards/AMD_Radeon%E2%84%A2_HD_7970/FX-797A-TDKC

My bad...these are indeed FX-797A-TDKC not FX-795A-TDKC !
Same issue exists therefore...
Please help!
 ;D

Ok. What settings are you using that are giving you 530kh

It's not a settings issue, I've played with that.
This is strictly a need to flash away from the XFX bios, as I have done with every other XFX 7970 card model I have.
Pretty standard with XFX that you get 530/khash with their firmware, and typically 680/khash after changing it (typically to Gigabyte bios I found...).
The issue here is that this specific model card FX-797A-TDKC is not accepting any bios flash (that I have tried 10+ of them so far) other than XFX versions.  :(

No, it is not standard. I have two of them that will do 788 each. No bios flash for either of them. I don't think it would hurt to at least go over your settings but it's your call.


Good luck.

You have same exact model card?
Maybe easier if you give me your working settings, so I can just try them out, please?
I've been thru so many, both on cgminer and the GPU clock settings, irrelevant what they are right now...

Yes. I have two of the same exact model cards.

As I said it might be useful to know what settings you are currently running so we can at least bounce ideas off each other but it's your call.

Each card has it's own personality. Even though my cards both get 788 each they can get slightly higher numbers if they were running separately. I use these setting as it nets me the highest stable numbers in my situation with my hardware.

Your mileage might vary.

"api-allow" : "W:127.0.0.1",
"api-listen" : true,
"api-network" : true,
"api-port" : "4028",
"expiry" : "120",
"hotplug" : "5",
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin",
"log" : "5",
"no-submit-stale" : true,
"queue" : "1",
"scan-time" : "60",
"scrypt" : true,
"shares" : "0",
"gpu-threads" : "2",
"gpu-dyninterval" : "7",
"gpu-engine" : "1130",
"gpu-fan" : "25-100",
"gpu-platform" : "1",
"gpu-memclock" : "1745",
"gpu-memdiff" : "0",
"gpu-powertune" : "20",
"intensity" : "13",
"temp-target" : "90",
"temp-overheat" : "92",
"temp-cutoff" : "95",
"temp-hysteresis" : "3",
"vectors" : "1",
"worksize" : "256",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"thread-concurrency" : "8192",
"no-pool-disable" : true

I bet this variance in hashrate amongst cards is related with the kind of RAM used and the memory timings that the bios sets. It seems that XFX cheaped out on the ram

Can you put online a copy of the bios you are using please?

Here you go.

https://mega.co.nz/#!kNcVHAoK!EgUDY0sDlPMQN3rIkYjyYC4ho4snZ9RSE5R8fZInCAM (https://mega.co.nz/#!kNcVHAoK!EgUDY0sDlPMQN3rIkYjyYC4ho4snZ9RSE5R8fZInCAM)

Thank you!
I'll report back in a bit... ;-)

Using same bios, and getting absolutely horrid results.....490/khash.
Tried every setting in the book.
Tried four different cards of the same exact model.

Are you running Windows or Linux for you system?

I have a dozen of these I need to get into production this week.
Pulling my hair out here! ;-(

Windows 8.1

Have you run the setx commands ?

setx gpu_max_alloc_percent 100

setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1

I have Windows 7
I am using guiminer-scrypt which rides on top of cgminer
not sure where to put those commands.
I tried the bat file, and as soon as guiminer starts, it overwrites the files and takes those lines out.
tried putting it in cgiminer bat file and running cgiminer directly, and it takes it and runs, performance is worse.

Open command prompt and put it in that way.

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/a/elevated-command-prompt-windows-7.htm


Once open just put the values in that I listed in my post above and hit enter. You will get a confirmation message.

Yes, did that...takes commands, ran cgminer, no change...still bad.

SMA

Are you getting the poor speeds at stock clocks ? I assume that you have tried to overclock the card, especially the memory as that is what will give you the highest gains.

I also assume that you have tried ' -I 20 -g 1 --thread-concurrency 22400 ' as opposed to ' -I 13 -g 2 --thread-concurrency 8192 ' ?

stock clocks, increased clocks, etc...

' -I 20 -g 1 --thread-concurrency 22400 '  crashed me instantly.

btw...my cards just came with bios .004 where yours is .001
I tried both...no change.

Try to run -I 20 -g 1 and no shaders or Thread concurrency setting. Delete all .bin files from the cgminer folder beforehand. Assuming that it does start up then go into the cgminer folder and look at the newly created bin file the number after tc is what cgminer selected as a thread concurrency that should work.

Assuming that goes OK, then shut down and run with the new tc setting and clock your card until you achieve the desired result.

If that does not work then try the same as above but with -I 19 instead of 20.

That is the best I can suggest for you at the moment. There is a process to follow from start to finish. The help files included with cgminer describe the process pretty well. I suggest you start from the beginning and work your way up instead of possibly jumping right in the deep end with other folks already tested (on their systems) settings.

For what it is worth I have two other 7970 cards made by HIS and one of them will not go over 560 no matter what I do. Although I seriously doubt that all your cards would be limited as you say. My gut instinct would be telling me that the problem might lie in the other components that I am using in that case. I don't know if it is possible for you to do or not but have you tried to run/config the cards in another totally different system with different components ?

I couldn't get mine to do more than 650KH/s so I put away for a while. Last night I tried again and with any TC over 10240 cgminer starts with error -4 saying it couldn't load the kernel so I was going to flash the BIOS but decided to try different configs first. Now "--thread-concurrency 10240 -g2 --gpu-engine 1050 --gpu-memclock 1650 -I 13" is doing 720KH/s and I think there's room for more tweaking. That's with stock cgminer-3.7.2 so I want to try one of the updates.  Suggestions for which one and any adjustments to config?