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Anybody have any tips/tricks for using the 5870? I'm equally excited for the mining possibility, and also for the possibility to play games (such as Half Life 2) on a higher graphics setting.

I'm planning on installing the bare minimum for drivers/etc needed to get the card running, as I don't like having extra programs running in the background. Does that sound like a good plan?

EDIT: Topic title changed

Install card. Install drivers. Go for it. There really isn't much else to do but that.

And get started quickly, because the hashing difficulty factor has been rising every 10 to 14 days.

Hm...5870 plugged in, drivers installed, no OpenCL/CUDA support. Going to the webpage for newest drivers.

New drivers installed, 555.4Mhash/s.  :o

It went down to 351Mhash/s while I'm typing this. I was really hoping I'd gotten a 5970 shipped to me by mistake.

Did you get the one of newegg? The 2GB eye-finity sapphire card?

Yes, I got it from there. I have now gotten more hashes in 2.5 hours than I have in the last 2 days.

Are you solo mining? whats your average khash?

I've been pool mining, so I'm still doing that. And I haven't been going long enough to get an average hash rate, but it seems to be ~300, give or take some depending on how I'm using my computer.

And this card is much quieter than the old card I was using, even when mining.

haha, I literally installed my 5870 five minutes ago. What a coincidence. Mine is getting only 220mhash/s, I'm suspecting it's because I'm running Stream 2.3. Anyone know how to downgrade successfully?

I'm pretty sure I'm using 2.3 as well - how do you check that?

I'm ranging between 285-295 Mhash/s.

You can check your Stream SDK version using GPU Caps Viewer.

Anyway, it turns out my problem was that CCC still thought I was running a 4850, so it set the core clock to 625Mhz. I reinstalled CCC, downgraded to Stream 2.2, and now I'm running between 300-340mhash/s.

Nobody has pulled those kinds of speeds off of a 5870. Can you post more details about your setup?

It has not gotten up that high since the first minute or so, so it was probably a bug in the GUI for poclbm. Or something I can't figure out.

I have a cheap MSI motherboard so I don't think it's my setup. :-\

you should downgrade to SDK 2.2*, to get 300-340Mhps like Beremat,
even my 5850 gets 310+Mhps (910MHz clock), SDK 2.3 slowed it down a bunch.


*if running DiabloMiner 2.1 is even better/faster, i couldn't get poclbm to run on 2.1 though.

I'm getting 323MH/s on my 5870 with SDK 2.1, without messing with the clocking or voltage.

I've tried the 2.2 SDK as you advised, it gave me the same 300MH/s on my 5850 (900 core); back to 2.3 SDK. Thanks for the hint anyway :).

Having trouble finding out how to downgrade from 2.3 to 2.2. I remember somebody saying that they had issues getting it to work correctly, but I can't find the posts where that was talked about and solved. Does anybody remember what I'm talking about, and can point me in the right direction?

Also, having trouble finding the location to download a package with 2.2 and not 2.3.

http://developer.amd.com/gpu/AMDAPPSDK/downloads/pages/AMDAPPSDKDownloadArchive.aspx

There you go, if you notice any difference please post how much is it.

Will do. Do you recommend completely removing the current version of the SDK before installing 2.2, or just installing 2.2 right over it? I'm planning on removing first, as that's generally how I've had to downgrade in the past, unless I should do it the other way.

What i did was remove the "newer" SDK only, not the whole package, then install the .msi file of the SDK from the older package only.

I run 4x5870s. Each is giving me ~355Mh/sec. They've all been overclocked to 900 and this (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3356.msg47489#msg47489) is my setup. I'm running poclbm (I know the post says Diablo but that was then) with -w128, -v, and -f1 flags.

I followed your setup with a single 5870, and I'm getting 13MH/s. o_O

aticonfig --odgc tells me clock is running at 850Mhz and GPU load is 99%. Am I missing something obvious? I'm not CPU mining.

Just installed my new shiny 2GB 5870 :D :D. Got the latest drivers and everything. So far I love the card. A lot quieter than my GTX 285. Default I was running 290 khashes but with humbles extra paramaters i went up to 320 khashes!! awesome! This card is really quiet. The temps and fan are really low so Im assuming theres room for some overclocking :)

320kh/s? Are you sure, seems low, unless you mean 320Mh/s?

Hmm... never experienced anything like that. You _sure_ you're not mining with the CPU? What output do you get if you just run:

./poclbm.py

without any flags?

Oh yeah I ment 320Mhashes. I overclocked the GPU to 900 and now im pulling in 340Mhashes. This is a surprisingly strong card.

I was trying to use DiabloMiner. Right now I'm trying again using windows, just to see if the hardware might be bad.

My speeds were slightly slower w/Diablo (peaked out ~343) but otherwise the same setup works fine for me.

Tip: be careful with overclocking. I ran my 5770 at 975 MHz for a week (up from 850) and everything seemed to be fine. The GPU temperature never went above 90 degrees C, which I think is OK. (I'm a GPU n00b since I'm not a gamer.)

However, after shutting down my computer for a few hours yesterday, I'm now getting garbage pixels on the screen, and random "verification failed" errors when mining, at all clock speeds. Looks like I damaged the card. :(

90 degrees is very close to the edge, I try to never let it go above 80 degrees by manually controlling the fan speed. If you're very close to the edge of where it will crash (20-30 MHz below) or you're over volting it should be even lower.

Yeah that is a high overclock, you kind have to expect your card to burn up without additional cooling. Im running my 5870 at 900 up from 850. I manually set the fan to 40% and the card hasn't went about 67 degrees. Now that is a good overclock.

Happy to say I've gotten everything up and running, and I added a second 5870, which is also running smoothly. Chugging along at 660Mhash/s at stock. Thanks to everyone in this thread for their help.

Now this is weird. Looks like the card has "healed itself" today while I was at work, there's no trace of the problems any more. Bizarre, but I'm not complaining. :)

Thanks for the tips given here; I downgraded to stream SDK 2.2 and my hash rate jumped ~30 mhash/s to ~340mhash/s average.

A note to anyone else trying this; from SDK 2.3 to 2.2, your device numbers may change. I ended up with my CPU as device 0, which was previously my 5870.



It's possible that the solder on some components came loose when you were overclocking, but the solder has now reflowed.

If it happens again (and if you've got some guts), you can attempt to reflow the board using a toaster oven (http://www.instructables.com/id/Toaster-Oven-Reflow-Soldering-BGA/).

I don't see any performance problems with ATI Stream SDK 2.3 on Win7 with m0mchil's python miner, I don't see why so many people instantly suggest to downgrade.

My HD 5870 gets about 355-360 mhash/s at 940mhz with -v -f 5 -w 128, and my HD 6850 gets about 230-235 mhash/s at 1ghz with the same switches.

On my 5870 @ 940mhz I run the fan at about 50% (~2350rpm), the temp flatlines at a constant 81-82'c at this speed. Another thing is that the stability of the core overclock is a bit misleading with mining, my card at stock voltage only runs stable at 910mhz with games + mining at the same time (915mhz = crash), but has mined for a week at 940mhz without a single hickup. My HD 6850 gets a similar result and is stable running at a ~20-30mhz higher core speed for mining than games. I just created seperate profiles in MSI Afterburner to quickly switch the core between 910 and 940mhz depending on what I'm doing, as that little 30mhz boost increases the speed by about 10m hash/s.

You could probably overvolt and get into the 380-400 range with a single HD 5870 if you had one with a nice cooler, but the reference coolers are hot/loud enough on stock voltage as-is even with great case cooling and room temps.

What tools are you using to overclock? The catalyst driver is limiting me to 900mhz core. I tried using the msi program but it seems like catalyst overrides the setting and puts me back at 900mhz.

MSI Afterburner, look into enabling unofficial overclocking (google).

Though my card allows up to 1300mhz in CCC without doing this.

One awesome thing with these cards and mining is that you can downclock the memory REALLY far without it affecting your mining performance.

I'm running 900 core 275 mem right now. Temps and power consumption (I assume) went down. It's running much cooler and quieter now, from 77 at full load to around 70, and the fan is much much quieter. I'd set the mem clock lower, but if I reach 250 then it actually starts being unstable - Aero goes nuts and starts artifacting everywhere.

I used ATI Tray Tools to downclock, Afterburner or CCC wouldn't let me go lower than 600mhz. Even though the slider in Ati Tray Tools only goes to like 595mhz, what you can do is slide it to that 595mhz, click Apply, and for some reason the next few mhz will be "unlocked". You can keep going down until you reach the speed you want.

Started using the -v -w128 flags, and increased by 20-30Mhash/s. Current speed, 313-320Mhash/s. Still running 2.3, no overclocking, no optimization. I'm a fan of seeing my graph on slush's pool jump 10x. :)

Haha yeah, I expected a big jump on the graph but not THAT big.

I'm fooling around with core speeds now, trying to see how far I can push this thing. I'm at 1000 core 275 mem right now, ~375mhash/sec. Hopefully it's stable.

Edit: Okay, 1000mhz failed and crashed poclbm, but 990 seems to be fine!

Changed to the Stream 2.2 release, and am seeing a 5-10Mhash/s average an increase in my average over using 2.3. Not hashing much faster, but the average is higher than it was before, and has less variation from one second to the next. Previously, it would bounce between 313-320, this is much more stable between 317-322. I'm looking for 2.1 though, and I'll update once I've done that as well.

Edit: Only able to find this page, is this ATI Stream? http://developer.amd.com/gpu/AMDAPPSDK/Pages/default.aspx#five The archive page on the download page for that link doesn't seem to be working, can anybody point me to a different place for 2.1?

Edit 2: My average was wrong, upon looking at previous data.

That worked, thank you very much. I want to max out my hash rate today because I'm going to be away for awhile, and my computer can hash 100% of the time for 7 days, instead of me having to use it to do other things. Even a Mhash or two could make a difference over a long enough period of time.

Edit: Mhash/s has gone between 329-332 for the last 2 minutes, with occasional drops below that. Much faster.

Necro thread!

So, I moved my 5870 to a new computer, and the poclbm GUI says that I don't have any OpenCL devices on my computer. GPU caps viewer detects the stream 2.1 install I have, and says that I have stream 2.1. I'm not sure what to do at this point, since it worked perfectly on the last computer.

Do you have SP3 installed if this is Windows XP ?
Do you have at least one display or dummy plugged in each card ?

XP Pro SP3, fully updated.

Two monitors plugged into one card. Same setup as my previous computer, and even plugged into same locations on the card.

Bump, mainly because I can't figure anything out here, and I've missed out on a day of mining.

Is there a way for me to move this to the Technical support area, or should I just create a new thread there?

How does one get a "dummy plug" for a displays?  I have 2 5870s in a windows XP machine, but sadly it won't probably enable the secondary card unless a monitor is attached on startup.  I'd rather not have to attach a monitor when I turn it on, how can I get around this?

Putting resistors in the vga/dvi adapter or directly into the vga card in order to simulate a monitor. Google dummy plug and check the first link.

Alright guys, I'm getting a lot of conflicting info here. I'm going to be setting up a dual 5870 rig soon and I'd like to know for sure what SDK to use in order to get maximum hashing performance out of it. Which is truly best SDK 2.2, 2.3, 2.2 or does it even matter? I think the latest CCC drivers use 2.3 so will it be worth it to use 10.x CCC drivers to use SDK 2.1?

I'm going to be using Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit as my OS.