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Just looking to get some figures on the performance people are seeing with the 5970. I have two in crossfire (Should I take them out of xfire seen as the miner's can use the cores directly) and I'm getting around 800Mhash/s to 1100Mhash/s.

I have my cards overclocked from 725Mhz to 770Mhz, with the fans at 80% temps are in the mid 80's (c). I think I could probably push them quite a bit further without voltage tweaks, so if any one has done this any info you have would be great. Also any special tweaks for the poclbm miner when used on the 5970 would be nice, if there are any.

Get MSI Afterburner. Im running both my 5790's cards at 850mhz voltage of 1100 and memory at 1025 and getting like 315mhs per core w/ this switch -v -w 128. There is another switch that will get me 330mhps but its not as stable so I dont use it.

Fan control is a bit funny, I set them about 70% and get temps of about 30.

good luck.

Thanks for that switch, just pushed my peak up by 100Mhash/s, giving me a peak of 1.2Ghash/s. Does your "current rate" fluctuate quite a bit? Mine often goes between 700Mhash/s and 1.1Ghash/s.

not ussually. Check your temps.

Temp on Card1 is 85c with fan at 100% and 100% usage, clocked at 800Mhz core 1000Mhz Memory. Temps on card 2 are 78c with fans at 68% and 80% usage, clocked at same speeds.

I think Crossfire may be messing around with my processing a little, giving card 1 most of the work. Do you think that the card may be clocking back at 85c? I'm not sure what the trigger temp is.

No, it should be quite stable, +/- few tens of Mhash/s. As bitjet said, check your temperature (especially VRM temperature, you can use GPU-Z for this). Card is throttling down when is overheated (voltage module over 120 oC).

Also consider turning off crossfire. Many users reported troubles with minning and crossfire on. I cannot confirm that as it was working with CF for me, but it is worth of try.

Are you running linux or win7?

Windows 7

Just looked at my VDDC temps in GPU-Z, they are at 100c Avg with peaks of 106c. I'll drop my clocks to 700Mhz and see what performance is looking like there.

[edit]

Looks more stable now. VDDC Temps are 94c avg, only varying by 150Mhash/s now. Considering the memory isn't been used on the video card, would lowering the clock speed by say 200Mhz help temps at all?

[multi-mega-ninja-edit] Mhash/s has stabilised now at 1.1Ghash/s. Is this about the norm for dual 5970?

My 2x5970s are CF enabled @ 850/1000 gets about 1.24-1.28Ghash/s. Fans at 100%.

What sort of temps are you seeing? Stock cooling?

Low 80s for core, low 110s for vrms. Running for almost 2 months now with a few reboots. I have a CM Haf 932 case and live in Caifornia.

Very similar temps to my setup except I am running at 700/1000 to keep my VRM's under 102c: At 103c the card clocks back for a few seconds and my hashing drops to around 500Ghash/s for 5 seconds, and when it's doing this constantly I loose a lot of cycles.

I'm using a Cosmos S chassis so I'll take a look into how my cooling is setup tomorrow and see if I can improve things a little (My pc is on a window ledge so I might take the door of and open the window next to it).

Also if you don't mind me asking, do you solo or pool mine? What sort of income do you see?

Thanks bud

Areyou running win7 or linux?

Windows 7 x64. I see a lot of people are running Ubuntu, is there a benefit?

I trust ubuntu over windows to run for weeks/months without issue.  There are other benefits, such as ease of scripting and no need for windows licenses.

I keep my clocks stock for reliability/warranty purposes.  I'm not sure if it matters for warranties though... is there any way that the manufacturers can tell you have overclocked?

I get around 285xxx MH/s per GPU @ stock clocks.  Ubuntu 10.10 x64, Catalyst 10.10 SDK v2.1, -v -w 128 -f 1

Has anyone noticed an increase with newer drivers or stream SDK?

Just so happens I found this guy's video on youtube a couple days ago and was thinking to purchase a drive image from him.

I'll post in his thread and ask how much it would be for him to upload the image to a filehost or ship me the archived image to the UK on DL-DVD(s).

I run Win 7 x64 with 2 5970's on two separate machines and have no problem whatsoever.  I just watched this video and it seems insane to buy a hard drive pre-loaded with Linux and type a bunch of command lines in the hope things will run better.  And they guys hardware looks like he's got it all mickey moused in the kitchen of his home, motherboards sitting on the counters, etc.  You sure you really want to buy something from this guy?  I can help you with whatever problem you have.  As can several people here that I helped when they started.  Seems like there are ten times the number of people with your setup than just one month ago.

Huh?, what's the linux command line option to dial down the memory clock? AFAIK the lowest memory clock speed (and the total range) is set in the graphic card BIOS, which can only be altered by reflashing.

What's wrong with that and why it should affect quality of his preinstalled hdds? There is no reason to build rigs into well looking boxes; design does not what improve your hashrate.

Exactly, I've took as much crap of my cosmos S as I can to improve airflow into the case. I even have a desk fan in front of an open window blowing directly into the case, which shaved 20c of my 5970's.

I have plans for around august of this year to build an 8x 5970 system with triple PSU's. I will make a custom chassis to hold it all in my 46u rack. It's going to be quick cheap and dirty.

Damn.  I guess cheap really is relative.

I meant the case....the 5970's and subsystem are going to require many hours on the street corner  :-*

I get over 9000 Mhash/s

It obviously doesn't affect the quality of his equipment, unless he makes a sandwich and spills mustard in it.  I agree there are many here that build systems in rack mounts without boxes, and those guys are often "state of the art".  It just appeared this guy was mickey mousing the thing and just getting started himself.  My impression was that he just figured out Bitcoin mining himself and is ready to start selling pre-loaded Linux drives.  It seems more simple to me to buy a hard drive, download ubuntu and go that route rather than buying something that may not work with his mobo, etc.  Then what?  The buyer is back here in a week debugging the whole thing.  Most people on here would be happy to get the guy started without his having to go that route.  I could be wrong.  I'll watch the video again now.

There is demand for Ghash contracts from people who don't want to run their own rigs. I don't see why there should not be a demand for preinstalled HDDs for people who don't want to play with Linux. Personally I enjoyed building my rig and learning the stuff around, but I started to not judge this kind of business, because 'we' are not 'they' :).

I have one of my 5970's getting only 300Mhash per core.  Windows 7, once I figure out how to get it going in Ubuntu I'm going to try that.  Running Catalyst 10.10, tried the newest one too with no change.  Any thoughts?

Is your 5970 clocked at 725 MHz? Are you using a miner that support the BFI_INT instruction? If not, then upgrade right away.

Just for reference I get 355 Mhash/sec per core on my 5970 which is clocked at 850 Mhz with 300 Mhz memory.

Downclock your memory to 500 and shave off a few degrees celsius without decreasing your hash rate.



3 x 5970 at stock clocks on ubuntu 9.10 w/ 10.9 drivers + 2.1 stream sdk. all run at roughly 78 degrees C. all poclbm miners.

1 x 5970 at 830 / 500 avg. temp: ~79C with AC running, ~83C without AC. phoenix 1.4 miner.

I am using poclbm - newest version so I should have BFI_INT.  I have not been able to figure out how to change to SDK 2.1 to see if that works better??  I have moved the memory clock down to 500mhz and cores up to 900, now getting just over 315Mhash.  Hopefully switching to Linux will do the trick.

That seems totally odd. Even with 11.3 and SDK 2.4 (what I'm using now) I get 350 Mhash per core. There is something wrong with your setup for sure. You should be getting BETTER performance than me by maybe 10 to 20 Mhash..maybe more @ 900.

What drivers are you using now, and what arguments are you passing to poclbm? Try -v -w 128 -f 1 if dedicated miner and if multipurpose machine -v -w 128 -f 60

Thanks guys.  The extra arguments helped, I had read them before but it did not sink in to me that this would help me.

I am not getting 375Mhash per core now.  Still some tweaking to do but getting better one step at a time.

375 per core is excellent! :) Congrats. I bet you can get it even higher with a bit more overlocking. But remember to take in the power consumption into consideration.

Using Phoenix 1.4 and getting 365 per core on my pair of 5970's while clocked at 820/300.  Temps staying in the low 60's with fans set at 52%.

hardware ware is what you need to worry about with overclocking, i leave my stuff stock, it will last longer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j86pORrusUo

I only need it to last long enough to pay for it's self in bitcoins.  Besides in all my many years of overclocking I don't believe I have ever killed any of my hardware.  The idea is I get them without having to buy them and have some computer parts left over.  Looks like I'm going to have to sit at 375 for now.  I tried overclocking higher but it started to cause crashes.  Waiting for RMA on my second card.  It will be interesting to compare what I get on that one in my Linux box...

lol, you sure you want them to last JUST long enough to pay for themselves..do you not instead want them to last until they pay for themselves and MUCH longer beyond that point ;)?

Well yes I would like them to produce coins long after they are paid off.  However I do not expect the difficulty to allow cost effective production on current hardware for a very long time, these cards do use a good deal of power at full load.  At some point not all that far off it will be most cost effective to sell these to a gamer and buy new hardware to mine, assuming mining is still profitable.

Yeah I see your point. As long as ATI or other graphics card manufacturers can come up with more powerful cards that consumer the same or less watts for the same performance level then dedicated miners will have no choice but to upgrade to these cards. The thing is that there is no guarantee that future cards will be exceptionally powerful at mining. We could end up with a change in architecture that will spell the end of profitable mining on ATI hardware - ie ATI could make cards that suck at mining like Nvidia does. I dunno, but I think that by that point dedicated mining chips would be out and about being sold and snapped up by the hardcore dedicated miner. I for one plan to move on to ASICs and any other more efficient mining hardware platforms as they get released.

375 Mhash per core, please tell me exactly how you did that :D   I'm currently getting 349.9 per core on my 5970 @ 840 Mhz (500 Mhz RAM) using phoenix miner via GUIMiner v2011-06-14.  flags as follows:

VECTORS BFI_INT AGGRESSION=20 worksize=128

I don't see a real difference between an aggression level of 20 or 12

according to device manager my driver is 8.861.0.0
BIOS Version   012.013.000.002   
AMD Catalyst 11.6
SDK v2.1.0.0 (according to add remove programs)

I am still quite new to bitcoin, if I have used any flags incorrectly, or am using outdated/poorly optimized software combinations, please let me know.