Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Mining => Topic started by: kindle on March 30, 2011, 01:13:28 AM



Title: MSI 790Fx-GD70 Mining Rig issue
Post by: kindle on March 30, 2011, 01:13:28 AM
Hi I recently just acquired a 2nd hand MSI 790Fx-GD70 with a 550be and 2 x 5970 for the purpose of a dedicated mining rig. The setting up process got me confused, reason being that both poclbcm and the gui version doesn't load completely after I set up the windows 7 OS and ati drivers. I tested both 11.2 and 11.3 and the issue is both miners will refuse to mine, the poclbcm will show a blank cmd prompt even with the correct arguments used previously, and the gui version will load to the sys tray and not respond to both left or right click. I also reformatted the OS 3 times and remounted the hardware everytime before I reformat. I disabled xfire and ensured that I got both cards initialized by connecting them to my LCD panel. As a last resort I connected the xfire cable, activated xfire in CCC and unplug the monitor cable from the slave card. It mysteriously worked, the performance wasn't that good as the hash/s will fluctuate wildly.

Does anyone have the same issue? Is it cuz I missed out any AMD drivers ? My main working rig has no issue running intel and I haven't touched AMD for almost 3 chip generations. I was wondering if I missed out any chipset drivers that I should have installed. Also is it a 790fx chipset issue? I plugged the cards into the 1st and 3rd slot to ensure air flow, I also wanted to acquire more 2nd hand 5970 but will have to put it on hold before this issue is solved.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated, I spent the entire night on this issue and only had 2 hrs of rest before work. o.o

Rig details as follows:
AMD 550BE + MSI 790Fx-GD70
4 gb ram team xtreme
some WD blue hdd
antec HCP 1200 psu
2 x 5970


Title: Re: MSI 790Fx-GD70 Mining Rig issue
Post by: yrral on March 30, 2011, 01:41:40 AM
open up a command line prompt (windows key + "cmd.exe") and run poclbcm. What processing cores does it list? Also, did you install ATI stream?


Title: Re: MSI 790Fx-GD70 Mining Rig issue
Post by: kindle on March 30, 2011, 01:47:27 AM
With the crossfire cable plugged to both cards all 4 gpus can be detected. With out the cable, cmd poclbcm will just display a blank cmd prompt screen. Yeah I have tried the amd 2.4 in 11.3 reformat and now on 11.2 with 2.3 stream.


Title: Re: MSI 790Fx-GD70 Mining Rig issue
Post by: yrral on March 30, 2011, 01:52:14 AM
Try booting with just 1 5970 and your lcd plugged into that card. What does poclbcm do then?


Title: Re: MSI 790Fx-GD70 Mining Rig issue
Post by: kindle on March 30, 2011, 01:53:20 AM
Yeah i did that, with a single card it detected the 2 gpus inside + cpu


Title: Re: MSI 790Fx-GD70 Mining Rig issue
Post by: yrral on March 30, 2011, 02:54:13 AM
What PSU do you have? IIRC, you shouldn't need the crossfire cable either. Also check your bios for a dual-pcie setting?


Title: Re: MSI 790Fx-GD70 Mining Rig issue
Post by: kindle on March 30, 2011, 03:30:03 AM
Hi yrral thanks for the suggestion I will check the bios settings. I am using an antec hcp 1200 w psu.


Title: Re: MSI 790Fx-GD70 Mining Rig issue
Post by: Peao on March 30, 2011, 12:21:34 PM
kindle, i got the same problem here.

my pc (i dont use it just for mining):
i7 950
msi big bang xpower
2 x 5970
windows 7 64

I've tried to mine without enabling crossfire, but i failed.
i simply cannot make the 2 cards mine ate same time.

after a few tries (change positions of the cards, reinstall the driver with only one card and then insert the other, changing video cables, etc.), i chickened and stopped to try after i got BSOD and had to use the win7 disc to repair the Win 7 initialisation... i dont want to format this pc.

so i gave up and start mining with crossfire on. 1.2 GHs/s @ 840 MHz core clock and 300 MHz mem clock - 68C temp.

one thing thats still bothers me is the 50% cpu usage when im mining...

if you make your rig work without crossfire, please tell me how :)

good luck!


Title: Re: MSI 790Fx-GD70 Mining Rig issue
Post by: kindle on March 30, 2011, 01:33:42 PM
Wow Peao you are making me think twice of getting more 5970, I just found out that one of the 5970 is faulty with artifacts on the desktop. I am running the 5970 with a 5850 now and it is working as it was the day I started mining with those two.