Bitcoin Forum

I am working on my first dedicated rig right now, which got me thinking, what is the record for a single PC  for MH pr S Stable? and what cards? how many? and what power draw?

anyone know?

Not sure why it matters,

7x 5970 would be the the max for an ATX motherboard

Around 5ghs I suppose.

Yeah sounds like you managed to hack the limit that ATI imposed on Linux of 8 GPUs for a system ...

It is either 4 * 5970 or 4 * 7990 OR 8 * 5870 or 8 * 7970 to get maximum hashrate per rig but trust me that 8 * 5870 setup is impossible to do unless you live in Antartica with decent temps.

Wouldn't extenders make this easy?

If you ignore the fact that some machines have BIOS limitations on IRQ ranges and that kind of stuff and also that it really is hard to get Linux to run all 8 cards then good luck.

Been trying to do a 8 * 5870 setup since June last year. Finally gave up and split into two 4 * 5870 rigs now.

I'm no noob but unless you put them in a fridge or something the heat output in that small a space is very hard to cool down.

Well I am a noob but the small amount of time I've been doing this I do know that spacing seems to make all the difference in heat buildup. 
Now software issues are a different thing...

You would also need powered extenders because trying to draw 75 * 8 = 600W through the mobo = recipe for disaster.

You also need a MSI BB Marshall P67 B3 motherboard ( only mobo that has 8 PCIe slots ). I got 2 for sale if you wanna attempt this. I'm in the UK etc.

Probably not what you're expecting but ArtForz has something like 50+ odd FPGAs. I'm not certain he has them on one rig but it is possible.

You guys arent ambitious enough. Get one of these:
http://blog.trentontechnology.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Trenton-Systems-BPG8032-PCI-Express-Backplane.jpg

18 PCIe slots.

http://www.trentontechnology.com/products/backplanes/picmg-13-backplanes/video-processing-gpu-backplane-bpg8032

and whats with the driver limit?

I suspect you can work around that either by launching multiple X servers each tied to less than 8 gpus, or possibly through virtualization, running multiple  OS instances, but I dont know how far along gpu virtualization is these days.

You can run a maximum of 8 GPUs using the ATI driver on Linux or Windows ( recent drivers like 11.6 etc. )

You can have like 4*5830 and 2*5870 and 2*5850 on one of those boards.

Youve said that before. And while its true (I think its actually 6 on windows?), you seem to ignore my suggestion of launching multiple X servers, since each would run its own driver, and each could be limited to less than 8 gpus.

Granted, this is more a theoretical exercise than anything else, because the cost of these boards will likely make it unrealistic anyway.

Heh. I just bought one. Actually the one I got is the "server-class" version, not the "graphics-class", because mining does not need anything better than a PCIe 1x link. Its more of a fun exercise to see what will work, not an insane profit machine. Its going to cost quite a lot.

EDIT: Link to the one I got: http://www.trentontechnology.com/products/backplanes/picmg-13-backplanes/pci-express-backplane-bpx6806

what kind of price are we talkin for a rig like that? that would be insane..

BTW the reason I am asking is I am looking for the most powerful single dedicated gpu miner i can, i went the 5970 route, even if its less mh than a 4 6990 only due to availability and cost.

so a 4 5970 should net what 3200mh?

More like ~3.0 to 3.1 GH.  To get 3200 MH would require 400 MH/s per GPU, and that means running them at 870MHz each.  While you can do it keeping them stable and cool would be very difficulty unless you are watercooling.

Well, I'm going to try hooking up used server power supplies, to keep cost down there. I have found some 2360 watt PSUs for less than 100 bucks, and they are 91% efficient at full load! The board costs close to $1200 new, but I got mine for $600. The largest cost will be the Single Board Computer that runs the whole show - this board is only a backplane. New, the SBC (AKA System Host Board or SHB) is between $1500 and $3000. I hope to get some used ones, but I don't yet know the cost.

I am going to be experimenting with VT-d and AMD drivers to see what happens in a virtualized environment. It is going to be a fun experiment, and hopefully I will come out of it with the fastest single system ever built. It probably won't be -the- lowest power usage system, since the SHB has 2 quad core Xeons, but it might rank pretty high, if I can underclock them. (Or remove one and have a single quad core)

Even if it is far more expansive than it should be, I might be able to sell the complete system for uses other than Bitcoin mining, since systems of this sort are usually $40,000 and up. Especially with more than 4 video cards.

I am pretty sure Trenton makes single CPU SMB that can use a Core i series CPU.  You should be able to find an SMB for $500 (although that is still insanely high for a miner).

Loving people like you ( with server PSUs and server backplanes ) and people like P4Man ( oil submerged rig ) that bring new creativity and ideas into the community and actually carry out those ideas at great risk to themselves and share with us !

Thank you !

Damn if I can get this working, I think I can safely say I have the largest e-peen of all the GPU miners here. ;D

If I want to sell it to an enterprise or government, I'd probably have to load it with "Pro" cards like FireGL shit and Quadros though. I think there are a few FireGL cards that have 1600 shaders each and only take up one slot.

BTW, I know of Quadro-based systems that have more than 8 GPUs - wonder if the "pro" drivers remove that limitation, or whether nVidia just has never had such a limitation.

What cards have 1600 shaders and only one slot except watercooled 5870s ?

AFAIK Nvidia has no limitations on the number of GPUs but I think they may have an artificial one like ATI with 8 ( maybe 16 with Nvidia ? ). Ask the folding guys.

My bad, the only 1600 shader cards are dual slot. However the FirePro V7800P (http://www.amd.com/us/products/workstation/graphics/ati-firepro-3d/v7800p/Pages/v7800p.aspx) has 1440 shaders and a passive single slot cooling solution designed for servers.

Wow that's pretty cool.  Good luck finding them cheap though.  Still $1,100+ on Ebay.

nVidia have 8 GPU limit as well.

all my rigs have 5 x 5870 in them, I have never been able to get a system to have more than 5 cards stable in windows, im sure someone has done it but I just could not get it to have any stability

I dont think they have. Windows, more specifically, WDDM has a 6 or 8 ?GPU limit for display devices. Fiddling with the registry can overcome that, by making some cards not be recognized as display devices (they wont function anymore if you connect a monitor). Thats also why XP doesnt have this problem, it doesnt have WDDM
Anyway, I distinctly remember reading an nvidia engineer describing how to do that, and saying there was no hard driver limit to the amount of GPUs. That was in the context of CUDA, but it shouldnt be different for OpenCL.

Looking at the folding forums it seems pretty consistent that NVidia doesn't support more than 8.  Also there are various BIOS issues that make running >8 improbable even if NVidia officially supported it.

One example from NVidia's forums:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=90410

It does support my point there is no driver limitation :). From your link:

Whether or not those BIOS problems will be a factor using those backplanes is anyone's guess I suppose. The only way to found out for sure might be expensive :).

Well NVidia has never made any claim >8 GPU will work even without BIOS issues.  I took that more as blame deflection rather than an admission that the drivers will work with more than 8.  Others have reported inability to get >8 GPU on one rig.

Some time back I looked around and never found anybody on any forum that had 9+ GPU working on a single rig.


http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=9011#p89268

Still it might be possible. I would love to see someone try, I just would they would go into it with understanding there is a good chance it won't work and they will be left with a lot of expensive parts. 

Still say 8x 7990 7970s,  ~18GH per rig.  :)

I read this thread expecting some numbers.  Where are they?

I'm not a serious miner, so haven't loaded up a 4*5970 board yet, and I run standard clocks so don't get any special speeds.  My top rig is currently cruising at a bit over 1.8Ghash (6 * 314Mhash from three 5970's).  Maybe I'll crank up the clock speeds temporarily with a fourth card on a different board I have, but that's not the plan at this stage.

Edit: slight o/c to 800Mhz/500 gives 2.077

Well I haven't tried any hardcore OC with my current rigs, but they both have 6x 5870's, clocked at 940/300 default voltage. About 2550 mhash per machine, 60 degrees or so and about 55% fan. So 5 Ghash across both machines.