Bitcoin Forum

I've been browsing through the mining hardware comparison section, and noticed you can get up to 350-380 mhash/s with a 5850. With clock speed of 900-995

How is that possible? Catalyst control will only let me OC to 775mhz, at that rate I'm getting about 290mhash/s maxed out. What am I doing wrong?

use something like http://www.sapphiretech.com/ssc/TriXX/

Also if you switch to linux you will get some extra mhash.

What brand do you have?

If you have a Sapphire, you should get the estimated numbers you're seeing other members report.

If you have a Diamond (or some other non-reference board) you will NOT be getting the numbers you see other members report and you will NOT be able to change voltages or reach higher clocks.

I have XFX - this must be a really bad brand..

my sapphires I can push to 372,  my xfx I can push to 355 mhz

like I said, use the trixx and custom modify your video card bios if you want to switch to linux.

Should make dedicated mining machine.  On windows you lose some performance (at least for me ;))

XFX cards will only go to 775mhz unless you flash the bios...which you do not want to do if you do not have a reference card.
Asus ones are the best, with a limit of like 1000 i think. I have 2 of them at 900mhz, currently 340mh/s. (Can't overvolt on Linux) :(

Ah ok,  well what I would do is to figure out the max using trixx then I will modify the video bios according to those figures.  Why don't you do that?  Then you can modify both video cards and then they will work fine.

Why wouldn't you want to do that?  I thought reference means you can modify the voltage.  Whats wrong with pushing with the default voltage?

Lol don't bm a brand just because you think it's bad.
XFX cards are the best. Best 6990 you can get, amazing customer service.

I have 2 XFXs and I'm at 850ish core, with afterburner,
anything past that gets way too hot.

Dunno how to adjust the voltage though, does it require a BIOS flash I assume?

No, reference just means that it was the original card that AMD made. Non-reference means that the manufacturer made some changes to it. Usually non-reference cards are worse, they suck for overclocking, you can't really change core and memory limits unless you want to brick your card, and etc.

This thread (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=4292.0 (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=4292.0)) will help you overclock beyond the current limits of Afterburner. How much OC the card can withstand stably is another matter, however.

I understand that part.  What I don't get is why you would be against flashing the bios? Is there any specific reasons?  Are you saying modifying the vidcard would brick it?  That hasn't happened to me at least.  Are there some posts on the forum talking about this?

yes and no. there are a number of non ref cards that were made to be better than reference ones. i wouldnt be so one sided like OMG NON REF, AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE,

using afterburner should unlock the limits

Non ref cards are usually better in that, they usually run cooler, they use less power, The companies revise the PCB to be smaller, they're usually quieter. But, they also usually don't allow voltage adjustment.

With Trixx you can adjust the voltage....

you can't. that's one of its limitations

the driver and sdk versions and the miner can also make a big difference. at 775Mhz I would get ~312MHash/s

I have the newest version of the driver off of AMD's website. As far as SDK I'm not sure what that is, care to elaborate?

Whoever said you can't run the XFX cards past 775 is wrong.  I'm running five of them at 870 Core, 290 Memory and getting just under 350 MH/s with them at stock voltage.  No bios flash.  Using Afterburner to overclock, Catalyst 11.5's, SDK 2.1 and Win 7 x64 as the OS.  Been running like that without a problem for weeks and they're in the 60-70 degree range.

I have MSI After burner and it's not allowing me to OC more than 775 Core, and what is SDK 2.1?

my XFX non reference 5850 is running 950/300 on stock voltage.  I've had good luck with XFX cards running cool.

You need two pieces of software from AMD to mine.  The video driver and the Stream SDK (Software Development Kit).  If you installed the catalyst 11.5 drivers it comes with the 2.4 Stream SDK packaged with it.  If you want, you can uninstall that piece and install the 2.1 Stream SDK by going into Uninstall manager and pulling the SDK from the Catalyst Install manager.  

You can pull the older version of the SDK from AMD's Stream Site. (http://developer.amd.com/sdks/AMDAPPSDK/downloads/pages/AMDAPPSDKDownloadArchive.aspx)

Download the 2.1 package and install it.  The only piece out of the install you need is the Stream Developer.

As for overclocking, it can be a pain.  Open up Afterburner and try putting in the clocks you want.  You'll probably notice you can't underclock the memory all the way down in one go.  I found if you set it, apply and then either close it or go into settings and switch to another GPU you can then underclock even further.

That is so awesome. Thanks for sharing! +1 to you.

Now, for the problem of GUI not being able to detect my 4 cards... Do you know anything about that?

Really depends.  What OS are you using?

Windows 7 32bit,

Mobo is MSI 890FXA-G70

2 6950 installed working
1 5850 installed working
1 5850 (detected but when I boot up GUI after adding the 4th card, GUI will load it's icon the bottom right but not work. Then when I scroll over to the icon it was disappear.)

I have a kingwin 1000W PSU so that's enough juice to keep the whole thing going. I don't get what's the problem...

might be your mobo.  cards pull power off the mobo as well as the through the 6 pin connectors. 

First question I'd have is do you have a monitor or dummy plug (http://www.overclock.net/folding-home-guides-tutorials/384733-30-second-dummy-plug.html) in each card?  If not, windows will disable the card during bootup if it doesn't see anything attached to it.

If you do, then I'd check to make sure all the fans are spinning on the cards.  Do you know if your PSU has a single 12v rail?  If not and it has multiples, you could be overloading one of the rails.  If that's the case, try reconfiguring the plugs to get the cards working.

Finally, like nazgul said, some mobo's can disable slots if some others ones are filled.  What mobo you using?

I have dummy plugs on all the vid cards, I would like to think I have a really decent MOBO

MSI 890FXA-G70

Windows will detect all of the VID Cards, and so Will Catalyst software. The only thing that doesn't work is GUI Miner, It won't load up...

Hmm, it's not a mobo problem.  I have the same one currently running 4 XFX 5850's.

Have you tried manually running poclbm.exe at the command prompt for each card and see if it's recognized/working?

Also, in GUIMiner, make sure under view you are showing the console, this will show any error messages that pop up.

GUIMiner won't launch... I wish I could do something about it.

Manually running poclbm.exe at the command prompt... I'm not technically savvy enough to understand what you just said..

Hmm, might want to check out these two blog posts.  Great info on getting solo and pooled mining up and running.

http://www.newslobster.com/random/how-to-get-started-using-your-gpu-to-mine-for-bitcoins-on-windows

http://www.newslobster.com/bitcoin/how-to-set-up-pooled-bitcoin-mining-in-windows

Those Sapphire xtreme are driving me crazy... the incluided bios is way to bad, there no way i can put a custom 950mhz/300mhz@1.2v... the 1.2v is not on the vcore registers, if i attempt to add the 1.2v in the voltage registers, the card switch to some kind of "fail safe mode", addicionaly i cant manually set the fan to 100% in bios with RBE either, i can do it, but the card just dont accept it.

The only thing i could do in bios is set them to 850/300, nothing more. I whant to try with other brand bios to see if i can improve this, someone already tried others bios on Sapphire 5850 xtremes?

I'd like to add to what Meatball explained about the driver and sdk.

There are two good combinations:

driver 10.12, sdk 2.1
latest driver (11.5), sdk 2.4 and phoenix with phatk

Uninstalling the driver is not so easy you will probably need driver sweeper and a couple of reboots. I would try my luck with the second option at first.

Have you compared 10.12, SDK 2.1 with 11.5, SDK 2.1?  That's what I'm using, but I might try a driver rollback and see what I get.

nope. would be interested into the result, I think the newer drivers are more stable.

Im using latest driver from AMD. 11.5 and SDK 2.4
I have my graphic card overclocked to 900/300 with Trixx with no voltage mod. Doing right now about 352 Mhash/s. Temperature 60 - 65 grades with 60% - 70% fan. Old Sapphire Radeon 5850. By the way, i'm using Phoenix miner.

I tested/answered my own question.  Rolled back my machine with SDK2.1 to Catalyst 10.12 vs. 11.5 and found basically no difference.  With the 11.5's I was hovering around 299-300 MH/s and with 10.12's I get 297-300 MH/s.  I'd say stick with the 11.5's since they seem pretty rock solid.

On a related note, I've not been able to get any more hash rate out of Phoenix with or without phatk vs. GUIMiner/poclbm on any of my cards (5830, 5850 & 6950).  If anything, I find GUIMiner/poclbm a bit faster and prone to a lot less stale results.

I suggest flashing your bios instead of messing around with different software, all of the software I tried either couldn't get past the clock speed limits or didn't support multiple cards.

Use this guide to make an usb with atiflash: http://www.overclock.net/amd-ati/640063-unofficial-how-flash-ati-cards.html

Boot into the usb to make a backup of your bios, dont flash yet: atiflash.exe -s backup.bin

Open that backup on RBE: www.techpowerup.com/rbe/
Use the clock wizard to edit the speeds.

Save the new bios, put it in the usb and flash the card: atiflash.exe -f -p [DEVICE ID] newbios.rom

Don't delete the bios backups, they might be useful in the future.