Bitcoin Forum

Damnit i have been looking for about 2-3 days for the Radeon HD 6990... its sold out everywhere, or backordered! demand is crazy!!

So nobody should say that bitcoin is bad for the economy...   ;)

6990s were sold out before bitcoin became a craze. They were a limited production line top end card. They're also a terrible $/hash buy for mining.

I had better luck with 5870s as well as unlockable 6950s. You obviously do not get the same density however they are less $/h

Exactly. These are gaming cards and probably a very, very small minority has been purchased for distributed computing.

Not to mention they cost $700 to $800 for about 600-700mhash/s, you can get two radeon 5870's for $300-$400 bucks at the cheapest & achieve the same or better.

two 5830 will get 600mh and thats only $220, but they sold out now too on newegg and chiefvalue

3 5870's would get atleast 1.5ghash?

Maybe at ridiculous overclocks that aren't stable for 24/7.

I do run some 5870s in my miners but they are all within 5-10% of normal clock range. Not even nearly 500ghash/s. Somewhat better than 5850s though (but not enough to warrant the price difference+ power consumption)

5830's and 5850's are ideal.

Maybe GPUs shortage will keep Bitcoin from growing too fast.
If this keeps growing soon we'll have mining dedicated cards, I don't like that idea at all.

how many hashes do you get out of your 5850 at stock.

1.0 to 1.3 is more realistic.

Wha?  I get 850 mhash/sec on stock voltage on my 6990.  It's overclocked to 990 on both GPUs.  I could probably hit 1050 easy.  

And the point of the 6990 should be to have an awesome gaming rig AND hash.  But I don't think that's the case for a whole of people.

But it's horrible value for the money. I have exactly one; Due to using a massive discount at a retailer. Otherwise it would've been wasted cash more or less.

Hell, you can get same hashing performance for two unlocked 6950's and those cost maybe 50% or less.

Not so fast. Gigabyte 5870SO model kicks asses 24/7 with its 950MHz for 410-425Mhash/s depending on the miner app, but dual-fan cooling system is ... noisy. Jumps between 190 and 200W power consumption , but I'm lazy to check that with lowered memory clock (around 350MHz for stability purposes).

I thought the best price/performance card right now was the Sapphire 5850 Extreme, which is 150$ for something around 300mhash.

You meant "was" $150. Or its on stock again?

It is if you can find it in stock for $150

Ah, I wasn't aware that they are already sold out. Damn, things change quick.

They've been out of stock for a couple weeks now.. I called in to amazon and if I remember right the rep said new stock wasnt expected until july 6th or so.

Either you got very lucky or you're full of s**t. The average 6990 goes nowhere near 990Mhz let alone 1050. Not to mention when overclocked the average 5870 (not a super special golden overclocker) can do 420MHash/sec. They game pretty well too surprisingly (for the same money you will probably get even better fps, though lots more noise and heat).

I have a scandinavian computer-hardware/accessories supplier that has them in stock.
Komplett.se (Swedish site)

But I hardly believe they ship abroad. The company itself is located in Norway but they have business in Sweden as well.

I probably agree with you both, if I had my thinking hat on.
I picked up a couple of 6990 and a pretty much new rig with 'free' bitcoins I got last year and didn't realize were worth anything (they have over doubled in value since I flogged them - but I'm trying to ignore that).

Justification for the 6990 is that in the near-ish future I know that difficulty is going to go through the roof, and mining will go back to being something you do in the background (which was always the intention I think of bitcoin). So I'll flog on of my 6990 off - and I'll pretty much get my money back. Buying an older series card is definitely the best bet for mining, but I'm a little dubious of anybody who does so currently ever breaking even. Much nicer to think of it as a free games machine :)

6990 sold out 5850 sold out.. im left with no choice but to get something else. whats the best bang for a dollar other than the 5830?

Probably 6870s. They're plentiful, they go on sale a lot, they hash a little worse than a 5850 and use less power. They're not as efficient for your dollar, but such is life. If you can find one on sale for $150 - $160 it's not a bad deal. They do about 300MHash last I heard, which is about 1.875Mhash/$. Not great, not awful (for comparison 5830s do about 2.75 MHash/$, and 6990s do about 1.14Mhash/$)

Plenty of 6990s available here in Australia at MSY.  Not quite sold out everywhere (or bitcoin hasn't caught on here).

i'm currently using 6950's w/ shaders unlocked and i'm quite happy with them. @ 840mhz they're getting avg 680 Mhash (2 cards). i just placed an order for 2 more. if you can find a reference 6950 for 250 i suggest you buy it. i know xfx' version has all but sold out, and currently ~350-450 on amazon. newegg still has a couple HIS and MSI models, but idk how long they'll last.

Sapphire 5830 for $110 shipped a good deal?

is this the best bang for the buck right now? 2nd after 5850?

It's the best, unless maybe you are living somewhere with really expensive electricity. Or you only have one available slot on your PC and do not want to get a new one.

I have the Gigabyte X58A-UD3R motherboard

http://hothardware.com/articleimages/Item1470/FullBoard1.jpg

x2 PCI Express x16 slots (x16/x16), x2 PCI Express x8 slots (x8/x8), x2 PCI Express x1 slots (x1)

Electricity is 7.15 c/ kwh

will that board fit 3x 5830 / 5850 / 5870 or mix of those? looking at my local used market

With some risers it can fit six!

Just looking at it, it looks like it *could* fit 3, but the middle one would be wedged between the other two.

well couldn't you use (from left to right) blue slot 1,3,4 and not use #2 since these cards are double slot?

I have a Gigabyte 5870OC (same cooler, but with a small 20MHz OC). Been running it at 960MHz with the fan at 60%, and I don't find it very noisy. Just ordered a 5850 with the same cooler (my sense of geek aesthetics demands that I have matching hardware in my desktop system...  :P), so I guess I'll find out how two of them sound together in a couple of days.

Correct. It will be very tight.

it's one of the cheapest up front, but it hogs electricity. even if you oc it to 996 it still gets .85 mh/w

at stock it looks like it is 245 Mhash/s and under full load 243 w (http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/03/22/xfx-radeon-hd-5830-1gb-review/7)

so, what is the Mhash/s and power consumption overclocked? the above link says 263 w @ 930/1200

As I said, mining is now constrained by the supply of video cards.   I had now two orders canceled by suppliers who said in stock then went to out of stock.

Paul

hrm. this site i saw said it was much higher, 359w at load. http://www.techspot.com/review/249-ati-radeon-hd-5830/page11.html

according to http://melanarchy.info/bitcoin/ it gets 307

So many misconceptions about power:

Those reviews are calculating Total system power draw from the wall. Not the draw of the card from the PSU.

according to this, the max power of pci-e x16 slot is 75w and 6-pin plugs 75w each, so the max theoretical draw is 225w?

I've never used a card having an 8-pin power connector (gtx 460 and 6950 both have 2x 6-pin)

They didn't test the 5830 but the 5850 was about 151w under "full" load, although FuturMark doesn't peg the cards at 99% like mining does.

http://www.geeks3d.com/20100226/the-real-power-consumption-of-73-graphics-cards/

Either way if you budget 225w per card and get an 80+ Gold PSU you should be fine

^^ that's wrong. Here is a better resource

http://www.geeks3d.com/20090618/graphics-cards-thermal-design-power-tdp-database/

or this

http://www.geeks3d.com/forums/index.php/topic,1946.0.html

5830 @ "peak 3d" = 160 w

This.

I get 810 Mhash/s oc'd to 940 per card. I game as well.

What's your config in terms of overclock gpu/mem?  The range I get is around 630-700 Mhash based on 900/1260 clock rate.

No worries, market will be flooded soon with cheap second-hand GPUs used for mining.

Should I buy AMD stocks too? :P

why because you think the bitcoin mining will become unprofitable?

Well, more and more people are getting into mining. Those who are already into it want to increase the number of rigs they already own.

Where does it all stop?

The 6990 was never intended to be a very popular card. They didn't make many..

So is the supply shortage being caused by higher demand than expected or is it the Japan Tsunami causing a delay in production.  I had heard at one time that 40% of silicon components would be negatively impacted by the tsunami.  We just purchased 15 camcorders and had to go with a more expensive model because the cheaper ones were sold out and the supply chain is behind because of Japan.

Hmmm Am I the only one that thinks this lack of cards is a good thing ???

I mean if anything if kind of puts a stop block on this hardware arms race that I'd imagine sees most miners profits go back into buying more hardware just to keep up with the rising difficulty.

Supply shortage of what?

5xxx series gpus are last generation and are discontinued
6xxx series gpus are plentiful and in abundance (current gen tech)
6990s are a top end dual-gpu card and as always targetted only at the highest echelon of users, so created in limited amount intentionally.

Japan has nothing to do with any of this.

You do have a point there.  But watching the graphs over the last two weeks it doesn't seem to have stemmed the tide much.  On the other hand, I only want the shortage to affect others, much to my own benefit!  Muah ha ha!  I've only got around 400 MH/s and would really like a bump up from a 5850 or similar.  Alas I cannot find it in stock.  I am deciding on whether I should chance it on ebay.  They have various cards some used some not.  I haven't decided yet.  If the shortage of new stock is going to be continuing then it would be worth my time to pick up a couple of used 48xx cards since I can get motherboards with additional slots without much issue.

Good point.  I'll check into the 6xxx series again.  I guess I'll take what I can get.  For me anyway I was hoping to find the 5xxx last gen technology somewhere at a discount since others would be clamoring for the newer 6xxx.  The common wisdom is that the 6xxx don't hash as well as the 5xxx which if true then would explain why the remaining stock was bought out.

I've not even built anything yet so I'm losing out too but I'm just a hobbyist and if I find my mate or someone selling a 5890 or upgrading I'll say "hey I'll take that off you"

To a student like me who wants to make a little extra spending money and make proper use of the free electricity in my apartment it's great.
Personally I don't buy the idea of people building these big farms of cards and if anything think it's greedy/unsustainable and mirrors all that is wrong in how the current capitalist world operates but that's off point and just my view.

If we all agreed to a bit of stagnation and didn't invest more we'd all be happier...But when is that ever going to happen :-\ :'(

You can use PCIe riser ribbons with power cores broken to bypass power going thru mobo ... "more power to the GPUs"  ;D
https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=6128.0

keeps those the mobo power rails running coooo .... ool


Its a goldrush, you can tell your grandchildren you were there. Have fun guys.