Bitcoin Forum

https://www.pcper.com/files/review/2011-12-21/06.jpg


So the Tahiti based GPUs of AMD were first introduced in January 2012 and they are actually the "Best mining GPU of all time".

They were introduced at a time when you could actually mine BTC with them back in 2012.

They were the most effective at mining Scrypt back in 2013. People were pulling in $10/day mining Litecoin and Dogecoin in late 2013 and early 2014.

They were the most effective at mining ETH back in 2016. Since the DAG was low and didn't require as much memory, you could mine ETH at 27MH/s back in Nov of 2015. And it hashed at 21-22 MH/s throughout most of 2016 before the RX series came out.

They were KILLERS at mining ZCASH when it was introduced back in late 2016 due to its huge memory bandwidth. The newer RX and Nvidia GPUs couldn't keep up.

Now as always thanks to ASICs they are no longer effective at mining ZCASH. Since they consume around 200 Watts while hashing at 300H/s.

However you can actually mine Cryptonight V7 (XMR) with them quite effectively with an bios undervolt.

Depending on your ASIC Quality (listed in GPU-z) you should be able to run these at the lowest voltage acceptable which is 0.950V and should run your Engine clock at 1000 Mhz and Memory between 1500-1600Mhz.

Make a copy of bios with Atiwinflash and Go into VBE7 and

Change #0 Core Clock to 950 Mhz and Memory Clock to 1500 Mhz, set VDDC to 956 mV.

Now restart the rig and let it run for a few minutes. If its stable then slowly increase your Core clock all the way up to 1100Mhz until its no longer stable. After a few hours, try and increase your Memory clock past 1500Mhz all the way up to 1700Mhz. Depending on memory type and straps, it might or might not cause a speed boost.

Measured from the wall at 1050Mhz/1650Mhz at 0.956V, one of my R9 280X only consumes 120 Watts from the wall. Basically same power usage as an RX Series GPU which mines ETH.

The speed in Claymore XMR miner registered is 595H/S which at the moment generates about $0.52 USD per day. If your power costs are $0.10 per KWH, then you should make a net profit of $0.250 USD per day.

Post your results and lets give these amazing AMD GPUs one last hash before they are finally packaged away and forgotten...

great idea for a thread.

7950's were to mining what satoshi was to crypto.

legends in their own accord.

i had a platoon of sapphire dual-x i picked up new and used back in the day that i since resold but kept one of my gigabyte models that i customized with some extra heatsinks.

if there is ever a grass roots mining convention it certainly should hold its inauguration in Tahiti.

You forgot the good old Lady R9 270 X VaporX serie Cards ,

http://up.picr.de/33326989nl.jpg

they also was good and are good i used them a few years !  

The best part of the story is that these cards will likely still have a use, most likely in budget gaming builds if the price for these cards is right, so hopefully these cards won't be packaged and stored in a dusty basement never to be seen again. It's still incredible to me how powerful the Tahiti cards really were and still are today, even with their stock wattage being somewhat high, and Tahiti was also the generation that forced Nvidia to up their game in the mid-range and drop prices a bit for cards like the 770. Truly a great generation!

Can you mod a bios on a 7990?  I have 4 I stopped using because of the power usage.

lol this is a timely post

i have two boxes of hd 7950s 3gb i bought used back in 2013

had a few spare rigs and decided to clean them and mine cn7 with em

440 mhs stock and 100 watts power.  I got like 20 more lol

Im looking at getting one of these (7850-R9 280x) for my "hobby" rig which has a R9 270X 2GB and a 1GB Sapphire HD 6950. The 6950 can still play games fine, and its just an old Pentium Dual Core E2160 running the 2 cards with 1 on a riser. Ideally I would get another 500W power supply and take a really old Athlon 64 LE 1640 and put the 6950 in that.

I've never owned an 7990, however I've had a 6990 before and it basically has 4 bios's in total. Each BIOS switch has 2 bios for each GPU, so in total 4 bioses.

So you will need to backup each core with Atiwinflash and open up VBE to mode the voltages and clocks and what-not.

The 7990 are special however and they fetch a pretty penny on eBay because they are a collector GPU pretty much. So if you can't get decent efficiency mining with them you can always sell them to a hobbyist.

Here is a good video of the 7990 mining. The beast of a GPU was pulling 750 Watts from the wall mining Litecoin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBy_KtUr4Kg

I still use my R9 280x to mine crytonite in some "new" coins where difficulty still acceptable. Never did undervolting, not sure how to do it, which software to use, etc... If anyone wants to share their experience more detailed in how to, I'd appreciate

Download ATIWINFLASH to backup and flash your bios

Command is something like

atiwinflash -s 0 your_bios.rom

to backup

atiwinflash -f -p 0 your_bios.rom

to flash your GPU

And you use VBE7 to modify your bios.

You can probably even use MSI Afterburner but it works better just modding the bios. Its pretty safe since there are 2 bioses usually for the Tahitis.

7950 paired with an acorn fpga?!?!

 :o

I saw ROI in three weeks only three times (short periods) with Tahiti.

1) Buying new cards late in 2013 to mine LTC, sold them later and bought Nvidia.

2) Buying back second hand cards during ETH launch Aug 2015 to pool/ solomine ETH.

3) Selling Nvidia's and buying back even more Tahiti/ Hawaii early 2016 to solomine ETH.

Later they again did quite well mining XMR/ ZEC with modded straps.

I'm completely out of mining right now but i still like to lurk here, 7970 can STILL do quite well on some algos but you need to use right OS/ driver/ bios combo. If there was a contest for the fastest ROI Tahiti would still be on the podium although now it would take months to ROI.

Respect.  8)

Thanks for your answer, I'll try to make it.
If I had merit I would give you some

                                   
I have some, and gave one to adaseb, nice topic, keep up

I still use my tahitis . Try cryptonight haven/heavy/tube.

I'm still using mines also, for cryptonight during night time (electricity costs half during night time)

I have twelve of these cards, 7950/7970/280/280x. Fantastic workhorses.

They just became unprofitable for me though due to high electricity price right now. I have some tips and questions for you Tahiti owners. Perhaps we can make them profitable once again?

Tips

---

Monero mining

Mine algorithms that have low power usage, like Monero.

I get around 750-810 h/s on these cards on Monero v7 with good undervolt. A short test for highest speed hit above 850 h/s but efficiency was not as good. Here are the hard details for my rig.

Room temp: 36 C!
Core: 980-1060 MHz at 956-1020 mV.
Mem: 11 cards at 1500 MHz, one at 1575. All with mining timings. Two have a bit looser timings than the others.
Power usage: 1780 Watt for the whole rig, estimate 140 Watt per card. This is from the 240 Volt side. PSUs are roughly 93% efficient at this load.
OS: HiveOS with export of env vars to make miners start on 280x (and increase max utilization on Polaris).

Run two threads per GPU
I could not get Claymore Cryptonight to run on this rig. In SGminer all you need is to add "threads": "2" to the config. For XMR-stak, copy the config for each gpu (two entries on the same index) and halve the intensity per thread. This helps quite a bit, perhaps 10-15% or so.

Worksize of 6 is typically better for 7970/280x, and worksize of 8 is typically better for 7950/280. Perhaps just on my cards.

sgminer-gm, latest:

XMR-stak fire-ice, latest:

Optimize mining timings
This helps an additional 10-15% or so since mem latency is reduced. Helps more on Hynix MFR since those stock timings are quite bad. Stock Hynix AFR is good and Elpida is right in between AFR and MFR. With mining timings all cards perform slightly better than stock AFR timings do.

If you're lucky you can get a hold of a Stilt or an Anoraks mining bios for your card.  Those already have mining memory timings and likely also VRM switching frequency mod to reduce power usage a bit. Anorak has a guide on how to modify the memory timings using a hex editor:

https://anorak.tech/community/t/anoraks-amd-vbios-hex-modification-tutorial/126/7

The timings I use are listed here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1676474.0;all

Perhaps the timings could be improved further, the FAW and FAW32 values are not zero, but that might work. Ohgodadecodetool can be used to decode the strap into separate timings. Nerdralph's "strapmod.py" should apply 0 to those timings as well.

Use the heat
If you live in a cold climate like me - use a heat pump. Mine sucks hot air from the rig, heats water in a tank for hot water and house heating, then blow the colder air either outside or back into the room. Where the colder air goes depends on outdoor temp but I have to manually switch where the air goes so I only do it with the seasons.

Questions

---

Optimize VRM switching frequency?
No VRM is perfectly efficient. Lowering VRM switching frequency lowers heat loss and that in turn improves efficiency further. "Actually Hardcore Overclocking
" on Youtube has an excellent video on VRMs and equations to calculate max power, heatloss, as well as how mosfets ans VRM work.

Fewer phases usually means higher efficiency and lower power limit (a limit we don't care about really since we're undervolting).

I think Stilt's mining bioses include a reduced VRM switching frequency from the default of 500 KHz to 290 KHz but I'm not sure. I also think that only ASUS Matrix gpus  includes the data in the bios to set the frequency - all other cards use the default. It is probably possible to add the data needed in the bios for the registers that needs to be changed. I think it's register 22 or 23, as that is what I've seen for newer generations.

Lower switching frequency could result in lower stable clocks due to increased voltage ripple (the now bigger voltage dips could cause crashes). That might be something we could combat by adding capacitors to the filtering stage of the VRMs, but capacitors reduce efficiency. Don't know how to calculate what would happen here.

1. Does anyone know how to modify VRM switching frequency on non-matrix cards?

2. How much lower can power usage go thanks to that?

VRM Phase shedding
Newer gen cards (Polaris?) can turn off one or more VRM phases when load is low - this typically increases efficiency.

3. Could we shed VRM phases on the Tahitis too? In BIOS or by physically altering the VRM controller?

Load Line Calibration
I think it would be possible to undervolt a bit more if load line calibration was off, but I don't know how to turn it off in the BIOS. The rationale is that LLC sometimes is too slow to compensate vdroop causing a hang. LLC off would need a higher bios voltage, but it would droop down to the voltage we want instead of being dynamically compensated up to that voltage. There is plenty to read about LLC and vdroop on the net. Will dig out a link eventually.

4. Can LLC be disabled in BIOS?

Physically disabling unused chips
5. Can we disable chips we don't use? In BIOS or in hardware? The displayport and HDMI controller comes to mind. Would be hard to sell the card to gamers afterwards...

Future ideas

---

A) Frankenstein tech

Acorns
The memory bandwidth on the Tahitis is massive, higher than on Polaris really (Polaris is often memory bandwidth constrained). The Tahitis seem to be mostly core constrained. Acorns could perhaps let us improve hashrate by quite a bit without increasing power usage very much.

Combine with more efficient gpus
Perhaps we could offload calculations from the Tahitis onto other gpus that are not core constrained. That is - we offload one or more steps in the algorithm to other gpus that have more power efficient cores such as Vega/Polaris or even Pascal really. Requires a whole lot of mobos though to support the bndwidth requirments to move data around on the bus... Would require a new generation of miners similar to Squirrelminer.

External VRM
Design an exgernal VRM that can supply say 956 mV to 12 gpus with very high efficiency. Probably way way too expensive.

B) Design a new PoW algorithm tailored for Tahiti
The 384-bit wide bus could ve used to read/write data in 1 cycle where a 256-bit bus would require 2 cycles. This should make Tahitis more efficient than Polaris for example.

The Tahitis have strong double precision compute power? This could perhaps be used to compete more efficiently?

Getting a popular coin to use that algorithm would be hard. :D Building a "Tahiti Appreciation Coin" seems equally difficult.


Links

---

79xx & 280 VBIOS Optimization Index (Read the Comments sheet too)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1odJXgWbHUcIS9fAxaXB-nPD8WWH1sBdd_XBOe3F3jo0/edit#gid=0

Archive of Stilts bioses?
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B2XVfIhkHZlfMTM0c1k0VDRERmc

Info on VRM switching frequency mod on the R9 290 (can it be done to the Tahiti too?)
https://www.overclock.net/photopost/data/1381417/4/49/49a792ea_guide.jpeg
https://www.overclock.net/forum/70-ati-drivers-overclocking-software/1605757-vrmtool-simple-tool-read-write-i2c-vrm-controllers.html

VRM info by Actually Hardcore Overclocking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDRHV3qtSWc&list=LLIxXaFjGhxoPbyEhvUKcTNA&index=3&t=0s

---

Don't have more ideas right now. Would be fun to revive these beasts once more.

Let me know if the miner settings improved your hashrate.
If you can't find a bios by the Stilt or Anorak and don't feel comfortable applying the timings yourself I can do the mod for some hashrate donation to the pool+address I mine to.

Thanks alot for providing this info.

I will try and see what speeds/power consumption I get with XMR-Stak and SGMiner. Which versions are you using exactly?

XMR-Stak I assume you are using the latest but there are tons of SGMiner forks out there.

I think the best way to optimize would be the memory straps. In the past I think I've took the lower memory straps and pasted them into the higher memory timings like we all do with the RX series. It worked however the issue was when a GPU crashed it froze the entire rig instead of just crashing the miner program or Windows and it needed a hard-reboot. So it was too time consuming so I just left them stock.

The 7990 is an awesome card and can be used for mining even in nowadays taking into consideration that you have somewhat near free or free electricity. This is the powerhouse of all the Tahiti cards and if I had free electricity I would buy one today.

The price is very low for a card of this performance for gaming, it is about 230 dollars used and I think it is still a beast for gaming as it handles whatever you throw at it. Running Witcher 3 at maximum settings with 75-80 fps I think if I hadn't a gaming card I would buy this one.

Oh good point, I use sgminer-gm (has no devfee). I get the same speed with xmr-stak fire-ice, but that one has devfee.


I use the one-click patch in polaris bios editor for the RX series, better performance than using lower straps? I too think the timings that I linked to can be improved further, tailor them to Monero v7 algorithm precisely?

The core is very power hungry though, don't think there is anything we can do there. Upping core speed definitely boosts cryptonight hashrate. :(

Yes but these cards are strange. Sometimes going from 950Mhz to 1000Mhz results in a 20% increase but going from 1050Mhz to 1100Mhz might only result in a 5% increase.

I think its because of the way the core engine and the memory clock work together since its a very memory intensive algo.

I’m still using one R9 280 with Frankenstein cooler made from two 120 mm fans. I undervolted this card in the Bios and I’m using it for Monero mining. Unfortunately my card has Hynix memory with bad quality so I have only 500 h/s with 1,013V VDDC, GPU Core 1000 Mhz, Memory 1400 Mhz. GPU_Z shows VDDC power only 30 W. I think it’s not so bad.

yeah i don’t know how ppl claim 700 or even 600 hs with tatiti 7950s and 280s

i get like 450 480 max power usesage is way lower than what people claim though 80 to 100 watts from the wall

What memory do you have? I had bad speeds with Elpida memory. With the Hynix memory I get 600H/S easy.






Is this an R9 280 or an R9 280X? Maybe you got less compute units.

seems like hynix

Which GPU do you have exactly?

Also which software are you using?

What is your engine core clock / memory clock ?

How much system RAM do you have? If you got like 2GB memory you might be getting these issues.

I too got 500-600 h/s on all twelve cards before memory timings mod and using two threads. The Hynix MFR timings are really loose by default, the timings I linked to do wonders.

Alright giving this thread a BUMP since tomorrow is the XMR fork and the current version of Claymore 11.3 won't be compatible anymore with XMR V8.

I haven't had luck with any of the alternate miners. Basically SRBMiner fails to start and XMR-Stak gets crazy low hashrates and with any tweaking it just crashes the entire rig.

My guess is that I am running the older AMD Drivers 15.12 which causes these issues but would rather get someone else's input before I upgrade to the newer AMD drivers which run poorly on older GPUs.

Wondering if the Tahiti's will still be able to mine XMR V8 at a decent speed and power usage. Since they have a huge memory bandwidth it might still be worth keeping them running.

I tried the XMR-Stak 2.5.1 got around 450H with 280x and pc just hangs some times, also no fan adjustment, Claymore was much better in this.

How much you're getting with monero v8 fork?

My results are similiar. Using XRM-Stak 2.4.x or so and I get 400Hs and previously I got 600Hs with V7 Claymore.

These are running at 1000/1500 and undervolted to the max, like 0.95V.

SRBminer I could never get to work. And trying to add another thread on XMR-Stak results in an instant system freeze.

Judging by the temps, the power consumption seems the same.

These results are bad because most Vega and RX GPUs are running at 90% of their V7 speed. We seem to be running at 66% of our V7 speed. And it was already not profitable. So V8 might be the death of the Tahiti.

We had a good run since 2012, but After 7 years it might be time to shut these GPUs off or sell to some low budget gamers who might Crossfire them.

Another option is to mine Ubiq, it should work since the DAG is low. Speeds might be 20-25Mhs however the GPUs will consume over 200Watts each if i recall correctly when I mined ETH back in 2016.


EDIT: Measured the temps with Kill-a-watt tool. And the V8 uses exactly the same power as V7.

Cryptonight V8
SRBMiner 1.6.8
HD7970 1180/1600
Adrenalin 18.8.1
560 Mh/s

https://image.ibb.co/gK8EwL/SRBMiner-Tahiti.png

Just took the last chunk (18) of my original (56) 280x's offline, These badboys mined everything from LTC, Dash(Darkcoin it was called back in 13-14), a fuck ton of ETH and many more, RIP you little gems, you paid for yourselfs 100,000's times over  ;)  :-*

Yeah I completely agree.

I never mined BTC with them but a few GPUs i've bought second hand the guy actually mined BTC with them. They were originally released in 2012 so you had a few good months of BTC mining with GPUs and at the time the 7970 was king.

Later I bought them second hand and mined LTC, then Dogecoin, then Dash, then ETH, then ZEC, then XMR and now might be time to shut them off and Craiglist them once the GPU dumping phase passes.

No other GPU has made a profound impact on mining and never will.

RIP!

My RX280 with Hynix memory gives errors on all miners except for XMRStack, and the speed dropped by half compared to Claymore. It is a pity, but it seems that this card has already outlived its own. Maybe I can use it again if Claymore upgrades his miner.

These cards were holding great value for all these years. Recently there are many rapid developments in mining arena and who knows they might be still useful again.

I have 80 pcs for these cards. 30% of cards still brand new ,never used also.

Anyone interested to buy it , contact me

Regards
Abrar

afrarnokia@gmail.com
whatsapp +85260327949

50 pieces of these monsters GPU (mostly Sapphire VaporX) laying over there. I direct replaced them with 1070s in my rigs.

I heard of the monero fork.. maybe they will come alive again  ::)

extremely impressive that cards that came out 2012 still can perform at a pretty decent hash/watt TODAY!.. its friggin 6 years+ they came out now! I started with a few 280/280x/7990s and now runs all nvidia today. But yes, the 7970/280x is legendary cards :)

Had some time and did some testing with these Tahiti GPU.

Basically XMR-Stak seems to work. The version I used is XMR Aeon Stak 2.5.2 and I found the link in Mattthev signature.

If you got the 7970/280X use intensity 920 and you should get at least 500Hs and up to 550Hs depending on how high your core/engine clock is set. At 1000/1500 you should get close to 500Hs and the GPU shouldn't consume much electricity, around 130Watts or so.

With 7950 with 28 Compute units you will need to lower the intensity a little bit and your speed will be slightly lower.

If you are getting incorrect shares, you will need to lower your memory clock.

Putting these numbers into What to mine with 10 cent power results in a total net profit of nothing. So if you are a die hard hodler or got free or cheaper power, you can mine XMR but for most i think it's time to pack up these GPUs.

If you undervolt a lot, you might get thin profit. It is good only for winter heating.

Giving this thread a bump.

Wondering if there is anything out there worth mining with the Tahitis. Basically ever since the XMR fork last week it made the last working algo obsolete since the new non Claymore miners don't support CNR.

The algo was good because even though the speed was slow the power consumption was low. Wondering if anyone had any luck getting CNR working with the Tahitis.

This card gives 8-9 sol/s while mining Beam with lolminer. It is profitable even now.

I got a couple of these beast 7990s, they run hot as hell.  Isn't the power usage too high?

I looked into this and doesn't seem very profitable. Basically using Nicehash prices of 0.006 kSol/BTC, you make about 19 cents a day. But what is the power consumption? I am guessing its at least 125 Watts so with 0.10c power it yields a loss.

Unless I am calculating this incorrectly or the Nicehash rate for Beam is way too low?

My price is 0.05$ so it's OK at the moment. Also I'm using card with modded BIOS. Core voltage is 1,075-1.12 V (Core/Memory is 1060/1450 Mhz). GPU-Z shows VDDC power 75-83 watts. Overall consumption is up to 120-130 watt. Also I'm using R9 290 and R9290X, they give abt 12 sol/s.

Anyone mining recently with 280x? On cryptonight I´m only getting 400 h/s on xmrig/srb and xmr stak just crashes the computer. And on beam I´ve been getting just 2-3 sols. Any sort of overclocking only seems to lower hashrate and eventually crash. Maybe older miners work better? I Remember getting like 550 h/s on cryptonight years ago. Maybe some older driver is better to use, maybe something can be done with this new mem tweak stuff? Any tips appreciated apart from Bios mod or telling me it is not efficient GPU to use :)

Sell those ancient Tahiti gpu's and buy some used Hawaii gpu's instead. Or if you have the cash, go buy some used rx580's and mine cryptonight variants with those great cards. Will use much less electricity too.

I am very surprised to see this thread being resurrected. Basically i've sold all my 280X that didn't have any fan issues. Most of the people that bought them bought it for Crossfire gaming, video rendering, or some hobby mining. I think I got an average of $50 per GPU. Hence its worth the time to package them up and sell them on Craigslist.

I wouldn't even buy any Hawaii's GPUs because in my opinion they are overpriced and they are almost useless for mining since they got that DAG thrashing bug and hash ETH at like 15MH/s and they also use tons of power, usually at least 200 Watts worth.

There are tons of second hand RX 570 4GB that you should buy instead because mining is still not as profitable as it once was and everybody wants to get rid of them.

New test in mining 2019 a video card AMD Radeon R9 280X

https://cryptoage.com/en/1768-what-can-mining-legends-amd-radeon-hd-7970-and-r9-280x-in-2019.html

Thanks for posting this link. Its actually a pretty good article how it talks about all the different coins that were possible to mine with a 280X starting with Bitcoin itself all the way to Zcash.

One issue with the article is most likely the power consumption figures, they seem a bit low. I don't know how the test rig was measured in calculating power consumption but it should almost be double of what is shown.

When I mined ETH in 2016, my hashrate was 20MH/s and my power consumption at the wall was like 200Watts with each GPU undervolted. I am assuming he used GPU-z which is not accurate to measure power consumption.

Power consumption is taken of the whole test stand minus power consumption in idle mode. there may be a mistake due to the low efficiency of my bronze 1200W power supply while operating at minimum power.

Hi All ...

So can I safely assume that ALL these OS are Windows based?

When you all post hashrates, miners and parameters (under/over volt, etc) you never actually specify what the OS actually is, what the build of machine and PSU, what model cards and what applications are being used. I assume all this is Windows based, but that assumption only comes from some of the applications you refer to in your posts.

Does anyone have a Linux system running? If so, what system in reference to hardware, software and drivers? Is it running well or unstable? Links to anything that needs to be downloaded or is there some tutorial, on a step by step basis, as to how to build and install these cards, OS, Drivers, and miners/apps. specifically due to the fact that I am more a RHEL based OS Tech, not a Debian/Ubuntu based OS Tech. I know little about Debian/Ubuntu's workings and installation protocols.

I ask this not from a newbie standpoint, but a knowledge standpoint. I have come across this thread, and VERY interested now, as I dusted off a number of our old 'theFARM' cards from the previous CWI Mining Farm back in 2013. To be honest, I have had one HELL of a time with getting it all running under different Linux Distros (CentOS 7, Fedora 30, Ubuntu 16.xx, and a few others) all because of the ridiculous stance that AMD have on their driver releases NOT supporting these cards in the latest release.

I am personally against using ANY Windows OS, but it seems this is one of the very few, more 'solid' ways, of getting it all working with the drivers AMD release AND mining. Power, setup and components are not an issue for us as we host a number of Miners in our CWI theFARM, so this is more for an exercise in functionality and mining more than it is for 'profit' or 'money'.

So ANY help with this will be greatly appreciated, especially by those that have actually got these cards running in Linux. Though at this stage of the game with us, pulling any more hair out building these systems will not only send me bald, but crazy too, as I am even willing to infect our miners with Windows IF we have to :P

OK - enough bashing Windows :P

If there is such a step by step tutorial out there, or if someone can at least point me in a good direction, I will make sure this is added as part of our 'nostalgia' module of theFARM, and show the results of these here, and eventually on our website (when that is ever finished of course!).

One thing that was posted earlier I read was interesting. An Algo specifically for these cards and cards of the like/era. We at CWI have a number of algos that we could test on these cards, the first of which will be implemented shortly on the redevelopment of one of our coins. If there is any success in building these cards to mine, we will locate an SGMiner/or-other-miner dev to build a miner for that Algo and set it up for testing here if you are all interested. Obviously the newer cards would do much better, but it would be a nice exercise in resurrection of these cards.

If anyone can help, has links, steps/guide, or knows anyone that does, please let me know. We do not have any AMD specific devs, as we switched to nVidia a LONG time ago and have stayed with them. I would like to see these cards active again, and mining once more if possible, preferably under Linux, but not necessary at this juncture.

Thanks,

#crysx

Sometimes you got no choice but to use Windows. There are many times in the past when Linux drivers were buggy while Windows driver's werent. There are also other issues such as the miner software. When a coin is new sometimes there are miners only available for Windows and comes out weeks later for Linux.

I remember the ZEC launch days when Claymore released a fast miner but at the beginning it was only available for Windows. So what are you going to do? Mine nothing or just use Windows temporarily?

I actually prefer Linux also, much more stable, requires less intensive hardware and easier to manage but with mining in 2017+ I started to switch everything to Windows because the drivers were difficult in linux and so were the miners.

I miss the good old days of mining Litecoin in 2013 with my Radeon 7970 using PimP.

Same ...

I miss those days also, though we had Wolf0 on our side, helping us with the private BIN, that he would produce for SGMiner at the time. We never used any other mining OS at the time, but our own installs (which if I remember correctly were Fedora Core 15 at the time). Fun days.

Well, Windows it will be if that is all we are left with. I am after someone that can help here, as almost everything I have tried now (including a 12hour stint with HiveOS) still does not allow the cards to Mine. Almost certainly due to drivers. HiveOS is quite interesting in that it seems to be quite a mature, although complex and at times confusing, system. All the cards show, and with a few tweaks, all the cards are recognized, but the mining side is still dead.

I will be installing Windows on an SSD when time allows in the next day. We have a two Windows 10 Pro licenses so will have to use those.

Again, any help from any one will be appreciated.

#crysx

God i never forget my Upgrade after using 6950 for so long and when zcash hit my 7950s were giving 4-5 usd per hour now tho sadly they all died but their fans and heatsinks are still cooling vrms and various other components i miss the good old days :-\.
It kind of hurt me to saw their heat sinks into little pieces.
I saved one heatsink just for the good memories when this Beast payed for my gtx 1080 and my house.
https://i.ibb.co/HPsrGTQ/7950.jpg

and i still remember when people were giving nvidia shit "the way its meant to be played"but not mined.

I've never liked Sapphire either. I didn't have the Sapphire 7950 that you pictured above but I've had a Sapphire R9 280X Dual-X and it was a very poorly designed GPU, especially for mining.

Basically they had faulty MOSFETS which would overheat and fry while mining. I think most gamers never had issues but miners experienced huge problems with these GPUs. I remember frequenting the Litecoin forum and people complaining about their GPU bursting into flames or finding their mining rig offline and smelling burnt PCB.

So I threw the PCB away and just used the Heatsink+fan from the dual-x but it was crap also. At first the fan died, then the other fan died, and so I slapped on a case fan and it finally worked without issue. The one area they didn't cheap out on was that some of the heatsink was copper instead of aluminum so with the right fan it would cool very well.

Probably going to frame that heatsink from all the headache it gave me throughout the years.

I Still have 50+ HD 7970 Brand new cards , I was holding this from 2012 ,
Dont know what to do with this ,

Actually i dont have any idea about bitcoin mining in beginning , Also i am bit lazy person

So never search of it ... Now i have lot of asic
But with This GPU what i can do ?
Any one have idea

tahiti is my first gpu on mining they simple just flash bios mod and viola no other overclock software, and pretty stable, easy to config

they strong, but bigger card compared newer amd gpus, polaris gpus are bad many my gpus already died except 8gbs, now vegas is my strongest gpu i ever had

component burn & smoked because short circuit in fan, but gpu still alive only replace the fan lol almost 4 years still mining no problem

I know they are all old GPUs but you can sell them for good amount of money on ebay, selling off within the range of 60$ to 70$ will attract buyers to you, some parts of the world like india for example still use old graphic cards for PC gaming

I can sale as bulk , Even i can deliver to india ,

Any interested .,

 If wanna look photos i can update

Litecoin, doge, monero and ethereum, this card made a lot of people rich.

They are worthless for mining now. Not much you can do. 9 year old GPU just isnt viable in 2021.

Lol. Crazy to see this old thread of mine still getting some bumps. Yeah the Tahiti were the king GPUs. You had a Large range of coins to mine starting with BTC then LTC then Darkcoin then ETH then ZEC and maybe XMR somewhere in there.

If you got a pair of them, you can sell them on Craigslist as a crossfire setup and they should game fairly well to a rx 570 since they got 3gb of ram. Great time to sell these cards at the moment. Only issue with mine is most fans are shot and can’t get replacements anymore.

Fans ...

Change them over to the newer fans with some modifications, or liquid cool them.

They are still great cards (we still have quite a few of them at CWI) for 'playing' with and mining some smaller lesser known coins.

#crysx

Who still mine with these cards today? Even free electricity is a complete waste if you use this cards, I have six of hd7970 but I've sold 5 already on ebay at a very cheap price, there is no point keeping the cards cos as time goes by they lose more credibility, such a nice cards they are but later no one would want them or talk about them anymore

tahiti, fuji, polaris had each one of them for museum purpose only, hanging around the wall, my greatest gpus and they still alive but not worth for using it, remind me for good old days  ;D

IF ...

and only IF you only care about gambling/profit/all-that-bullshit - then agreed.

But as we have different uses for different projects in different agendas, they are VERY useful in more ways than that dribble about Money! As a developmental and testing system, our AMD TestBed, they are great.

That is THE problem with everyone today - it's all about Money and nothing else to you all, which shows where your CryptoInterest actually lay. Nowhere in Crypto itself, just the Economic World that the Governments have forced us all into. Period! Complete the opposite of WHY Crypto/BTC was invented in the first place.

Not everything is about Money - certainly not with CWI.

Hence why you consider almost EVERYTHING based on it's FIAT account, and not it's useful merit.

#crysx

They still are great cards ...

Really!

Not much good with Power Usage in comparison to todays cards, but depending on what you use them for, they are still good.

In our case, Cards that can be ripped to pieces and rebuilt for developmental purposes, and in your case, Sentimental Wall Hangings ;)

#crysx

I still mine VTC on a Sapphire R9 280x (and 285). It's about 2000 sats a day per GPU.

I'm interesting how many Vertcoin do you mine per day per GPU? I'm mining Vertcoin with RX550/560 (they are mining like ~1 VTC/day) but I want to compare with older better GPUs :)

Maybe ...

Just maybe - we should share mining tips and miners/OS/parameters for everyone? Or is that thread already created?

That is if anyone is interested f course.

#crysx

Didn't think there was anything left to mine. Is this the same Vertcoin that came out in 2014? I remember it used slightly more power than Scrypt and scrypt was already pulling like 300 Watts per GPU from the wall.

I remember mining Dogecoin back in 2014 with 2 of these gpus in a single case. The power from the wall was like almost 700 watts with the power meter. And this was only 2 GPUs. These days we got rigs of 5-6 GPUs pulling the same amount of power.

Crazy times.

I use zergpool, so I do not know the exact amount of coins. Hashrate is 395 kh/s@1010/1495.

Yes it's the same coin. But it has forked. It forks away from ASICs. Have been on LyraRev2 and LyraRev3 before. Don't know what algorighm back in 2014. Never the less, it's a great coin. I think you could optimize 79xx GPUs a lot like on Polaris etc. I had an 270x before and that was even profitable in the bear market mining Vertcoin on LyraRev2. I want a HD7950 or such to play with actually. I think it's still profitable on Verthash..

Like mentioned above, it's a bit of history in the crypto space!

I mined all my LTC using 7950's, they absolutely rocked back in 2013. Heated my basement too!

Today a 7970 can mine 350Kh/s at 130W on VTC

At current difficulty 3x 7970 mine 1050/1100khs, more or less 4.5$/day before electric bill, so yes.. in this moment they are back to be profitable, not worth if you have to buy them but if you already have old cards sleeping they are worth a shoot until price of gpu and BTC will normalize

I am also mining Vertcoin with my 270X 2GB - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvkGpXWw1L8

An update.. with an old release of HiveOs that embed Amd drivers 19.20 and lolminer i'm able to mine ethash4g at 23-25mh/s with 140W. Currently is 0,016ETC (1.4$) before electric bill. Not much but at this prices it's amazing an almost 9year gpu could be still make profits

You sure it’s only 140Watts? How did you measure? From the wall?

I ask because when I used to mine ETH with my 280x back in 2016, the speed was around 20mhs and power consumption was always around 200 watts.

With a 5 GPU rig it consumed about 1000 watts and this is with every GPU undervolted as low as it can possibly go. I would of loved to get 140 watts and 23mhs considering my RX series GPUs hash at like 28-29mhs and they consume 130-140 watts.

There is no coming back for GPUs like HD7970 anymore unlike rx580s, I'm sure the 580s will last few more years before they meet the same fate as the 7970s, I still have this cards today and I've dash out two of them to family member for PC gaming, I have no use for them since I'm running on solar energy, need to save much power as possible

Newbies in mining do not use wattmeters.
The trusses for 5x280 were used on two 750 watt power supplies. 1 kilowatt power supplies were expensive.
The 280x video card consumed over 200 watts.
3 GB video cards will be able to mine the Ethereum classic for about another 10 months, but the hashrate will gradually decrease with each epoch.

Even if he didn't have a Wattmeter how did he measure that it was 140Watts. As far as I know there is no such power consumption indicator with any of the monitoring software for Tahiti GPUs. Maybe perhaps he was shown the current and multipled it by voltage to get a wattage. However Ive never see a software which calculates any type of power consumption for Tahiti's.

And yes they are power hungry. For ETH it used 200 Watts which is considered too much by todays standards however back in 2014 I mined with many of these 280X mining Litecoin and guess how much power they used??? For a 2 GPU rig so 2 * R9 280X the power at the wall was over 700 Watts. Even if you undervolted it still used tons of power.

Basically a single 750 Watt PSU could only power 2 GPUs.

A lot of time has passed and I could be wrong, but it was 2 power supplies of 750 or 850 watts.
For Ethereum, this was quite enough, but the memory of these video cards was 3 GB, so the R9 280X was replaced with other video cards.
I liked the R9 380 and R9 380X better because they were cold.

Yeah back in late 2015...early 2016 I had a huge dilemma. Basically the only GPUs that I was in the market for were the R9 280X or the R9 380. Both of them cost almost the same... maybe the R9 380 a little more.

Here is the thing. When the ETH DAG was very low, the R9 280X mined at like 26MH/s or so. The R9 380 mined at like 21-22MH/s. So I basically decided to get the R9 280X instead. Spent most of my budget on those... big mistake.

Why? I didn't realise that the R9 280X would slow down on each new DAG, eventually from 26MH/s it mined at 21MH/s, same speed as R9 380 however the 380 never slowed down but the 280X. Something called DAG Thrashing bug.

So if I bought the R9 380, I could of mined longer and because it was 4GB even longer that the 3GB 280X.

I have a rig with one RX 550 4 GB, one HD 7950 3 GB and one R9 290 4 GB. All mine ETC 59 MH/s @ 398 W at the wall (measured with power meter).

Also it's an 850 W PSU, only bronze rated.

RX 550: 11.35 MH/s
HD7950: 24.46 MH/s
R9 290: 23.13 MH/s

I'm trying to buy older AMD cards because they are really cheap and still profitable, if you known how to config them.

Wow. I think something must of changed in the new ETC algo because these figures would of been very difficult to achieve back in 2016.

I had a bunch of the r9 290 and if you undervolted them to the min it still pulled 200 watts while hashing at 25-26mhs. You could give it more juice and get it to hash at 29-31mhs but it consumed way too much power.

The 7950 all pulled at least 200 watts, especially when the DAG was low and it hashed > 20mhs.

Add in your 550 plus the Mobo+cpu+fans i would way over 400 watts.

Weird that HD7950 is higher than R9 290, i think it should be close to 28-30Mh/s

I don't think it's weird, I have lowered the core clock to just 800 MHz and undervolted it some on the 290 to reduce the power, it's a blower style card and it overheats quite easy, and I don't want the fan to do more like 60% because of the noise. :)

Sure it CAN do maybe 28-30 MH/s, but I don't think that the most efficent thing to run at. Like you could do 31-32+ MH/s on Polaris cards, but that's either not efficent over all.

the good old days has been passed, well 2012 card still mining in 2021, the power is to wild for greener mining this days  ;D

surely the cards still able to makes some bucks, these veteran gpus already mining since first crypto mining sha256&script, better to put them on museum

Ok you know how to config them? I mean your RX550 do 11mh instead of 13.5 - 15 mh  :D

R9 290 will give you a lot of hashrate, but it's very hard to find these cards in good condition.
Video cards HD7950, HD7970 (R9 280), R9 290 are very hot and they had a lot of overheating problems. When the 3XX series appeared, it helped a lot to solve overheating problems for miners.

Didnt know this cards were hashing that much, thanks for the tip! i sold my 7990r and finding replacements now :)

cleaning up some of my storage stuff.

played with two 280x sapphires.

both burned something in the board, lighted and smoked....aaand it both runs.

4 screws, you clean and you are good to go...with just 4 SCREWS!

Let me guess. Is this the Dual-X Sapphire R9 280X?

Yeah I had the same issue. Started to mine ETH with one years ago. All of a sudden came home with rig turned off. Started it back up and poof.

Opened it up and some MOSFET or some VRM had burn't out. So I desoldered it for fun. And started it back up and it worked. Undervolted it and underclocked it. A few days later another MOSFET went. So its been for parts ever since.

I gamed with it for a while and it was fine but as soon as I tried mining ETH, it completely went up in smoke instantely.

yup, dual x

surface mounted chip capacitor or resistor that was burned, i say they might be in a better condition than mosfet or vrm burning out there.

Yeah something strange going on with that model of GPU from Sapphire. The Sapphire from the 7xxx era and the current era were all pretty robust. However something about that Dual-X model which made them susceptible to blowing up.

Even before ETH, people bought those to mine LTC and Doge (Scrypt) algo and they had similar issues. Within a few days, they would go up in smoke. However since they were new back then, you just had to RMA them and got sent a new one.

out of curiosity for the 3-2GB versions you will be currently mining? kawpow has his dag over 3.7GB and etc over 3GB

They mined for years and stored for years..they were not the ones you are saying..

There are different batch with different vrams, hynix and elpida that hashes differently too..maybe there are bad batches for the unlucky ones.

I played with the 290x too..



This is what i'm comparing the 280x to 290x...in terms of present day

280x is like 3070 level of heat with the performance of 3080ti vs the 290 (3090) and the 290x (3090ti).


They are going back to the storage though because i have more profitable cards for the space, electrical space, and heat space.

About "for parts only"...yeah this is a must, i have a 3080ti screw that fucked up because i used a lousy screw driver...you know what, i got a replacrment screw from some old 390 lol.

By the way, as i pointed out in other threads,  3080, 3080ti, 3090 with lower end coolers even with the best thermal pads/paste is like buying 290/290x where there are no improved coolers available vs buying the 390 and 390x with improved coolers.

The only exception is when you are in a cold climate area, the low quality coolers can suffice.

This is also what made this 7950, 7970/280x the best mining card because it is the best mining card in all climate temps.

These video cards can no longer be found on sale without serious problems. The 7970/280x video cards have 3 GB of memory, the 290 video card has 4 GB of memory, which will not allow mining some modern coins, and these video cards have very high power consumption, which is also a problem.

Still better than a heater, power consumption is heat generation, the more power consumed the more heat generated, these cards can still reduce cost of heating if you are in a cold climate and the newer cards are still overpriced hehe. Even better if you already own them.

Do you seriously want to make a heating system out of 7 year old graphics cards? With the current profit and problems with old video cards that have a memory limit, I would not do experiments. Do you suggest putting these video cards in a special liquid?

If the cards are 7 year olds, the motherboards that they plugged in are teenagers LOL.

No they are not going to explode, just plain air cooling will suffice.

Even if the profit is negative 3 usd, with zero hash rate heater your profit will be negative 7 usd, you will save 4 usd..that is good enough.

They are still ok for some type of light gaming. Especially when you can crossfire them. Sure power consumption is not great but for gamers it won’t matter.

In terms of mining. I think when ZEC went all ASICs it was the end of the road for these GPUs. They went from mining Bitcoin in the early days, to Litecoin and doge during the 2014 era, then later to ETH and finally ZEC was last good coin to mine on them.