Bitcoin Forum

Whenever I come home at the end of the day and check my speeds at my pool they read 725+ but when I check my miner the speeds are at ~660-675 (using 7970 and diablo miner)
I was wondering if this setting in windows, Turn display off: (I have it set to 5 min), increases mining speed when I'm not around.

check it out and report back: turn turn display off off

not you. Blackasaurus did.

On linux if you are using the card to display the screen - it means you will lose MH/s

My linux install script says to also make sure your screen blanker is just a blank screen and is enabled for this exact reason

When I bring the screen up out of blank mode, for me it dropped about 50Mh/s of the 365MH/s for the 6950 connected to the display but of course the 2nd 6950 was unaffected (though I will also admit that I only checked this a few times back in August ...)

I'd be surprised if windows wasn't the same

@Blackasaurus thx for figuring it out

@kano thx for your statment too

it does matter for overall efficiency optimization

I just recently switched my 1280x1024 monitor for a 22'' 1080p monitor and only lost about 2MH/s.

Remember that when GPU needs to redraw anything for you, it must take a part of the processing power from the mining. So, when you move windows, redraw their contents, there is (very little) slow down of mining process.

For example, I minimize the console windows when not watching the mining.

it's possible. display output affects performance of mining.

I used to set my display to sleep when I was on Windows and it seemed to help a bit. But since switching to Ubuntu, I can't sleep my screen anymore because it won't respond when I try to wake it up again. :-\

The rate shown by the pool is based on the number of shares you have submitted over a given period of time and involves a few averages and magic numbers, it should not be used to accurately gauge what your miners are actually running at.  The only truly accurate place is the display of the miner itself, for example in cgminer or diablo.  If you watch pool based hashrate readouts they can fluctuate wildly because it is also partly based on how lucky you were finding shares for that particular period of time. 

Also, using logmein or some other remote desktop would be the same as turning on the local display on the miner because the miner then has to render that desktop for your remote session.  The best way I've found is to use ssh to check your miners on the command line, or something like ANUBIS which gives you nice monitoring for cgminer, including 5s and long term averages directly reported by the miner.

I can throw this into the conversation: last May when I got into mining, a few months before AMD added support for headless mining (and people were making dummy plugs), my cards all hashed about 1% faster without a monitor.  My process was to plug in the monitor, get the mining started on the currently plugged card, then unplug the monitor and move on to the next one. 

Since that was nearly a year ago, I can't say whether it still holds true today.


Test it and find out.

fwiw:  I noticed that on my Windows machine, if a video (e.g. youtube) is playing (even paused), my hashrate drops by approximately 67%. 

Yep - it's all to do with using the graphics card.

It's quite blatantly obvious but I'll state it:
If you are hashing on a graphics card and the card isn't doing anything else, you get your expected X MH/s
If however, the graphics card is ALSO doing something else, it will reduce the X number by some amount in relation to what extra you are doing.
Try running a 3-D screen saver :D
(of course if that something else is extremely small the reduction in X may be small or negligible also)

If you aren't seeing the above, then you are either not getting the correct expected X MH/s or you are confused about which cards are mining and which cards are mining + doing something else.