i've run in to this phenomenon too..

staff, people traveling on business and the company pays for hotel along with per diem, shared accommodation to lower per night fees are just a few guesses.

find the ideal settings for each card individually, test it crash proof for at least 24h.

then put it in a rig along side other cards, maintaining space for proper cooling. ensure cooling is sufficient to surpass the environmental conditions during your 24h test scenario.

if you still crash it's likely a software issue like drivers or windows trickery.

if you are crashing or hanging while running the card individually for testing ideal configuration:

increase voltage which increases heat but makes things stable at higher clocks
decrease voltage which decreases heat but makes things unstable at higher than factory clocks due to sensitivity to quality of power signal delivered by gpu
decrease intensity which makes the card run cooler and cuts the workload slightly
decrease the clocks, gpu vs memory depend on the quality of your cooling solutions
clean and repaste your GPU

i do believe most of this has been said before..

you think?

alright so after a long wait for parts to arrive and research/prep on how exactly to work with SMD, i spent the end of the weekend getting my fix on.



check out how the 0402 caps are shipped, encapsulated in that little strip.. grabbed some solder paste and since i have a surplus of these components now, i removed the other of these same variety caps in the mosfet step circuitry as they probably got subjected to excessive heat over their life span which is why the card was in its sorry state to begin with and it was parted with so cheaply.



you really have to be on your game with these tiny components.. i should have bought those visor goggles with magnification in them, but think i fared alright with the naked eye.. close up for scrutiny provided (: started with a toothpick but ended up using the head of a pin to apply paste, and worked great at picking up the capacitors also.



the paste is sticky enough to hold the parts in place but i really wanted to get some smush on these components to ensure a solid connection.. i grabbed some foil tape, 3M foil tape.. it has an acrylic adhesive that holds up at least until the paste starts to work its magic. polyimide tape is the way to go here if you got it.. or simply omit the step, the residue left over made me think twice about going this route in the future.



next its off to my designated reflow toaster oven. this paste melts at around 420F so i went 425 for 4 minutes and spiked it to 450 the last 2 minutes.

Now with the repair work out of the way and the GPU settling down after its roast in the toaster.. we can focus back on the mosfet heatsink mod i had originally intended.



because i'll be using Arctic Alumina which is an epoxy adhesive with quick cure time, its vital to have your shit together while executing this mod.

above is a dry run planing the layout of my sinks and which gets designated to which chip.



since it would be a waste to permanently fix these nice little copper sinks to this gpu, i'm only going to apply the epoxy to the corners of the mosfet and a conventional tim in the center.. not only does it provide a means to repurpose these heatsinks in the future by making them removable, but the conventional paste actually dissipates heat better than the epoxy so the benefit it two fold.



we're going to use a clamp once the sinks are all in place, one could have opted for cardboard or another buffer for the underside, it's much more practical to use the repurposed heatsink that was originally on the top side though.



and all clamped up, try to use a soft wood for this if you can. and leave it a minimum of 2-3 hours. overnight is best.



while the clamp is working for us, we can focus on the fans.. there were working great beforehand but maintenence can never hurt.



many complain their fans must not come off.. sometimes you have to be forceful. i have never broken a blade performing this maintenance.. using a flat blunt edge helps with prying action if it's super stubborn. dont waste your time with the dental floss around the fan blades trick. (:

after cleaning the blade cavities and the motors, put a small drop of oil in the middle of each fan motor.



heatsinks come from factory in non optimal form as it is, but seriously.. who is the nutter that takes a razor blade to scrape old TIM off their heatsinks? i run in to this ALL the time.



properly lapping the heatsink surface does wonders. get your thermal tape ready too if thats what you plan to use on the GPU RAM.



properly applying TIM to the compute unit of the gpu is vital, depending on product you use, excess can be anywhere from catastrophic to just plain insulating heat.



better than new.



better than new.



better than new.



one thing of note, if you intend to keep the metal bracket on the side of the card (i suggest you do) and re purpose the mosfet heatsink for the underside, you will need to clearance that bracket a bit.. i just used an old file i had laying around but a dremel could do the trick just as easily. alternatively you can clearance the heatsink, as it's aluminum and softer.. this was an after thought for me ;/



here's the GPU back in action.. many solved blocks left in her, fingers crossed.

eyes peeled for next project!

not crappy but as5 is old school and has a notorious cure time to reach maximum efficiency.

i'll concede the reference cooler leaves tons to be desired but re pasting usually entails dusting off the fins and if you're doing it right.. taking care of the mosfets and replacing those terrible stock memory chip thermal pads too. this brings new life to lots of equipment, not just the 290's.

i think for the compute unit itself, gelid's GC-EXTREME is a good safe TIM.. according to manufacturer as5 has like a 200 hour cure time and requires several thermal cycles on top of that. if you have a stable rig running 24/7, cycling it with breaks to cool components just isn't practical.

repaste that r9 290 and you can get 1100 core out of it quite easily. at 1.1875v

i like to use the 290x rom and lower mem clocks though.

i have found removing the faceplate dramatically improves potential.

the account distribution is actually pretty ideal.

the network distribution is the issue. some way to discourage pool mining or farms all together is what would be best applied here in my opinion.

unfortunately because the current stock of gpu miners could not figure out how to gpu mine properly, they flocked to pools when available and 51% attack is a real concern.

Alright so part 1 of my 7950 Gigabyte Windforce 2 tear down and overhaul.

The windforce cards are well documented as not the greatest for mining. Particularly early revisions where the VRM had no heat sinks or cooling provided.

I answered an add and picked up a card that was "on its last legs, not overclocking and displaying severe artifacts"..  the seller admitted to overvolting and mining early scrypt coins with this but fortunately the price was right for a chance to mess around with and learn more about these cards.

Plugging it in at home it mined surprisingly well off the bat, but any overclock put it unstable and crashed the OS shortly after. Flashing the ROM to something more tame helped but not by much and even at factory clocks there was artifacting under load and crashing after sustained mining.

I did notice the VRM area was equipped with a heatsink but still got incredibly warm, too hot to touch infact and the back of the vrm just had this flat bar across it as a heatsink which was also uncomfortably hot.

Time for disassembly to apply some VRM cooling mods..



I found some Enzotech low profile copper heatsinks for GPU ram that looked really promising and clear the height allotted by the factory windforce heatsink.

With a steady hand a thin dremel cutting disk I prepared some heatsinks with intent to fix to the top of the VRM mosfet's with some fujipoly thermal pads.

Then the factory aluminum heatsink for the vrm mosfets could be repurposed for the underside instead of that flat bar to keep things chill.



Unfortunately while cleaning the thick caked on putty/paste used as a thermal interface medium (TIM) on the underside of the VRM components, a problem became apparent.




can you guys spot it?




There was a little SMD/SMT (Surface Mount Technology/Device) capacitor that either disintegrated under extreme heat, had a crack in its solder and came off while I was cleaning the board, or the previous owner attempted to reapply thermal grease here and damaged the board unknowingly.

So with an idea what the issue was, time to figure out how to remedy it.



SMD capacitors come in various sizes, these particularly are extremely small, getting out the digital caliper and accounting for the extra solder on the end of the cap, the dimensions are consistent with 0402 size SMD capacitors.

Knowing the size, the value of the cap is not as easy to determine. Checking with a multimeter is really not so accurate in this instance. Ideally the manufacturer will have the specs on hand and can identify against the board assigned "Cxxx" designation printed beside the capacitor.

I emailed gigabyte support asking for a schematic of the board or value of the capacitor in question and received a not so prompt reply stating this is proprietary information. Further prodding revealed that I would not get far with gigabyte/amd for this issue so decided to dig further on my own.

Although the schematics are kept quite secretive, the VRM portion of these cards are usually sourced out. To find which VRM system is used on your GPU you must locate the PWM (Pulse Width Modular) which is the VRM master control chip of sorts, and read the printing on the chip surface.



It will be a larger chip, off near where the VRM mosfets are all lined up. A magnifying glass may be helpful at this point. If you're lucky the text will still be legible.

Mine read:

ADP 4100
JCPZ
TAB49003
#1249
KOREA

Which lead me to ADP's online schematic for their 4100 system at http://www.onsemi.com/pub_link/Collateral/ADP4100-D.PDF

Where the helpful data was identified below:



Which puts me to where I'm at now.

Stay tuned for how to resolder/reflow smd board repairs, application of upgraded VRM cooling on Gigabyte Windforce 7950 GPU and the performance gains afterwards.

this is a good tip, i just started work on that gigabyte we've been pm'ing back and forth about.

preparing to get out the good ole solder sucker tho ;p coupled with my hakko of course.



any idea why all sapphire gpu's have this thermal pad stuck over various smd components? also leaving that single ram chip completely uncooled.

how about an idea to not have a network controlled by two pools?

source available? crypto is trustless by default afterall

right so conservatively estimating 500MH/s per gpu on the network side, over 10,000GPU's added to pasc network since yesterday. i do tend to exaggerate its not millions, but you can't argue it is a considerable sum.

all while XMR



ZEC



and ETH



network difficulty also steadily rises.

as for the ckolivas cgminer link in supernovas help page for pascalcoin, its just unchanged from the MPOS package default https://github.com/MPOS/php-mpos/blob/master/templates/bootstrap/gettingstarted/default.tpl

network hashrate continues to climb exponentially according to http://explorer.pascalcoin.org/

while other profitable gpu coins difficulty rises as well.

not the trend one would expect.

putting aside the unlikely explanation that a few million gpu's have just been added to the global mining pool, does anyone know anything about bitcoin sha asic being adapted to this algo or possibly some drastic optimizations in the current mining software?

no use mining old school with a few gpu's when people have an outdated s3 doing equal to 100x GPU's worth of work.

as an aside, anyone want to buy my s3?

just switch to optiminer, at least for now

yea that makes more sense.. current state of things i would not have been surprised either way

won't be mining there regardless

you mean people are expected to mine and not have access to their payout for 2 weeks?

i think it is.. i'm setting a rig aside to silently solo mine this coin.

being late to the table, the fact that you need to research properly to mine this coin effectively was a big factor in my initial buy-in, and the account distribution being limited to block finders is something that makes keeping a wallet open and mining a worthwhile endeavor.

i didn't unload anywhere near the top but with the advent of some pools here the dump was inevitable and predictable.

although i would have preferred a coin code-base ported to assembler instead of pascal, the fact that we're far below when i did dump my wad means i've set my buy to re-enter this market and i'd advise others to do likewise.

this looks like buggy wallet code or temporary disconnect from peers.

LOL


using -t 15 will produce more of an effect of submitting shares to your wallet.

you will get false registers of blocks found in the mining window as well, but in your wallet logs you will find "pow higher than target" errors. you can leave it in this mode and a share high enough should push through and be accepted by the wallet provided you're mining right.

if you get all invalid operations hash or timestamp errors in the logs while submitting those nonce, or no submitted share in the mining window at all then you will know somethings not right and basically wasting electricity at that point.

tbh the proxy mining is better depending on which cards you're running.