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Cards are going on eBay this evening, thanks for playing everyone.
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price for the whole setup shipped international?
Can't sell the whole setup, I have 4 7950s that will be dropped into the board tomorrow. |
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110 Shipped to Central Canada? It's your only offer on the forum, it'd look good for more rep.
Don't need rep, but thanks. If the forum falls through I sell them on eBay for $145-$165. |
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Greetings.
Perhaps 1,880 MHash/s and not 1,880kh/s, am I right?
Good luck with the selling.
1,880 KH/s mining scrypt-based coins like LTC. |
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Photos. Going on eBay Monday evening EST. Reaper instance.  Top rig is the 5870s. Bottom rig is a 7850 setup that isn't for sale.  |
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Reference 5870s, various manufacturers. I can get pics up tomorrow sometime. Not much to see though.
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Most cards that are locked these days are voltage locked in the hardware. 3rd party PCBs typically have the voltage locked by setting a VID with resistors. This cannot be reprogrammed via software, it requires a hardware modification.
Most reference PCBs are voltage unlocked and overclocking specific PCBs are also usually voltage unlocked. Budget cards tend to be voltage locked.
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Consolidating my rigs. I've run these cards for the last ~18 months and replaced the fans ~3 weeks ago due to a few squealers. Currently scrypt mining w/ reaper @ 750/1225 @ 1.05vddc for a combined 1.4 MH/s due to my apartment hitting insane temperatures and my warehouse not being airconditioned.
Asking $135/card in BTC plus shipping($15 for CONUS). Buy more than one and get free shipping. Escrow is fine if you are willing to pay the fees and I trust the escrow. Will give this a few days before I toss the cards onto eBay.
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after the diff increase and seeing it go up real quick, I'm having second thoughts if i event should build a farm. Am I the only one?
Plenty of other coins to mine besides BTC. I am sitting here nervously watching the LTC exchange rates though.. |
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Wait. I'm confused. You are saying you will earn $293 on the card but you won't get your money back? When you are done with the GPU resell it. I imagine in a year 7950s will fetch $150 so your $275 investment returned $443 when shutting down the operation.
Unlike ASICs, there is an aftermarket for GPUs.
Just don't tell the buyer you mined with it for a year ;-) Also, as every GPU out there will be uneconomical in a year, there will be a glut of used cards, and I think $150 is optimistic, given 8xxx cards coming out, etc. Also, my example was for a 7970, not 7950, which is a bit less powerful (e.g 500 MH @ 200 W). But point taken re: resale value. However, if we even see 15% hash rate growth vs. 10% in my example, that 500/200 card returns a mere $137 over its life, barely over 1 BTC. With resale of $150, you're basically at break-even. You have to be pretty certain that hash rate growth stays under 15% at this point. My point is that it's a very bad time to be thinking about a GPU farm, and even small underestimations in hash rate increases result in disastrous ROI. I do agree that for BTC mining that now is not the time to buy a GPU. Because there are more efficient means to mining BTC, I think we'll see the difficulty increase but the price won't fluctuate much due to miner pressure. Or rather, I suppose I should say that more hashing capacity will come online as the price stays stable. However, I do believe there is room for more than one crypto-currency and I believe LTC has sufficient presence to survive and thrive. I do think though that LTC is undervalued slightly right now and we'll see LTC profitability compared to BTC at 'equal'(1000:1 hash ratio) hash rates increase slightly. |
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Wait. I'm confused. You are saying you will earn $293 on the card but you won't get your money back? When you are done with the GPU resell it. I imagine in a year 7950s will fetch $150 so your $275 investment returned $443 when shutting down the operation.
Unlike ASICs, there is an aftermarket for GPUs.
I am not 100% convinced there won't be a market for ASICs after the difficulty makes mining BTC unprofitable. I saw a guy on reddit that said he is going to try and use the Erupter USBs to develop an ASIC for Litecoin. If it can be done on the USB version, I am sure someone will do so for the larger ASICs as well. Alt coins are a big question mark, but if there is still interest down the line, there will be a resale potential in that market. Litecoins were supposed to be GPU-proof. They weren't. So they are most certainly not ASIC-proof either. I have not read much about Scrypt but my understanding is that the algorithm used is so memory intensive that there may not be the performance gain that we saw going from GPU/FPGA to ASIC with BTC. It sounds like you'd basically be building a compute core with access to massive amounts of bandwidth, also known as a GPGPU. |
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Wait. I'm confused. You are saying you will earn $293 on the card but you won't get your money back? When you are done with the GPU resell it. I imagine in a year 7950s will fetch $150 so your $275 investment returned $443 when shutting down the operation.
Unlike ASICs, there is an aftermarket for GPUs.
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There is no such thing as separate power plains on cards. They all share the same power supply, the same ground, and gate regulated 12v sources...
Again... as I said... if your 6-8pin does NOT supply enough POWER, it will DRAW from the PCIe rails.
Obviously, you do NOT supply enough power through your other connections.
If it was isolated, it would NEVER be able to power the card. It would have to power something unrelated to the card, like a fan or data-controller, which is still connected to the other sources.
It may have horrible designed gate regulators, but that is NOT "isolation". If that were true, then "everyone" should have that issue, and those who use correct power, do not, thus, it is your assumption that it is isolated.
I just tested one, and the traces are NOT isolated, and all connections test as connected.
Cards haven't been built with "isolation" since the voodoo cards came-out.
Check your power. Your PSU is obviously "short" on its values. Possibly you are seeing the MAX/peak values, and treating them as if they are constant values. (Read the AMPS off your 6-8pins, your card regulator is just trying to distribute the load across all three supplies.)
Please read mrb's post with measured numbers showing the current draw through the PCIe connection for various cards -> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=199706.msg2082941#msg2082941. This is a known issue, these cards draw memory power through the PCIe slot. This was rectified in the HD 7xxx series cards. BTC miners weren't the only people to fry the 24-pin on boards. When I used to competitively overclock, HD 5870s on liquid nitrogen were toasting boards most effectively. I used a 1x PCIe extender wired up with a 4-pin molex to provide a safer path for additional current when running quadfire. The quality of the PSU does not matter when it is a fact that the cards draw a significant amount of power from the PCIe slot. Also, last I checked the 100 amps of +12vdc that my Corsair AX1200 PSUs can pump out is probably sufficient to power 1, maybe 2 HD 5870s if I'm lucky. If you are using a 5870 still... Power is the least of your worries.
I love my 5870s and 5970s. Two years later and besides fan replacements they are still hashing away, having hit ROI multiple times. People starting to mine now will have trouble achieving the same thing with HD 7950s meanwhile I'll continue to mine at just the cost of power(which is cheap) and replacement fans. |
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It has nothing to do with 1x or 16x... all have the same power. The "extra" x's are just data-connections, not power.
It has to do with "your available power on your 12v rails" which connects to the 6-8pin connections. If you do not supply power there, it will be drawn from the PCIe rails.
If the total of your cards exceeds 75watts (the standard "must supply" for PCIe), using the (standard 25w draw max for cards on a PCIe slot), then you NEED supplemental power.
Or, if you use cheap china risers which can barely handle 15watts of power on those thin wires... then you need powered risers.
Or, if you simply have more than 3 cards, which would possibly pull more than the PCIe supply of 75w, from the multiple 25w-pull from each card. 3 = 75w (ok)... 4 = 100w (bad)... If your 6-8pin connections are not supplying the required "load".
Although the "standard" is 75watts, many OC boards are designed for more than that. Crossfire-ready and NVidia-SLi boards and PSU's are usually designed for the "extra PCIe loads". But the china-wires (old hard drive data-cables used to make cheap risers), are not.
Not always true. Some cards have separate power planes on the card. The HD 5870 is notorious for drawing the current to feed the memory subsystem from the PCIe slot. That being said I've run many 5870s off 1x-16x risers with no ill effect. I do run them on Rampage III Extremes with auxiliary 4-pin molex connectors for mobo's PCIe power plane. The +12v pins on my 24-pin and aux molex connectors are warm to the touch and the risers are warm to the touch but not in danger of melting the insulation. |
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Go with full-card waterblocks. You can easily dump the ~0.8-1 kW of heat coming out of 4x 7970s with fullcover blocks and sufficient radiator to support it. Chances are you won't be able to mount the radiator within the case though.
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Do yourself a favor and find a way to filter the incoming air. I ran a location last summer where I sucked in unfiltered air and ended up with a ton of unnecessary dust. This time around I'm using furnace air filter elements as I begin to vent heat outdoors again.
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So what do you use, if Reaper and CG miner are garbage?
I'm a fan of Ubuntu 12.04 personally, and that's the build I'd probably use, so I'd probably run something similar to whatever you're doing, but with only one card. I'd really prefer to avoid buying another license for Windows.
I run Reaper @ 340 KH/s per core @ 825/1225. 8000 thread concurrency, 5 gpu threads(doesn't seem to make a difference), intensity 17 and I think 32 share threads. I see very few hardware errors(maybe 0.001%) and I get around 10-15% stale shares while running p2pool(about average I believe). Tried up to 950MHz on the core but it decreased hashing throughput. Compared to people reporting upwards to 400 KH/s per 5870, I'm kind of pissed, but I don't know what there is left for me to adjust. |
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I only ordered one. It will be here Monday. In setting up a machine in anticipation of this thing turning up, has anybody used this (or any 5870) in a Linux based machine, and if so, what software and settings did you use for mining?
I really only use Linux for servers and basic workstations. Never for anything that required anything more than onboard graphics. Are drivers easy to get and install for this card?
I strictly run Ubuntu 12.04 for my miners. On my 5870s I seem to get crap performance with Reaper(340 KH/s per core) and CGMiner is completely unusable(tons of HW errors). For comparison my HD 7xxx cards have been a dream with CGMiner. You can download built binaries for CGminer, Reaper you'll have to build from source. Driver installation is easy but removing the drivers seems flawed so I just re-image the OS to test driver versions. |
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I swear Sapphire must just buy up chunks of 'old' GPUs from AMD on the cheap and then make runs of cheap cards. The HD 5830 was an incredible hash/$ deal and they appear to have delivered again with this '6870'.
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