Nice findings, thanks for sharing OP.

Properly tuned, GCN cards can get dangerously close to BFL unicorn FPGA with the benefits of having a full manufacturer's warranty and support and a non-zero resale value.

Personally, I'm waiting for the 7990 cards - they will be using top-quality bin chips so the power efficiency should rock.
The initial price will be ungainly but a month of competition from nVidia's Kepler should drop it to an acceptable level.

Not sure if troll or simply horribly misinformed.
Seriously you are going to use a miner not changed since last September?? It's an abandoned project, man.

Cgminer is being very aggressively optimized for GCN right now in cooperation with diapolo, the author of the GCN-optimized mining kernel.
I personally believe it to be the best miner today.

This is so full of fail...

Did you use the exchange as storage? You know you're not supposed to do that, right?
If you used those 200 BTC for speculation, remember never to speculate with what you can't afford to lose.

In either case, that's what you get for entrusting your funds to non-reputable sites.

I strongly disagree. Power fluctuations high enough influence a connector would either hang or kill the card outright.
There have been no stability issues.

I'm of the opinion that the cheap generic connector just made poor contact leading to a temperature rise.

Mind you that the "rash of bad connectors" happened elsewhere, not at the PCIe plug.
The molex-pcie adapters are clearly substandard, look at the pics.
The PSU is likely ok.

If your PSU cables also say 18 AWG someone was clearly dishonest
The difference is undeniable.

Not only outrageously crappy but also mislabeled - why doesn't this come as a surprise?
This is precisely what many low-end OEM manufacturers do...

If you solder those wires or just go lazy and use wire nuts you should be ok.
Should you go with wire nuts make sure to twist those flimsy wires firmly together.

Thanks for uploading high quality pictures to document the issue.
This topic should be made a sticky.

Don't get me wrong, I want to have a choice when it comes to mining card manufacturers.
I hate being tied to AMD and having to deal with each driver update introducing performance loss and craploads of fail.

With shader clocks significantly lowered, however, I just don't expect competitive performance from Kepler

Read the tiny print on the cables. Look for the AWG rating, like 20 AWG. The higher the number, the lower the wire diameter.
AWG 18 is a recommended minimum, 16 is golden, 20+ is just inadequate for power-hungry cards as wire gauge makes one hell of a difference for the 4-pin peripheral "molex" connector.).

That adapter of yours is outrageously full of fail, even as far as crappy and inexpensive adapters are concerned.

If you have another of those surefire (or was it sure-to-catch-fire^TM??) molex->pcie adapters and a soldering iron, try using a dab of solder as an electrical interface between the wires and the contact surface.

+10k, thanks gmaxwell.

With the danger current implementations of pool software bring to the bitcoin universe by introducing unnecessary centralization, I feel the last thing Bitcoin needs is pool ops playing dirty games with the miners' hash power.

I know, P4, thanks for your concern.
No action needs to be taken, it's a highly overclocked 6950 with locked memory and voltage - of course it will get hot.

Did you know that the 69xx series was supposed to be manufactured in 32nm due to heat dissipation issues?
Obviously, the plan failed and AMD had to re-engineer those chips back into the 40nm process.

Actually, shame on me for purchasing a non-ref 6950 in the first place, but I wanted a quiet card since it's installed in my general purpose home server upgraded with mining capabilities.
It's right here in my study, I don't want to hear it howl when I'm in the bathroom  

The other card in this server is a 6750 (206 MHash/s) - an oddball combination of cards but case space limitations didn't allow for another large card and I got it very cheap.
Getting ablut 600 MHash with this machine which is not bad for a non-dedicated rig.

As I said, once the card can't pull 900 MHz I'll sell it provided it's still adequate for gaming.

...to reset the bios, yes.
Still, as any hardware job this required some concentration a steady hand.

You might have a hard time finding something to flash the non-reference ASUS DCII cards with...
At least they are equipped with a backup bios, I used mine a lot when I tried various voltage/shaders/memdiff flashes last September.
The bright side is you have the 1 GB versions which translates to less power being wasted by the memory than the 2 GB versions.

I'm sorry to barge in and spoil your party guys, but did you per chance miss the fact that Kepler's shaders will be running at core speed?
Fermi-based cards run their shaders at twice the core speed.

Unfortunately, I don't think so.
GTX 580's shader clock is 1544 MHz.  Let's optimistically assume 1 GHz stock clock speed for Kepler (that translates to 65% of a GTX 580's shader speed).

Therefore, a better estimate might be
where a is overclockability modifier and b is architecture modifier.

Let's assume that Kepler will overclock to 1200 MHz, what results in a = 1.2.
Since integer operations efficiency has long played second fiddle to floating-point operations, there is no reason to expect huge gains. Let's assume b = 1.1, i.e. Kepler being 10% better at integer operations than Fermi.

A stock Kepler running its 1536 shaders at 1 GHz would achieve 300 MHash/s.
Overclocking the card to 1200 MHz would boost the hash rate to 360 MHash/s - that's uncomfortably close to a stock VLIW4-based hd6950.

While half of a 7970's hashing speed is far less embarrassing than nVidia's previous generation of GPUs, it's still pretty underwhelming for an expensive and power hungry card a 1536 SP Kelper running at 1 GHz will have to be.

Update the topic title, jjiimm.
There's bound to be someone with a 7970 willing to take the job.

Any of these will do.

The basic steps of getting a rig going are installing the os, installing the drivers, sdk, and miners, configuration of X server and miner, startup automation.

You can learn more about screen by issuing the man screen command (man as in manual).
A more readable form can be googled out. Screen tutorials are also aplenty.

Buy me a 7970 card and I'll upgrade linuxcoin, deal?

RTFM && use screen.

So, do I understand correctly that you're moaning and bitching because ASUS didn't write Windows 7 drivers for a board released in 2003?
May I remind you that Windows 7 was released to the public in late 2009?
No, you're right, it's all Linux's fault.
Newbies... guaranteed to make you laugh

<amd bashing>
Definitely deproved  

Feeling sorry for Con? Think of the pain AMD people must be going through with those damned faildrivers...
Nothing strange that the CTO of AMD's graphics products group abandoned ship.


</amd bashing>

Not broken (yet ), don't fix. If the PSU works fine with no 5V load it's all for the better.

No problem, I'm glad we cleared this misunderstanding.
Actually, thanks for giving me a reason to link the manufacturer's spec sheet for everyone to see.