Thanks to everyone who posted suggestions to fix my GPU0 issue on my 4 6x470 rigs, as well as "the pill" comments.  Here's an update:

- On Saturday, I updated all 4 rigs to driver version 18.3.4 & CDM v11.6 (heard about some stability issues with 11.7).

- 2 days later, 3 of the 4 rigs are running perfectly with no GPU0/OpenCL fail restart issues. the 4th rig crashes about 2 minutes after start of CDM 11.6, so i rolled it back to 11.5 and turned off GPU0. However, this has been my problem rig for quite some time, so I am pretty sure i either have a finicky GPU or a bad riser, which I will try to address soon.

- For the first few hours, on the 3 other rigs, I did have a weird thing occuring in that GPU0 on each rig would drop down to 2-6 Mh/s sporadically.  It usually fixed itself within 5-10 minutes, but if I turned the GPU on/off quickly within CDM, it fixed it immediately.  It was worst of 2 of the 3 rigs, and I discovered that 1 only had 16GB of virtual memory set, so I upped that one to 32GB. The other one was at 32 and I upped it to 48.  Thing is, it didn't fix the issue right away, but overnight Sat and since, all 3 of those rigs have run at full capacity including GPU0.

- So, bottom line is, with W10 Fall Creator's Update it seems like 18.3.4 drivers & CDM 11.6 is the solution.

- On "the pill" front, i cant believe how easy that was!  I simply downloaded and ran the .exe and bam! both my 1080's instantly went from 23.5 to 34!  That's almost like getting an extra 1080 for free, so I will take it and look to donate to that dev team and this is a great tool!

Yeah, i was wondering the same thing about most of the algo's that have ASICs either recently released or coming up. Why not just change the algo like XMR did?  It really seems like there are many more GPU miners than ASIC, so why not do all you can to keep those people as happy as possible as long as possible?  If other big coins did this then it should also have the benefit of slowing down the ASIC manufacturers.

Hey everyone... regarding the ETH Pill... wondering if anyone could answer these questions:

I have a rig with 6x ASUS Strix Gaming A8G:  4x 1070ti & 2x 1080 (the latter with GDDR5X).

I want to use the pill for the 2 1080's but trying to figure out the process order exactly.

Do you start the miner and THEN run the ETHPILL exe?  or run the pill first and then start miner?

Also, with this screw anything up with the 4x 1070ti's? on the same system?

Finally, is this a 1-time thing or does the pill need to be run every time you restart the miner or reboot?

Any of you had experience with the newish MSI 570 Armor MK2 8GB GPU?  I know that previous Armor models have been clearly worse for mining than their gaming model counterparts, but in looking at the specs between this and the MSI Gaming 570 8GB, they seem almost identical, except for the clock-speeds of the Armor are only about 1% less than the Gaming version. Not sure how that translates to mining though, which is why I ask this question.  Still looking for 2-3 more 570's to complete a build and highly prefer to go 8GB route. Just wondering if this MK2 Armor has closed the gap enough vs the Gaming versions.

Thanks Vapour and the others who replied.  Interestingly enough, my rig's config is almost identical to Vapours'... except that I am using risers and all 24 of my GPUs are MSI 470s... and the W10 version.  Mine shows as 10.0.16299... not sure how I tell which update was the last as with your 1709.

To answer some of your other questions...

- I have 2 Biostar TB85 and 2 ASRock H81 Pro BTC R2.0 Mobo's.  I have never touched the bios settings on any of these boards.

- All 24 GPU's were Bios modded using the strap-1500 method. After this W10 update and previous driver changes, I always used pixel patcher to get the cards recognized.  Also used the DDU driver cleaner prior to install.

All of these methods worked after any prior update to OS or Drivers but not this time. If it were just 1 or maybe 2 rigs with GPU 0 I too would thing risers gone bad. But like you said, in this case with all 4 doing the same thing, it statistically rules out hardware issues IMO.  I may go ahead and try swapping out 1 or 2 risers just for sanity sake first though, just because it's a lot less tediouos than messing with driver updates.  But alas, I suspect this will be an issue of finding the right set of AMD drivers that play nicely with the version of W10 on my rigs.

I have seen 18.3.4 mentioned a few times so may try that first.  Seems that was the last version before the 18,4.1 was released 3 days ago.

Hey Everyone... as some of you may remember, I have been having issues with GPU 0 on all 4 of my 6x470 rigs. Pretty sure the W10 Fall Creator's Update was the culprit (for some reason i could not stop this from installing on all my rigs), and have tried various versions of Claymore ETHash & Cryptonite-7 miners but always GPU 0 ends up going "open CL call fail restart"... over and over again.

Since I've been out of town most of April, I just turned GPU 0 off mining on all 4 rigs but now I am back and looking to get those 4 running again.

My first try is going to be a driver update, so I wanted to ask the experts on this thread which AMD drivers you are currently using or find to be the best/most stable.

I'm using 17.11.2 on all rigs which is quite old, so hoping a more recent driver will work better and fix that GPU 0 issue.

Yeah, it seems like most of the people freaking out about turning off their rigs are probably the ones who came onboard during 1 of the 2 recent major spikes (May'17 & Dec'17). For those people, their baseline mining returns were likely in the 4-5x range (meaning earnings of 4 to 5 times electricity costs). So now, or at least as of about 10 days ago before this recent recovery, they were maybe at the 2x mark or closer to break even, so by comparison, it seems bad enough for them the turn off their rigs.  In addition, they also have not been around enough to see the major ups and downs of the crypto market, so probably don't have as much faith in recovery as those of us who have been in the game over a year.

But, the valid point has already been stated here many times... unless you are paying crazy electric rates and dont' have the cash to pay that bill (has to be a very small % of overall miners), why on earth would you turn them off lol?  Unless, like i said above, you truly dont think the prices are going back up, in which case I ask you, why are you even in the game at all then?

Frankly, I am glad that many miners turned their rigs off over the past month+ because it kept difficulties in check, which means even more rewards for us that kept them on 24/7! :-)

Never ceases to amaze me how many newb retards come in this forum with this crap!  1% lol... seriously?!?! for all of the money their software has made you and you want to steal that nominal 1% fee?  talk bout MF'ing ingrates!  btw...that link you provided for Claymore's ETH wallet shows him getting a whopping .1 (that's 10%) of an ETH per day.  Even at the current rates that just spiked over past week that is $60 per day lol.  Seriously man... yes, please go waste the time of you and your friends, post you crap free miner here and see how many losers actually use it vs a proven rock solid platform like Claymore lol.  Or, you could go get a real job at McDonalds you freaking ingrate.

Hey guys... sorry to go off-topic here but I trust many of you on this thread so wanted to throw out an important question for those of you who are either preparing or at least involved in your Income Taxes for Crypto.

I understand fully most aspects of reporting but the one piece i cannot seem to find a definitive answer to is what the IRS officially provides for available methods of calculating gains on sales.  The 3 mentioned most places are FIFO, LIFO, and “specific share identification”.  For me (and probably most people that got into mining in the past 2 years anyway), FIFO would be the worst because it means the biggest gains (due to low prices in late'16 when most of what I sold in '17 was mined) and also because it would make them short-term cap gains, which are taxed at a higher rate.

LIFO would be much more beneficial for me but i cannot find anywhere official that says the IRS will accept this for crypto.  A few articles indicated they felt FIFO was the only safe method, given the IRS's lack of clarity on this issue, but i don't want to through away any more money than I absolutely have to lol.

Any guidance or links to sources about this would be greatly appreciated!

I have been running both on a rig for over a month so can provide some good insight for you...

- 1080's will generally get about 10% better (about 550 vs 500) hash-rate on Equihash coins, like BTG, ZEN & ZEC
- 1070ti's will generally get 25-30% (30.5 vs 24) better on ETHash coins like ETH, ETC, Music, etc PLUS, can dual mine DCR, etc (although dual mining not as good with these as with 4xx or 5xx AMD cards) but still, it's a nice bonus

With profitability of all coins down at the moment, but Equihash taking the bigger hit, ETH dual mine has been more profitable, so if this trend continues, 1070ti would be the easy choice.  In fact, unless Equihash coins move much higher in relation to ETHash coins, 70ti will be way better long term.  I know there are other algos to consider but these seem to be the most consistently profitable. Bottom line, if I could do it I would trade my 2 1080s for 2 70ti's in a heartbeat, even though the 80's have higher retail value.

lmfao.... umm yeah, good luck suing a Chinese company from anywhere in the world lol.  Not only that, but the disclaimer that was referenced earlier on this post pretty much releases them from all liability. buyer beware... if you didn't read the find print about them not being responsible for an algo change/tweak, then say goodbye to your money.

ummm... the same dorks that have been paying 50%+ premiums for GPUs over the past couple of months ;-)

this whole situation baffles me... I mean, Bitmain had HUGE profits last year alone so why try to get into an algo that anyone with half a brain should have known was likely to be tweaked/forked, rendering their ASIC useless?  This just goes to show that greed can influence anyone or any company to the point where they start doing absolutely stupid things.  Very poor decision on their part to even make this product and worse decision trying to push it on the uneducated portion of the mining community. This will come back to bite them for sure.

Some really good advice on this thread, especially for newer miners.  The point I would like to reiterate is that you should absolutely no be selling coins now with the market down.  This is the mistake that so many people make, and it actually feeds the negative fuel and causes further declines that are not driven be any actual negative events (such as more exchange hacks, gov meddling, etc).  If people would just chill out and HODL, the drops would not be as big and everyone would be happier.  I made this mistake early on myself. Been mining almost 2 years now and it probably took me a good 8-9 months before I came to this realization. 

Now yes, some may not have a choice due to financial crisis, etc, but aside from that, now is actually the time to be buying, not selling. just look at every other dip prior to this in the last 2 years and you will see it followed by a major comeback to new all-time highs for most coins.  Granted, this current downswing has lasted longer than some had thought, but that certainly doesn't mean there is not a huge bull market right around the corner.

Personally, my game-plan of late as been to hold a bit of USDT when the market is shaky, then pull the trigger on some coins I've been eyeing that have a likely bright near-term future.  Then, when it looks like the market is near a bottom, i buy up those coins and wait for the rise. This was not an easy thing to do because I think many of us fear that what if the market continues tanking even further. But at least recent history has shown otherwise and this methodology has worked well for me for the past 3-4 dips.

I know a lot of miners use this very nice Asus Z270-A motherboard as it can support up to 8 GPU's.  So, I am hoping that somewhat has experienced the same problem I am having with not being able to enter the BIOS to enable support for more than 4 GPUs.

I built a rig with this Mobo a few weeks ago... currently running 2 1070ti's and 2 1080's... Windows 10 Pro with 8GB RAM like my other rigs.  It has been mining various coins perfectly since that time.

However, I finally got a chance to go in and modify the BIOS so I can add the 2 more 1070ti's I have to it... and for some reason, I cannot get into the bios.  I tried it many times, each time tapping or pressing the Del key or F2 upon start-up, but nothing.

The weird thing is that the Asus splash screen never even appears upon rebooting. Screen goes dark (as normal) but then after that, I get a weird message from my monitor 1) no signal detected, the 2) monitor going to sleep... shortly followed by the windows login screen appearing within a few seconds.  I tried tapping F2 and Del at all times during this few second process but it will not enter the BIOS.

Something else that may or may not be related... for whatever reason, there are a few basic functions that have never worked on this rig.  1- Left-click functionality does not work on either the power options button or in the windows search bar at bottom left of screen. I actually have to right click on the power button then choose reboot that way. 2- left click doesn't work on some launch items in the task bar (like IE), but it does work on the File Folder icon.
 
FWIW, I have the monitor plugged into the GPU that is plugged into the first PCIE x1 slot (closet to the CPU) via the DVI to HDMI cable that came with my monitor.  Since this and the other 3 GPUs work perfectly for mining, i don;t believe there is any issue with risers, etc.  I read in some Asus forums that monitors needs to be plugged into GPU slot #1, which IMO, mine is.

But, is it possible that by #1 slot they mean the first x16 slot and not the actual first physical slot, which is an x1? 

Anyway, any suggestions would be much appreciated. This is probably an easy fix that will make me feel stupid but i just want to get those 2 extra 70ti's mining lol.

yeah, i actually have WU turned off but as i understand it, for major updates such as the Fall Creators Update, you can only push it so long.  I kept getting notified and kept pushing out week after week but eventually it didnt give me the option to not install it and just did it on it's own.  If anyone knows of a way around this I would be very happy to hear it :-)

And... i have a monitor plugged into the GPU via HDMI cable on all 4 rigs.

wow, it's been a crazy week, even for the crazy crypto world lol!  been super busy at work so missed a lot of stuff on this thread and in crypto world in general unfortunately.

- Stupid gaff by me... probably worst sine i started mining 18 months ago - I had both 1070ti/1080 rigs mining away at ZCL for several weeks.  I never read about that hard fork that happened last week, so was shocked when ZCL crashed from $150 to $10 in 2-3 days. Needless to say, I stopped mining it at that point and now everything pointed to ETH and getting about 900Mhz on that.  BUT... i did lose about $800 as i had mined about 5-6 ZCL coins, which are now effectively worthless.  In the big scheme of things, not a huge deal, but one that could have been avoided if I had been paying attention.

- Still having that "GPU0 hangs in open CL - miner restart" issue on my 4 AMD rigs.  it got so bad on 1 I had to just disable it within Claymore and now it runs fine. but still have the issue on at least 2 of the other 3 rigs and 1 is getting worse. This has to be a software/settings issue since it's statistically highly improbable that all errors are with GPU0s on 4 diff rigs and never a diff device #.  But have yet to figure out which setting needs to be tweaked so any advice would be appreciated. I know moving to SMOS would probably fix it but i simply don't have the time to do that at this point.

- Agree with the comments on GPU pricing... it's still insane and honestly, anyone paying these prices that is brand new to the game with no equity built from selling old equipment may never ROI their investment... unless we see another huge bull market and get over $1 trillion market cap in the next few months.  I was very lucky to get most of my 1070ti/80's from my employer's store at regular retail, but now even they are price gouging by charging $800 for a 1080 (NOT TI version lol).  Been watching AMD cards as well as I need 3 more 570's (preferably 8GB) to complete rig #7, but no way I am paying over $400 for those lol!  Got the 4 i have for about $300 before all this nonsense started so that may be where i stay for a while.  All retailers seem to be gouging even more now. I've seen the ASUS 1070ti's i have listed at close to $700 lol.

- Finally, I just read about the upcoming Monero fork (MoneroV). Was wondering what thoughts people had about this.  XMR has been one of the big 3 I plan on holding relatively long term but a bit worried what's gonna happen after this fork.  Clearly the XMR price run up recently has been at least partially as a result of the pending airdrop of MoneroV, which I beleive is at a 1:10 rate, but a bit worried given what happened with ZCL, but i do have much more faith in XMR than that.
   Also, does anyone know if MoneroV is going to be mineable? I hope so cuz that Algo could really use a new kid on the block. XMR has been worthless to mine over past few months, and with prices of other CN coins struggling, i new profit maximizer on that algo could help things a lot for mining overall

yup... i posted the exact same issue a few days back but never saw a reply with fix suggested. Here's the thing... this is happening on all 4 of my 6x470 rigs... and really only since that last major W10 update.  So, I am saying it is NOT a hardware issue because what are the odds that on 4 rigs, there is an actual problem with GPU0 on all 4?  It never happens on any other GPU, so this means it is a software/settings issue, but I have not been able to figure it out.  On Claymore Cryptonite miner, the solution to fix a lagging GPU0 was to manually designate the "-h" value in the .bat file, but no such option existing in this miner, at least not -h but maybe something else can be tweaked only on GPU0 to fix this... that has been what i've tried to discover for the past weeks but no solution yet. I actually had to disable GPU0 on 1 of my rigs that it got so bad, and looks like another 1 is headed that direction as well.

The one difference with mine is that they don't actually crash/freeze, but they get stuck in a non-stop look of resarting the miner due to that hanging GPU0 issue. So it restarts every couple minutes, usually with GPU0 at zero speed.

Claymore... or anyone else that knows of this issue... please advise. Thanks!

Windows 10 Pro - 8GB RAM - 16-32GB virtual memory - Claymore dual miner versions 10.2/10.5/10.6

Hello fellow ETH miners!  I've been having some issues lately and wondered if any of you might have experienced the same thing and figured out a workaround...

On 3 of my 4 Windows 10 6x470 rigs, GPU-0 is causing issues. Many times it runs at a slower speed (20-21 vs 25-26) and also ends up eventually causing a "GPU 0 hangs in open CL - miner restart" error.  Sometimes this ends up occurring every couple of minutes, which obviously kills mining rewards.

This problem seemed to start popping up after the Windows Fall Creators Update was installed on these rigs.

I had a similar speed issues with Claymore Cryptonite miner... always GPU0 again on all 4 rigs... and this was fixed be manually designating the "-h" value for GPU 0 at slightly below default and leaving the other 5 cards at the 0 defalut.

However, I see no such "-h" value option in this dual ETH miner, so wondering if there is another setting that I need to manually adjust to help fix this issue with my GPU 0's.

Any suggestions would be warmly welcomed!

For those of you still mining ETH... I've got a weird issue on 3 of my 4 6x470 rigs that Im hoping to get some advice on.

Seems like ever since the Window10 Fall Creators Update (i put it off as long as i could), I've been getting this strange behavior using Claymore 10.2. I also tried 10.5 & 10.6 but made it worse, so went back to 10.2.

Here's what happens:

- miner starts fine but in some cases after restarting, GPU0 starts running slower than all other 5 GPUs. Usually between 20-23 vs the 25-26 of the others

- it can run like this for a while, but then many times will eventually end up with a "GPU 0 hangs in open CL - miner restart".  Sometimes it does this reset every 30-60 minutes but sometimes it ends up doing it every couple of minutes, which of course kills mining returns

- since this is occurring consistently across 3 rigs and is always GPU 0 being the culprit, it seems very likely that this is a software issue and not hardware.

- I had a somewhat similar thing happen with Cryptonite miner... GPU0 was always way slower on all 4 rigs.  This was solved by manually designating the "-h" value for GPU0 in the .bat file, but there does not appear to be an "-h" option in ETH dual miner.

Does anyone have a suggestion on a setting tweak within Claymore to try to and fix this issue? 

 

I tried numerous Burst pools back around mid-'17 due to all the DDOS attacks and finally got onto pool.burstmining.club and have been happy there ever since (about 6-7 months running).  The only reason i hesitated to go there in the first place was that many in the Burst community believed some of the owners of this pool were the ones launching at least some of those DDOS attacks. It was a bit strange that through that really rough period of time, this was one of the only pools up and running consistently, but finally I just gave in and joined where i could get the most return and stopped reading all of the in-fighting within the community.