anyone else notice the plastic sheeting all around the stock heatsinks that is slowly melting and looks  like maybe just MAYBE it was supposed to be taken off before they put the heatsink onto the gpu board?

These diamond cards we definitely just fucking whacked together in some factory and thrown out there for sale. I highly doubt there is any need for plastic sheeting to be adhering to the heatsink all around the thermal pads and copper heatsink plates. What purpose could it possibly serve? Except to protect the heatsink in transport before it was supposed to be secured to the GPU board.

I wish I knew how to post pictures on this board to show everyone.

so you used .5mm everywhere? I used 1mm just on the vrm chips(the little ones or whatever the fuck they are called) and .5mm everywhere else. of course i used the 1mm in those recessed areas you are talking about as well.

Then I used shin-etsu thermal grease on the GPU chips. They have been running at 820-410 stable for a while now with two on one msi 890fx board. One in first slot and one in last pci slot.

Seems to be okay, but I haven't gotten to messing with that radeonvolt thing you can supposedly do in linux to measure the gpu ram temps.

oh yeah I used .5 on the controller chip also.

on cgminer settings --gpu-fan 85 --gpu-engine 820 --gpu-memclock 410

gpu 0 66.5c
gpu 1 65.5c
gpu 2 72.5c
gpu 3 62.5c

now the one card that read 72.5 has just always had a higher reading, even when it was stock. I'm not sure if the heatsink just doesn't sit right there or it's the chip or whatever. I've redone four cards now in the same manner and they all are closer to 60c with pci-e extenders and 65c if they are on a board with a little bit of spacing, like one or two slots between the cards.

The two cards we did with pci extenders actually sit closer to 55c, but that's at 800/300.

Thanks for the help, I think we have isolated that it is some type of electrical wiring issue, bad circuit, etc. I don't claim to know jack about electrical work, but my partner does, so he's going to check it out. I think we're just going to get a dedicated 30 amp line/wire? for the mining rigs. (with correct wiring, etc. I don't know the technical terms)

We might just be overloading the circuit it is on which causes fluctuating power issues or it was wired improperly to begin with.

Fr the record, the rigs don't "shut down", the cards just stop mining, yet they are not having any heating issues. They will shut down at 50c.

Thanks for all the help though.

looks like the third pin gets burned out from the the side which attaches to the pciE slot on the motherboard. Same side as where the molex powered adapter is soldered. I made the noob mistake of buying powered adapters even though I've been told I don't need them for 5970's on an MSI-890FX-GD70. I would post a picture but i can't figure out how to do this on these boards.

Could it be that those molex connectors have to be powered once they are soldered on?

Would be pretty interested if you had an alternate payments method available like paypal

having an issue with trying to use multiple gpu-engine speeds. i have a rig with 3 5870's and one 5970.

GPU 0 is 5870
GPU 1 is 5870,
GPU 2 is 5970
GPU 3 is 5970 - obviously from same card above
GPU 4 is 5870

I want to clock the 5870's at 950, 900 if they're not stable enough. I want the 5970 at 800 or 820 if I can get it.

memclock of 300 for everything.

So this is what i wrote at first.

./cgminer -o http://miningpool:port -u (username) -p (password) -I 9,9,9,9,9 --gpu-fan 85 --gpu-engine 950, 950, 820, 820, 950 --gpu-memclock 300

I just got a 100% cpu bug out of it.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

I don't think so, they're seasonic gold 750 watts and I used them separately with just two cards on them before. The rigs have always shut down after a certain point at  this location. At first I thought it might be the cooling since those stock diamond 5970's from newegg come with horrible stock TIM and pads.

I haven't replaced the TIM and pads on all the cards, but I have on four and they run a little longer, but not much. I know I replaced the thermal stuff properly because the temps went down like 5-6c after doing so. I haven't figured out how to monitor the ram temps in linux yet, so maybe that is my next step.

Also, I did try and run them at stock clocks (725/300) and it didn't make a difference except of course on my hash rate..lol

I'm just thinking these diamonds from newegg are refurbed stinkers that they simply got running at the factory and then pawned them off to newegg as "new".

I have an XFX 5970 at my house that I run at 800/300 without issue for over a week. I also have an ati brand 5970 paired with it that hasn't had any issues either. Then again, I have less problems overall on the rigs at my house versus the ones at my brother-in-laws. I think it just might be his wiring over there. I'm wondering if I can buy something that can "clean up" or maybe stabilize the power over there.

Who knows...

no, not powering cards with lines from two different psu's. I know that is not only idiotic, but will fry your card. I am using a lian li power supply adapter. see below

http://www.frozencpu.com/products/5637/cpa-167/Lian_Li_Dual_Power_Supply_Adapter_Cable.html

I have the 24pin atx part connected to what I will call PSU 1 and then the 24pin part with just the green and black wires connected to PSU2. of course I then have the 24pin ATX part connected to the motherboard.

Now PSU 1 is then connected to the cpu power connector on my motherboard and one of the pci-e cables is connected to video card 1, which is in pcix16 slot 1 which is what I connect a monitor to when trouble shooting.

PSU 2 is connecting the other two 5970's with two separate pci-e connectors of course and nothing else, just the two cards.

Thanks for the reply and that is exactly how I have them set up.

PSU 1 is powering the mobo, cpu and one gpu. I use a usb drive so nothing else needs power.

The second psu powers the other two gpus.

Oh and the rigs with three 5970's are at stock 725/300. the one rig has 2 5970's at 800/300.

I'm thinking I have a problem with the wiring in the basement where the rigs are. probably some power fluctuations or "dirty" power, etc.

I have nearly identical rigs at my house here and they have been 100% stable and they are overclocked. the 5970's are at 820/410 and the 5870's are at 950/300.
One rig has 4 5870's on a 1250 watt seasonic gold psu.
one rig has 3 5870's and one 5970 on a 1250 watt seasonic gold psu
one rig has 2 5970's with a 750 watt seasonic gold psu.

all have MSI 890fx-gd70 mobos, amd sempron 140, 2gb ram and 16gb fash drives using linuxcoin final with cgminer 2.0.7

I have two rigs with two seasonic 750watt gold psus powering three 5970's. I used a lian li adapter which connects the power supplies together.

The rigs power up and run fine for a certain amount of time, maybe 24 hours, but then they shut down. Other rigs I have with only one PSU seem to be far more stable.

So could the dual psu's be causing the stability issues?

all rigs use the same motherboards, linuxcoin via usb, etc.

Could it have something to do with the new port 9009? I've tried to switch half my rigs to that port in order to help balance traffic.

Just kind of sucks to see all these invalid blocks in such a short period of time. Although we did find 13 blocks in one day, so hard to complain too much..lol

Hopefully we can figure out why this is happening (beyond just being random) and maybe some who mine at other pools can comment on whether its happening there more frequently as well.

I did remove the blue wire and the fan still ran at slow speed and showed itself as 100% in cgminer, but it certainly wasn't running at 100% as the temps were skyrocketing to 80c. Fan seemed to be running at about 30% is my best estimate.

I'm interested in Miner1 Miner2 and Miner3.

I have no interest in the hard drives though.

let me know what you want for each rig.

@ sveetsnelda

Nothing happens, it just stays at auto.

well it will only run at auto if I just plug the cooler into the gpu board directly. It does not respond to any type of manual fan control. So what the hell am I supposed to do? auto isn't going to cut it for mining, especially with an overclock as it's just going to throttle all the time.

any other tips?

no the problem is it doesn't respond to any software controls. aticatalyst, cgminer settings, etc.

I use linux also which limits my options.

I need to mod the card fan somehow to make it run at 100% permanently. I'm thinking about connecting it to a molex power connector directly by disconnecting the fan adapter from the gpu.

I read about detaching the blue cable from the fan connector on the stock cooler, but that didn't work. All the other 5870 cards I got from bens are great and respond well to manual fan control except this one. I don't care about being able to control the fan, being stuck at 100% is perfectly fine to me. Auto is just unacceptable because it will shut down all the time before it kicks in to cool the card sufficiently.

Any tips?

WTF, i set it up so they would contact me when they were in stock and they didn't send me shit. You guys bought these today?

Damn it man I wanted 8 more.

I'd gladly make a donation for your time Kolivas. I want a specific startminers.sh script for linuxcoin final and cgminer2.0.7

Here is my current script:
#!/bin/bash
sudo aticonfig –od-enable
cd cgminer-2.0.7
./cgminer –o http://us.eclipsemc.com:8337 –u username –p password –I 9,9,9,9 --gpu-fan 100 --gpu-engine 800 --gpu-memclock 300

This is for 5970's I have three machines with 3 cards and eventually want 4 cards on each. I want to figure out how to make sure it will restart dead gpu threads.

Oh and I already have a Headless auto start script so I'm all set there.

If you are interested in helping me privately with this I will pay in bitcoin with a pre-negotiated price.  we can consult through chat, IM, phone, email or skype.

please pm me if you're up for it. I will also set donation to .5% if you help me.

I just pm'd you, but would like any watercooling stuff you have left and 5970's with blocks or just the blocks. maybe even stock fans if you have those left over to help with other cards I have which might need future repairs.

Can pay with paypal asap.