Are you really certain that 11.X would be any faster than 12.1? I'm running 12.1 + SDK 2.1 on my Win7 rigs, and I believe that is the fastest & most up-to-date possible combination for the 5000 series cards. I can only get about 98% of that with newer drivers, because SDK 2.1 is not supported then (no accepted shares). What difference would there be when using some 11.X driver compared to 12.1, when using SDK 2.1?

Payment received.

Any ideas why I'm getting 3-5% reject rates when mining through GPUMAX? Currently I have 17k accepted shares and 600 rejected. I haven't tried connecting directly, if that's required I'll have to use another pool. When I mined on ABCPool & Mt. Red through GPUMAX, my rejects were well below 1%.

With full specs of the gaming computers, people could recommend cards that would better fit the overall performance and be suitable for mining.

What kind of LAN games can you even play with those cards? You must be into some serious retro gaming there

I mine on gaming computers, using 5870 cards. Especially when crossfired, those can run pretty much any game nowadays.

I just changed my avatar to a 80x80 PNG image, but it didn't work correctly at first. When I used my Gravatar URL, my avatar was stretched to 120x80 by the HTML, even though the original image was 80x80 when I examined the stretched image. After downloading the PNG from the Gravatar URL myself, and uploading the file as my avatar, it wasn't stretched anymore.

Is this a bug, or some feature I can't understand?

I don't think that compressed air really helps on the tar caused by smoking. I have seen some components that are just beyond cleaning. It's pretty hopeless if you only start trying to clean the components after smoking near them for years.

I have tried to get Windows PXE booting to work for other reasons, but it was really problematic. The best I could do was boot a custom Windows PE (Preboot Environment) image, which was fully loaded to memory from a TFTP/HTTP server. I have no idea how I would configure a true installation to use a ramdisk as its system disk. iSCSI is one possible way to network boot Windows 7, and that could be done by installing straight to an iSCSI target and then booting from there (this is the better way, if you get the iSCSI target to show up during installation), or trying to convert an existing installation to an iSCSI target image. I tried both a few times, unsuccessfully. I managed to get a converted image to boot, but it just gave the BSOD for missing system disk. Is it actually possible to run a full-blown Windows 7 image downloaded from network without using iSCSI?

I don't need lecturing for PXE booting in general, but any Windows-specific information would be helpful.

I was told on IRC, that even though the displayed usernames have changed for some reason, you can still use the old one and it will work. That's bound to cause a lot of confusion, anyway.

I wouldn't worry about the stats much, it's not the first time there are problems with updating, even though shares are accounted for behind the scenes.

If the new drivers continue to have problems with SDK 2.1, I guess it's time to move on and use the SDK bundled with the drivers + diablo kernel. That gives me about 98% of the hashrate compared to SDK 2.1.

I have the same problem with this version that first came up with 12.2. When using cgminer 2.3.1-2, SDK 2.1 and phatk kernel on a 5870, my hashrate is normal, but the miner never submits any shares. Downgrading to 12.1 helps.

I'm using cgminer 2.3.1-2 on Windows, and can't get Catalyst 12.2 or later to work with phatk kernel and SDK 2.1. The setup that's working best for me currently is Catalyst 12.1 + SDK 2.1 with the following settings:

"gpu-memclock" : "450",
"gpu-platform" : "1",
"gpu-threads" : "1",
"kernel" : "phatk",
"intensity" : "6",
"vectors" : "2",
"worksize" : "256"

This gets me about 375-380MH/s with a 5870 at stock speed (850MHz). Note that I'm using gpu-platform to select SDK 2.1. Just to clarify, I first install Catalyst 12.1 in express mode, then SDK 2.1. After installing SDK 2.1 cgminer -n shows the additional platform.

There seems to be a problem with Catalyst 12.2 and 12.3, though. I can install either of those + SDK 2.1, and still seem to get the desired hashrate. But no shares are ever submitted! I've tried this a few times now, and cgminer consistently shows the expected hashrate with zero accepted shares. The first time I ran cgminer for a whole night on one rig, and only discovered the problem after looking at my pool stats. Deleting the bin files doesn't help.

It's easy to return to Catalyst 12.1 to get everything working again (already done), but I'd like to have the latest drivers for gaming. If I don't select the SDK at all when installing Catalyst 12.3, and then install SDK 2.4 or 2.5, I still get lower hashrates with underclocked memory. The best I've managed to reach using just Catalyst 12.3 and the included SDK is 365-370MH/s, using diablo kernel. That's close to but still lower than the expected 375-380MH/s. If I'm doing something wrong and diablo should be just as fast as phatk for a 5870, please point that out.

Should phatk + SDK 2.4 or 2.5 have problems with underclocked memory? Does anyone successfully mine with Catalyst 12.2 or later and SDK 2.1, on Windows?

What happens if you setup your private pool to point to your own IP address, where you are running a temporary redirection service to a real pool while setting up? After setting up your private pool and worker, you could stop the redirection service, and your "private pool" would always be offline. I can't see how GPUMAX could automatically distinguish this case from a real private pool just being down for a while.

I haven't been getting any downtime because of GPUMAX lately, and the private pool system is good enough. The requirement to have a private pool is just a bit odd, and perhaps easy to circumvent if you really want to?

Realistically, I can't run my 5850 crossfire setup at over 800MHz core clocks, without creating a loud hurricane in my home. The upper card in my setup is a Vertex 3D 5850, and the bottom card is a reference model 5850. They are 2-slot cards, so there's an empty space of one slot between them. I run them at 150MHz memory clock and 777MHz Core clock, and they are still pretty loud @ 80C. The reference card is undervolted to just 1.012V. I'm getting 310MH/s from both cards, which is a little low. If loudness is of any concern, you can't really hope to overclock your cards in a crossfire setup inside a normal computer case, unless you have some serious cooling. You might even have to resort to underclocking, or redefining what "loud" means for you.

EDIT: I'm running SDK 2.1 with Catalyst 12.1.

I just tried underclocking my Asus HD5870 (reference model) on Windows, beyond the 600MHz point offered by MSI Afterburner. I had done this on Linux somewhat succesfully. On Windows, it worked at first, but it's practically unusable. If I set the memory clock anywhere between 150-400MHz, and then try to change it back to 1200MHz for gaming, the computer always crashes. At some odd numbers (eg. 240MHz) it seems to crash right away (tested repeatedly). Hashrate also drops if the memory clock is below 300MHz, even though my 5850 cards can go all the way to 150MHz without problems. I'm using SDK 2.1 with the newest drivers (cgminer -n confirms this). My 5870's behaviour wouldn't be a problem for dedicated mining, but since I'm also gaming, I settled on the MSI Afterburner limits for it. Seems they are there for a reason, after all :/

I found Bitcoin well before the first bubble. I tried the software, but gave up without mining any low-difficulty bitcoins. I just didn't go into the details enough to find out if Bitcoin was legit or not, and the IRC server connection it made to find peers was shady in my opinion. I knew about many malicious botnets functioning through IRC servers, and thought that maybe Bitcoin was just a voluntary botnet, masked as a useless virtual money software to hide the real traffic.

Then I found it again a long time later, when the price was about $30, and only got to sell my first bitcoin at that price.

I can take the last two bitcents: 15MQZdUM8E5EkDnvvCvC724KC7KinfFAKx

Didn't take very long to find a newbie thread worth posting to. Although the time I took making this post was likely sold below minimum wage.

Hi! I have been lurking around here for half a year, but now I need my first post to be able to PM Goat. I'm interested in his 105% PPS project.