I seriously cannot believe this worked I have 2x XFX 7970 GHz Edition cards that I couldn't push past 575 khash/sec @ 1100 / 1800 MHz, and that was using 650 watts (measured at the wall)...
Just flashed that Gigabyte BIOS mentioned earlier, the 925 MHz core version and now hit ~650 khash/sec on each card, @ 925 / 1500 MHz and am only 450 watts!!

Better yet, I have a custom water loop that was running "hot" at 55C earlier, now it's stable at 40C and I'm speechless. Incredible, goes to show that hardware performance truly is all about the software 

Thanks for all the hard work OP, and research by everyone in this thread!

Yeah I'm hoping to avoid dummy-plugs, I know there is a software way to do this!

Ram: 8GB, Gskill Ripjaws 1600

I meant cgminer 3.0.1 in the title by the way.

Hey everyone. So I recently switched to mining BTC with cgminer from a year or so on phoenix 2.0 because of the built in overclocking and stratum support (whoo)
But I'm having some trouble getting it to start headless. I never was able to get phoenix to do this either but I've heard it's possible with cgminer.

Anways I've been using Windows 7 64-bit forever but if this is going to be a headache I can easily switch to Linux, I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced cgminer getting stuck on "Started cgminer 3.1" until a display is attached, HDMI cable is plugged in, etc...

After that it starts up within 10-15 seconds but until then it just hangs there, maybe I can somehow specify the devices I have in the *.conf so cgminer doesn't have to wait until the AMD drivers report the cards as online? Just speculating, thanks in advance!