I've been having some issues with fan control of my GPU's in Windows and I've tried MSI Afterburner and EVGA Precision XOC.  For some reason, even if I set those to set the overclocks for my cards on startup (which they do), the fans never kick on if I've got it set in Auto mode.  (Haven't tried just setting a single fan speed b/c I'd rather they ramp up and not stay full blast the whole time.)  I don't know if it's because they're on the risers or not, but does anyone know any windows based command line utilities that will allow me to set GPU/Memory Clocks and Fan Speed/Curves through a command line in a windows batch file?  I know Coolbits is out there for Linux, and I've seen a few versions that are 12+ years old that are supposedly windows based, but not sure I'm willing to try them.

So, random question as I jump back into some coin mining and trying to build the most efficient rigs.  What drives a cards power consumption down the most?  Lowering Power Limit, Core Clock or Memory Clock?  In particular, I've got some 1070's I'm trying to mine ETH with, and while I can get them to 30-31 MH, can't seem to get the card below 110W draw or so.

Recently I've come to the realization that I just won't see RoI on my ASIC pre-orders unless BTC spikes pricewise, and I personally don't think that's going to happen so I decided to pull the plug and put in cancellations for the orders I had in place.  Of course I could be wrong, and if I am, all the better for you folks that tough it out.

All in all I had 4 Preorders with BFL, and 2/3 orders with BTCFPGA.  They've all been cancelled and I've received all my money back with just a little bit of hassle.

BFL

Had 4 separate pre-orders placed in the Sept-October timeframe.  Sent an email describing my exact orders, the dates and information on 12/09/12 @ 7:04 PM.  By 12/10/12 @ 4:30 PM all the orders/payments had been refunded through Paypal without a problem.

BTCFPGA

Had a bit of a hitch with BTCFPGA, partially due to my own screw-up.  Put in a preorder in early November, but accidentally put in the wrong email address as mine.  Never received the verification info, so I called Tom, spoke with him, and after a few calls, he cancelled the original order, and credited me the amount on a new account (with the proper email address), and I put in another order.  Put in a second pre-order a few days later.  Sent in a cancellation request on 11/22, Tom responded on 11/23 and I had a refund for one of the pre-orders on 11/24.  Assuming there was just some delays due to Turkey day and some confusion due to the first cancellation/credit, I sent an email to Tom/Dave about the other refund on 11/25, 11/27 and 12/10 and received no response.  Finally had to dispute the CC transaction and received my refund on 12/15.  I hated to go the dispute route, b/c I think Tom/Dave were doing the right thing, but there was some confusion around the original order/cancellation/credit and I think they might just be overloaded.

So, all in all, 6 ASIC orders, cancelled, without too much of a problem (other than the minor hiccups with BTCFPGA).  I've had fun with BTC mining over the past year or two, and wish everyone luck.

Yeah, I know it's not exact, but I just noticed we had hit block 209,858, or 142 blocks from BTC reward halving.  Assuming 6 blocks/hour, we're just under 24 hours (23.66 to be exact) until we hit block 210,000 and reward goes down to 25 BTC/block.

Unless BTC/$ goes way up, at .10 kilowatt/hour here, I'll still be profitable, but just barely, and likely not worth the effort/aggravation.

It's been fun...and I'll be sad to see it go away.  

I think that ASIC's are seeing delays and are going to hit for at least a couple of weeks after the reward drop has a silver lining.  Since the reward drop occurring while ASIC's are not in the mix, we can get a good picture of how the BTC network reacts to the reward drop alone.  Will it drive some people out?  Lower the difficulty?  Drive up the price?  We should know in a few weeks.

If ASIC's arrived while the network was still in the midst of the reward drop change, it would be impossible to understand if changes we see were brought about by the ASIC's or the reward drop.  The inverse is true as well, if the network has time to work it's way through any impacts the reward drop may have before anyone starts mining with ASIC's then we have to opportunity to watch ASIC's impact on the network without any influence from the reward drop.

Let's not turn this into a troll/fanboi thread on ASIC's.  My question is, is there any technology out there that could push ASIC mining out the window the way ASIC's will do to GPU and GPU's did to CPU, or is ASIC mining 'as good as it gets' and will be the endgame for bitcoin mining?

So, I jumped on the bandwagon and ordered one of the new ASIC units from BFL.  They've gotta be close to order 8000 by now, since my order number was pretty close to that.  Reading through some other posts, it looks like a lot of the new orders started around order number 2000, so that's about 6000 orders of ASIC units waiting to be fulfilled.  Let's just for argument sake say that every order is a single Jalepeno and is fulfilled by year end.  That's at least 3.5 GH/s * 6000 = 21000 GH/s or 21 TH/s added to the network in the next 3 months.  That just about doubles the hashing power that's out right now, so difficulty will double relatively quickly.

So, my question to everyone is, what do you think will happen when all these new rigs hit the scene to BTC price/difficulty?

So, here's my situation, I recently picked up a Sapphire Radeon 7970 OC edition on Newegg for $449 to replace a pair of 6950's I had set up in Crossfire.  Card worked out great and I can easily OC it to 1100/950 and get a bit over 650 MH/s out of it at a decent 73C.  I decided to pick up another one and Crossfire them and get some extra hashing in.

I have a MSI Big Bang Fuzion board that has 3 x16 slots in it, and this is my main machine, so everything has to stay tucked nicely in the case.  So, with these 7970's, the fans are mounted on the side of the fan enclosure, but the enclosure is a bit wider than 2 slots, so if I try to Crossfire them, the 2nd card blocks the intake of air on the 1st and it shoots up to 85C+ in 10 or 15 seconds and appears to want to keep climbing even at 100% fan.  I've tried to put them in the 1st and 3rd slot, but the dang distance is longer than the 100mm Crossfire bridge they supplied will reach and I can't for the life of me find anyone that makes/sells any bridges bigger than that.

So, anyone know of somewhere that has longer Crossfire Bridges or have any other thoughts?

For sale on eBay.

1 XFX ATI Radeon 5850 (HD-585X-ZNFC)

Lot of 5 XFX ATI Radeon 5850's (HD-585X-ZNFC)

x1 to x1/x16 PCIe Extender Cables/Adapters

No, I won't accept BTC as payment, nor will I accept offers outside of eBay.  Also have some other items up for sale and will be putting up more 5850's in the next few weeks.

Thanks!

Lot of 8 Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 XTreme model 100297L's for sale.  Bidding starts at $399.99 on eBay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-8-Sapphire-Xtreme-Radeon-HD-5830-100297L-1GB-GDDR5-Video-Cards-/130592443021

 

So, I'm looking at putting in a higher voltage outlet and running my rigs off of that for a bit of efficiency improvement and just to make my life easier and less extension cord heavy.  Guy across the street is an electrician and I can pretty easily run a 30-50 Amp outlet off my breaker box.  My question to those of you using higher voltage runs, what are using for power distribution to get the power from the single high voltage outlet to your multiple PC power supplies?

Any suggestions on power strips, cords, high voltage outlets would be appreciated

Thanks!

[Bitcoins are not a 'Get rich quick' scheme]

I'm seeing a lot of posts on the boards and chatter on IRC from people that just really don't understand what's going on with Bitcoins.  While we don't mind helping folks out, after a while it get's to be a bit tedious to answer the same questions, over and over.  Sorry to burst your bubble, but...

Bitcoins are not a 'Get rich quick' scheme - There was a short window a few months back where you could make a lot of money off of Bitcoins and payback times for hardware was in the month range, but that's long gone now and will likely never come back.  Payback for hardware costs is probably now in the 4-6 month range and will continue to get worse.  Can you still make money?  Certainly, but you need to do some research and be smart about things.

AMD/Nvidia/[Insert Vendor Name Here] doesn't give a flying rat fart about the Bitcoin mining community - All these posts where people say, "I can't find any AMD card, AMD must know they're missing a huge opportunity and they'll make more cards!" are just silly.  No, they won't make more cards and they don't care.  We are small potatoes, a blip in their earnings.  In Q1 of 2011 AMD sold 19 million cards, and in Q2 they sold another 16 million.  Yes, we buy lot's of cards, but we're such a tiny part of their market that they're not going to change they way the operate because of us.  As I'm writing this, the current network is clocking in at 11.13 TH.  Just for arguments sake, let's assume that's all made up of GPU's with a conservative hashing rate of 200 MH/s.  That's about 55,650 cards.  (Someone correct my math if it's wrong, 11.13 TH / 220 MH | 11130000000000 / 200000000).  IF my math isn't off, then yeah...they sell that many cards every 7 hours.  We're a rounding error

Yes, someone knows what the answer to your problem is and it probably already been answered - Before you hit submit on that new post, did you take a few seconds to do some searches on the forums?  How about and another few seconds to do a google on your problem?  More often than not, you're not the first person that's run into the issue.  You may notice a lot of the old timers don't respond to questions or come across snippy when they do.  It's because after you answer the same question 20 times you just get sick of it.  Spend half a minute searching before you post and you'll save countless hours of other people having to read a new post on a topic that's already been discussed.

No, you don't deserve technical support/updates for free software - People seem to get awfully upset that their favorite miner hasn't gotten some bug fix, feature or upgrade you want.  Well, guess what, you get what you pay for.  You are using free software that the developer has spent their free time developing with no expected payback.  They've already given you something great for free and you should be appreciative of that.  If you really want whatever change you wanted in the first place, you have a few options.  Send the developer a decent donation (which you should do anyways if you use anything for more than a few weeks) and hope that motivates them.  You could switch to a different piece of software.  Or write one yourself (and prepare yourself for demanding users that want X, Y and Z now!).  Posting a rant that something should be added is one sure fire way to actually motivate the developer to work on something else.

Just because something worked for one person, doesn't mean it will work for you - Every setup is different and no matter what you read in posts, you need to tweak and play around with your own system to find the optimal settings/setup for your mixture of hardware/software.  

Free electricity isn't - Unless you have a solar farm or wind turbine in your back yard, there is no 'free' electricity.  Someone is paying for it.  Whether it's your parents, your workplace, or your school.  Yeah, you can probably get away with a card or two without asking and noone notice, even though it's basically stealing.  Anything more than that and someone going to notice the power bill going up.  My electric bills have gone up about $100 for every 3 GH or so I'm running, and I have a great power rate of .08 cents/kwh.  Don't be stupid, get permission or don't do it.  It's not worth losing a job over a few extra bitcoins a month.  Oh, and if you're trying to find software that will hide/obfuscate the miner process on any machines, then yeah, you already know what you're doing is wrong.  Bitcoin already has enough PR problems, you guys need to stop crapping in the pool we all need to swim in.

And finally, don't trust or listen anyone on the boards, myself included - Listen, there's a _ton_ of information out there on Bitcoins in the way of wiki's, news posts/articles and these forums.  Google 'bitcoin' and almost 16 million results come back.  While there's no way to predict the future of bitcoins, there's just no excuse for you to lose money in your bitcoin endeavors because of poor decisions.  Anyone that puts in a little bit of time and effort to do some research can make smart, informed decisions on whether they want to mine, buy BTC through exchanges, or just avoid the whole thing altogether.  Bitcoins can be a fun, and maybe even profitable, learning experience.  You'll be doing yourself (and your wallet) a favor for every minute you spend researching and learning about Bitcoins.

Anyone else have any other 'bubble bursters'?

So, in the next month or so, things should finally start cooling off here, which will be a nice break.  With the temperature drops I'm hoping I can shut down my extra window AC and just use the cool air from outside to cool down the room I'm doing most of my mining.

The question is, how can I keep those windows open to let the nice cool air in and hot air out and not worry about any concerns with precipitation or dampness on rainy/snowy days.  There is no real overhang over the window, nor shutters to keep that out, so if there's anyone out there using outside air for cooling, how are you handling that?

I don't expect this to happen at anytime soon, and don't want to debate whether it will/won't happen, but hypothetically if BTC dies/tanks, it gets too expensive to mine or individuals just plain get sick of BTC mining, what other options are there out there to make use of all this computer equipment people have purchased for Bitcoin mining?

I know of a few other distributed computing projects like Folding@Home, BOINC and even GIMPS (CPU Only I think?).  All of these are volunteer and don't have any payback, other the prime searches having some possibility of getting a reward if you get lucky and find a new prime.

Does anyone know of any other distributed computing projects that all this mining gear could be put to good use for, volunteer or paid?

There's a ton of posts debating the pros and cons of mining vs. costs, but if you're mining on anything more than just your GPU sitting in your main machine, you owe it to yourself to determine your 'Break Even' price of BTC vs. your Local Currency.

It's actually pretty simple.  First, figure out how much you spend on electricity mining each month.  If you can determine out your machine's power draw with a KiloWatt meter or something of the sort, you can get an approximation by seeing how many watts your machine is pulling from the wall and doing the following:

(Watts Drawn from the Wall / 1000) * 24 [Or however many hours per day the machine runs] * 30 [Or however many days there are in that month/billing period] * Kilowatt Hour Cost [Most power companies will list that on your bill or you can call them and get it]

There's your approximate mining cost for that machine per month.

Then just hit up any of the many Mining calculator's out there.  Plug in your hashing rate and tweak around with the BTC price until you find the price that you'd make back the same as your electricity costs are that month, there's your break-even price.

You'll need to recalculate that at every difficulty jump to find your new Break Even price and if you haven't already paid off your hardware costs, you need to factor that in as well.

Regardless, there's no reason to not be an informed miner and determine what price you will be 'profitable' and at what price you're spending more than you're making and then make intelligent decisions on your own about what works for you. 

Saw this today over at HardOCP.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsWdOMbQF94

Looks interesting, though they're a bit expensive (about $20 each) compared to some other options out there like just shorting out pins or cable adapters.  Still nifty though.

Hey folks,

I have 2 of these boards that are happily chugging away with four cards in them, but the cards are sandwiched pretty close together.  To get some airflow I'd much rather use some PCIx extenders and get the cards off the board, but no matter what I do, any cards I put on the extenders are not recognized by the OS.

Is anyone using the MSI GDFXA-GD70 motherboard and have cards using extenders on it?

Thanks!

Someone threw this adapter in with a GPU I bought off of eBay a month or two back.



I'm pretty sure this is a dual PSU adapter, but it doesn't look like the other ones I see online and I'm not positive how to daisy chain both PSU's to one motherboard with it.  There's a 24 pin female on one end, 24 pin male on the other and off the male side there's a 2 pin male pin.

It almost looks like it's actually for one PSU to run multiple motherboards, but I'm not sure.  Anyone have any thoughts on this adapter?

I've seen some great chassis and setups out there and found that it's extremely easy to build your own open air chassis for next to nothing.

First, for your base, go out, get a scrap or square of plywood for a few bucks at your local hardware store.  Mark the plywood with your motherboard hole layouts and then drill out the holes with a 1/8" drill bit.  The small metal motherboard standoffs will screw right into those and you can mount the motherboard to that.

Your power supply can rest right behind the board on the plywood.  As for the GPU's, it depends on whether you want to leave them on the motherboard or pull them off the board with extenders.

If you want to keep the cards on the motherboard, you should be good to go.  If you're worried about the cards seeming to be loose because they are being held up only by the slot, pick up an aluminum bar from the hardware store (you only need about 6 inches, so see if they have a scrap.)  Cut the bar to fit the width of your cards by lining it up to the top of the brackets and then use some self tapping screws (about $5) and attach the top of the card brackets to the bar and it'll hold them extremely securely.  

You can also pull the cards off the motherboard with extenders.  This is my preferred method just for better cooling and airflow.  I bought these 1X extenders on eBay and with a pair of snips you can trip the end off of them in about 5 minutes.  They're cheap (~$3.50 each) and ship from China in about a week.  Then all you need is to find a simple wire cabinet shelf to support the cards.  I found them at Walmart for around $7 USD each.  It's sturdy enough to hold up the cards and the legs should be wide enough to straddle the motherboard.  You can easily space the cards out to give them some good airflow and the extenders will feed right through the wires.  To hold the cards sturdily, just pick up a small spool of bendable metal wire.  You can wrap it around the rack and then loop it around the top of each cards metal screw bracket in turn and then back down and around the other side of the rack.

Here's part of my setup with 4 rigs.  2 have the cards off the boards with extenders, the other two have the cards on the boards using the aluminum bar support.

Anyone able to point to any official link or document from ATI/AMD about the maximum temp a Radeon 6950 should run at?  I bought one from a guy on eBay and it's shooting up to near 100 as soon as I start mining with it even if I force the fan to 100%, so I shut it down.  I'm pretty sure that there's something off with the card because I have another one of the exact same card that runs at 60 degrees at 65% fan speed.

He told me that he was running it past 100 fine and I want to see if I can find something official on the temp ranges the card should be running in.

Thanks...