The best I got with an 8800 was overclock core to 650 (or 660, cant remember. memory speed didn't seem to affect speeds), guiminer with phoenix miner, poclbm kernel, WORKSIZE=64 AGGRESSION=12

Pushed 33.1 Mhash/sec. Can do higher aggression but you may get idle miner messages.

Your GPU doesn't support any sort of special calculation stuff aside from ... well, regular video card stuff.

Your only chance is to CPU mine. You're probably looking at maybe a few hundred kilohash/second, if that.

I've yet to figure out how to undervolt my sapphire 5830 extremes. The lowest it'll take in trixx is 1.163, which is the default. :/

Hmm, would you take 10? <.<

I found that while running phoenix command line, desktop lag became unbearable at AGGRESSION=12 and anything higher caused idle miner to popup. With GUIMiner (and modded phatk, same one as command line) and phoenix, I can comfortably run AGGRESSION=14 without any idle miner messages, and desktop lag isn't as severe while getting a higher hash rate due to the higher aggression. I can run AGGRESSION=14 on my dedicated miners too and have no discernable lag between mining and not mining while controling via VNC.

Thanks.

What the subject says. 1.5k per USD is my target, so with current exchange rates (14.12 at mtgox), that's about 21.2k/BTC. Paying in bitcoins.

Try Sapphire Trixx. I use 5830's and a 5870, mind, but MSI Afterburner could only go down to 600 for me while Trixx lets me go as low as 100MHz on memory (not 100MHz below core, but just regular ol 100 MHz!)
http://www.sapphireselectclub.com/ssc/TriXX/TriXX.aspx

Does automatic payout work? My threshold is 1 BTC but my balance is about 1.16 (increasing by about 0.02 per block found).

Got about 0.75 more on my 5830's. Not sure about my 5870 but its likely on the magnitude of 1-1.5. Keep up the hard work!

edit: 5870 had about 0.5-0.75 improvement

What happened to the estimated huge gains with your unreleased patch? I could've sworn the first page had a difference of about 7 ALU less between current version and unreleased version, now it's only 2. O_o

I might be blind... I see 11.7 all over but I can't find a direct download link? I want to try to get some of this fabled performance increase.

Dummy plugs didnt even cost me that much. Maybe $0.60 USD each (the dvi -> vga is "free" with all retail boxed video cards these days, the the resistors were about $1 for a pack of 5, needed 3 for each plug).

Why would they cost $10 each O_o

on topic: yes different cards will work just fine, even ati and nvidia mixed. just make sure you have dummy plugs or monitors to hook up to each card.

That sounds about right. I thought it would take roughly 2.5-3 months to pay off any sort of investment in hardware required to mine, regardless of how much you put into it. Assuming you got the 5830 from newegg, thats between the tiemframe I predicted. Everything after that time frame, you are gaining money from mining. Before that, you're working off your investment.

I already had a 5870 mining peak 450mhash, and 350 when gaming. I invested in 5x 5830s and hardware to hold them all, about $1050. My average compute rate is 2 Ghash. I should be able to pay off that investment in about the same timeframe: 2.5-3 months. If mining bitcoins still appears to be profitable enough to put more hardware into it, I will after I've paid off the initial investment

Phoenix with phatk mod on 5870 985/350: ~450mhash
bitminter, peak 405mhash.

I think I'll stay with phoenix phatk mod. Sorry.

Story up ahead. TL;DR at bottom.

I've recently gotten into the scene and already knew graphics card overclocking was going to make a big difference on performance. I initially started off with MSI Afterburner on my Asus 5870. I read around the various forums and kept spotting people underclocking memory. Unfortunately, MSI:A could only underclock to 600MHz at the lowest. Fortunately for me, I found AMD GPU Clock Tool (Call it AGCT).

Now I could really squeeze out that performance, but mind you I was still solo mining and this is on my own PC I regularly use for gaming. I didn't mind the need to manually switch back to lower, game stable clocks, but what I did mind is there is a low-power 3D setting in addition to 3D and full power 3D that was used solely for youtube videos. Playing -any- youtube video would cause an instant crash of my entire PC after using AGCT, even after restoring to default clock settings. Obviously something wasn't being reset. I banged my head against the desk several times mistakenly opening a youtube video and getting an unrecoverable freeze 1 second afterward for about a week. Then I got my Sapphire 5830 extremes.

It didn't take me long to realize it was impossible to alter voltage on these with either of the previous tools, until I saw "Trixx" being thrown out. I tried it out, lo and behind, voltage changing! This was well after the update to allow multi-gpu OC/UC/voltage. It doesn't provide GPU activity but I can live with it. I used the last card I had in my extra PCI-E slot in my main PC and opened up trixx, saw both graphics cards. I thought "Eh, beats using 2 tools" since I had to use afterburner for voltage and AGCT for clocks. Trixx successfully did voltage, clocks (including super low memory UC), and fan on my 5870, and the real kicker is it seems to preserve clocks for low power 3D, which means no more crashes!

TL;DR: If you are using AMD GPU Clock Tool to adjust clocks on a PC you use frequently for ordinary stuff (games, browsing, etc), I suggest switching to Trixx. It'll preserve the middle-level clock settings that can cause unrecoverable freezes if messed with by AGCT while allowing very low memory underclocks.

I finally got some dummy plugs and got 3 5830s working in 1 PC, though its not "in the open" like yours is, Furthermore, they are sandwiched very tightly (only 1 "blank" slot between the 16x slots instead of 2), so much so that when initially testing it before dummy plugs, the fan from 1 video card loudly grinded against the back of the card in front of it. It was very sudden (at 100% fan speed no less) and I pulled the power plug in a panic. I've since made all 3 "naked" with a drop of AS5 I've had lying around, but I'm not sure if its good anymore (its really hard to force out of the tube, but its still very tacky, like a slow running glue). Regardless, I also tied the PCI-E Power cables to parts of the case so it bends the top and bottom card away from the middle one a little bit to rpevent the fans from grinding again, and to give access to better air. Finally, when I get a drill that actually works, I'm going to screw this directly on the case side so I can close it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyMUddH0qzY (not my video, but exact same fan)

if you tried to read my post, i said 78c.

also airflow should be fine, got a ton of fans sucking in air. maybe I should take off the plastic shell so the metal fins are exposed?
Noise also isn't an issue, they'll all be tucked away somewhere where I can't hear them. The difference in power between 70% fan and 100% fan is also negligible, seeing that they may only use 2 watts max at full power, if that.

I'm assuming you jumped on the newegg bandwagon too? I just started (wasnt aware of a dummy plug so I only have 2 running tonight, will have 5 after dummy plugs), and I can only get 970/300 stable @ 100% fan and 1.195 core. Temperatures are 78c., 309 mhash

How can you push the core so far? Did I just get a bad card? ty in advance

no chance to ship to usa?

Came across this topic when browsing https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison and the comment on the last 5830 entry (not the crossfire one). Here's my results

Baseline: 11.6 drivers. Not sure what SDK it is (I'm going to assume 2.4. I haven't done anything to my knowledge to change SDK and it seems 2.4 is what comes with 11.6) 5870 @ 1015 core, 300 memory with original phatk with phoenix 1.5 VECTORS BFI_INT WORKSIZE=128 FASTLOOP=false AGGRESSION=13
441Mhash
7-07 build, immediate gain to 450 MHash/sec
Increased memory to 350. 459 Mhash/sec
Increase WORKSIZE to 256. 463 MHash/sec

And I found that any increases to memory after 360 cause weird things to happen (almost certain crash, I panicked to get it back to 350 before it crashed), but I see people posting about 500MHz, so I'm going to try that out, hopefully not crash.

Edit: 500 memory speed causes a -decrease- to 452 MHash/sec. It leads me to think that there are certain dividers/timings being changed at certain thresholds. This would explain why 500MHz and 350 MHz appears to be stable, but 360+ and 600MHz are unstable (I was limited to 600MHz for a while because I didn't know how to push memory lower than 600. I used MSI Afterburner).

Now I use MSI Afterburner to alter voltage and AMD GPU Clock Tool to set frequencies. I don't suppose anyone knows an all-in-one solution? AMD GPU Clock Tool doesn't seem to want to set custom voltages. It just has 0.9500, 1.0630, and Max VDCC. It won't accept custom numbers.