Are you seeing the error message all the time or just once in awhile? It is normal to see it occasionally (once every few hours), but if it is showing up all the time yes you do have an problem.

You are correct in thinking that any overclocking settings the previous owner applied by MSI Afterburner will not carry over with the card to a new machine. It will also not carry over from Windows to Linux.

It is possible however the previous owner did try to mess with the card's BIOS or maybe he even pushed it too hard and caused some damage that only crops up when mining.

I think the simplest solution is to install Windows and download MSI Afterbuner yourself and try to play around with the settings a bit. Usually people will reduce the power limit some, maybe try 85% to start and then depending on the algorithm you are mining adjust the core and memory clocks. For Ethereum you can actually lower the core about 100 MHz and increase the memory to 300-400 to start. If it stabilizes you can try pushing it harder. For Zcash the opposite is true, you could leave the memory clocks at 0 or even reduce them a bit -300 and increase the core clock a little at first, maybe start with +100.

If that works you will know it is not an issue with the card itself and you can go back to Linux and try to apply the settings via the Claymore command line

If no matter what you try you continue to get the error, the card may have been damaged somehow and you will need to either return it to the person you bought it from or try for a RMA with the manufacturer.

He would already be pretty rich on his own as he supposedly controls a wallet with 500,000 Bitcoins, worth about $2,900,000,000 USD as I type this. That is 2.9 Billion, so yeah he would be (or already is) among one of the richest people in the world. As far as fame, he is also already famous even though no one know who he is, can't beat that if you ask me.

Had he done nothing at all he would have been ahead. Looking at the invoice he paid 0.868 BTC for the order. On July 12 and 13th which are the dates from the invoice, BTC was trading around $2,200 - $2,400 USD. Today it is trading close to $5,800, or close to a 2.5x profit for basically keeping your wallet shut and doing nothing.

I hate to sound harsh, but as d57heinz said, you guys cannot open your wallets fast enough to give scammers your money. Even if Bitmain does ship the product you are unlikely to earn 2.5x your money, and even if by some chance you did, BTC probably would have increased another 5x by then so no matter what you lose.

Oh, and I am sure if you do manage to ask them for a refund, they will only refund you the USD value at the time of your order, or $2,400 worth of BTC which means you will only get 0.413 back or less than half of what you originally sent them. Again no matter what you lose.

Yeah, I thought exactly this. Don't think the landlord will not notice his new tenant is using 5x the normal amount of electricity, at the minimum he will make you pay the difference. Even if it is a commercial space like a warehouse or something, they still make certain assumptions when they figure out the lease payments and if suddenly someone is causing their electrical bill to go way up they will surely start to investigate who the guilty party is.

About the only time you might get away with it is like in a dorm room or small apartment setting, but in those cases you are usually limited by the maximum circuit size. A dorm room might have one or possibly two 20-amp circuits for the whole room, so you are still limited by the amount of rigs or ASICs you can run. An apartment might give you a few more amps but in the end you are still limited. I never heard of a real situation with unlimited free power unless the person was basically stealing it from another party.

The previous two posters need to read the definition of Ponzi scheme.  http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/ponzischeme.asp

Of course they pay out at first, that is the scheme, if they cheated everyone right off the would make a few bucks but they are after a lot more. They lure a few of you suckers in by making it seem legit at first and let you withdrawal. For everyone of you who come on here and post it is great, it's legit, etc., 10 more suckers go there and give them money. When the scammers decided they made enough or when things look shaky, like they are about to be exposed, they shutdown and take all the money with them.

Yep, like the others above said its the same algo as Zcash. While the AMD line is not quite as efficient as Nvidia at Equihash, it is still mine-able, especially if the profits are there. When Zcash first launched late last October a lot of the Ethereum hashrate moved over for about a month and many of those miners I am sure were using AMD cards (I know first hand as I was one of them).

Anyway, since Nvidia normally does a better job on Equihash, most of the articles you encounter will probably reference those cards versus their AMD counterparts. The only time you would need to worry about it is if you were considering buying new cards just for mining BTG, keep in mind in general Nvidia is good at Equihash, while AMD is good Ethash.

Yeah, I guess you got me pegged pretty well. I do have plenty of rigs with 6 cards and every single card has a slightly different voltage set, something like: 880, 885, 902, 887, 890, 892. I strive to run each card at its most efficient while at the same time providing the max stability. I don't like rebooting rigs everyday either and will give up a percentage of hashrate or power efficiency if it means more long term stability. I also like to use high efficiency PSUs, run them in their most efficient band, and even make my own heavy gauge PSU cables. I look at RAM efficiency, don't need 8 GB sucking power needlessly, CPU efficiency, and an often overlooked area, disabling unneeded motherboard accessories such as sound cards, serial, printer ports, extra USB or sata controllers, and so on.  It may only knock off a watt or two per rig, but for me that is part of the thrill. How efficient can I make this entire rig. Gaining 10-20 watts per rig in efficiency times a large number of rigs is like running a few rigs for free.

Getting back to stability, I learned a long time ago while it may be nice seeing all your RX580's displaying 32 Mh/s, if it is only good for a few hours and often hangs or reboots you lose more during the resets than you do by dropping the clocks a bit and stabilizing the rig. I have many rigs with 1600+ hours of run-times and I probably would be higher except I did a mass upgrade to the blockchain drivers a couple of months back. I think my highest run-time before that was like 3600 hours or 150 days and I think that was only cut short due to an early morning power outage.

So while I do like efficiency, I like stability more, but that doesn't mean you just toss some high voltages at it and forget it. I think the problem more has to do with lack of patience, as you said, with most newcomers. They just want someone to give them boilerplate settings and be done with it. I kind of think it more of a challenge and similar to tinkering with a car to get an extra 5 horsepower out of the engine, I tinker with GPU settings to get the most from each and every one of them. Over the years as my rig collection has grown I cannot tune them all as much as I would like, but each new rig spends a week or two on the test bench and I like to think they are pretty well optimized before they leave for the farm racks.

It could go up and it could also go back down. You could try to wait for a dip to buy in, but I think the time for dips is quickly coming to an end.

According to Richard Heart now is the time to buy because Wall Street is coming next and ETFs shortly after, meaning the time of sub $10,000 bitcoin may be coming to an end.

Watch his latest video on the the subject here and then decide for yourself:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZtF3uOnjxQ

I said this before, he is most definitely into Bitcoin but he is just trying to get in cheap like everyone else. The only thing you need to know is he is a banker and bankers are drawn to money like bees to honey. If there is money to be made you can be sure bankers are interested. With Bitcoin being up nearly 500% this year alone, it definitely is getting their attention.

This should probably be posted in the Speculation thread as I am sure it will soon be moved.

Anyway, while I am as excited as the next guy to see Bitcoin charging ahead, these constant influx of new threads about Bitcoin's most recent price point does get annoying.

We can all see the charts and all know what recent high Bitcoin has made. It is one thing for a new thread to pop up every now and then when it hits some major milestones, $5,000, even $6,000, but we  do not need one for every $50 or $100 that it rises. At one point in Bitcoin's past a $100 rise may have been notable, but we are long past that point and hundred dollar fluctuations are now quite commonplace and we don't need a new thread every time it happens.

I have long suspected Suprnova of skimming a little off the top on all their algorithms. Needless to say I stopped mining there a long time ago. I am surprised as many people still mine with them as they do.

Anyway, regardless of the pool you use there will always be some disconnect between what your miner displays and what the pool shows. Your mining client is displaying the hashes per second it is performing, but there is also some amount of luck involved in finding a solution or share. Normally a given hashrate will find X amount of shares in a given time frame with a slight +/- variation.

The pool, on the other hand, is only concerned with the actual number of valid shares it receives. It uses this information and does a reverse calculation to display an assumed hashrate that would yield the number of shares per period of time it receives. Adding in a small number of stale shares due to latency your pool hashrate will almost always be slightly lower than what your mining software displays. This is perfectly normal and happens with all pools, but it is the amount of discrepancy that leave open the possibility of manipulation.

Also note that the pool is subject to some amount of "luck" as well as their average block finding rate may be higher or lower than the network average at any given time. This can also cause lower numbers to display depending on how they do their back-end calculations.

About the only thing you can do is try several pools and stick with the one that gives you the best results over a period of time. It would probably take a week of hashing at each pool to rule out any of the many variables though, so some patience will be required to find your ideal match.

You just got to ask yourself, 10% every day how is it possible? The answer is it isn't.

If they could legitimately earn 10% every day, they woudn't need to share it with the rest of us they would keep that secret and within a few months be rich beyond their dreams.

No, the reason they share is because it is a Ponzi scheme that uses new sucker's money to pay off a few earlier sucker's to entire a few more people in. Once they line their pockets with enough of your money, poof, the site disappears and you never hear from them again.

But of course deep down you knew that, or why post on here asking.

So it sounds like you had a contractor do a substandard job for a temporary splice, most of the rest of your post is a lot of how to do about nothing. The issue you experienced, while definitely frightening and rightly so, really has little to do with mining itself as any activity that draws significant current could have caused the same situation.

Anyway, not that I am unsympathetic to your situation, but it sounds as if you already have it well under control and unless someone were to be in that exact situation with a substandard temporary splice, I really do not see the need for the tone you took to issue a desperate warning.

As far as the last part of your post, it really sounds like you just need to grow a pair all around. Your beef and rants should be directed to the contractor who almost caused your house to burn down, not to the mining community. Also you need to tell your wife much the same, I do not even see how that last part even figures into this at all. If anything demand the contractor subtract all or a portion of the bill for such shoddy work endangering your life and that of your family's and keep your guns locked up. Really two separate issues, but it may be one in the same as it sounds like your wife doesn't really put a lot of confidence in you.

Finally building a 400 amp mining farm inside your house putting lives at risk doesn't sound too inspiring. That kind of hashpower needs to go into a detached garage or shed so if it does burn down, you might at least be able to save your home. If you have little kids around even more so.

If you are new to mining and are also looking for consistent income then solo mining is not what you are looking for.

As has already been suggested, pointing your meager hashrate at a pool will provide the most consistent source of income although it will be quite low.

Solo mining is best left to those with large farms (100's or 1000's of rigs) or for gamblers who mine a recently introduced unknown coin and hope for the best. But in either case solo mining does not provide a consistent income except possibly for those with the largest of mining farms.

Good overview of the process and I am sure this post will prove to be valuable resource for a lot of newcomers. I think the key takeaway is you can certainly run 5 or 6 GPUs with a 1000 watts PSU, but if you have no idea what you are doing start out with only 3 of 4 GPU's installed until you make the mods and voltage adjustments as shown above. Straight out of the box with no adjustments, even 4 cards will be pushing the limits a 1000 watt PSU.

One last item, I think in your testing you left off at a kind of a high GPU voltage (at least for ETH only mining). I have many cards running successfully as low as 875 mv or 900 mv while still maintaining a healthy 30 Mh/s hashrate (RX580 8 GB). This will reduce the overall rig power consumption even further as each card will be measured a bit over 100 watts at the wall and 66-70 watts in afterburner or GPU-Z. That is with ETH only, for dual mining you will probably need to keep it higher and leave it around 950 mv and you will probably be drawing closer 125 Watts per card from the wall, which is close to your second from the last example.

The only advantage is to use whichever server is closest to your physical location to reduce network latency. Too high of latency can cause you to lose a small amount of shares over time as they may expire (go stale) before they get turned into the server. This usually only happens if your latency is well over 100ms.

I believe the NiceHash USA server is located in San Jose, CA so choose the location (USA or EU) based on where you live. If you live in US the choose USA server, if you live in the EU choose EU server, if you live somewhere in between you will need to measure the latency between the two and choose which ever one is lowest.

Normally when the shares are submitted by the miner you can see a latency report such as:   INFO 18:08:26: GPU0 Accepted share 55ms [A:3162, R:0]. You could just run a few minutes pointed to each server and see which gives you the lower latency readings.

Alternatively you can just use the ping command to check the latency to each server, use speedtest instead of the algorithm name so your command would be:   ping speedtest.eu.nicehash.com  or  ping speedtest.usa.nicehash.com

You can visit NiceHash's page on testing server connectivity for a full list of their servers. Do note though that some of their servers will incur an additional ms penalty due to their use of proxies as explained at the bottom of their page.

Try using:   equihash.usa.nicehash.com

The port is still:  3357

So your complete string would be:    miner --server equihash.usa.nicehash.com --user <wallet address>.2x1070 --pass x --port 3357

You were pretty close, just needed to add the little "a" at the end of "us".

Myself, I usually avoid any open box items as they probably indicate potential issues. PSUs and Motherboards especially, as if someone bought it and tried to get it mining and failed, they might have simply sent it back. Now NewEgg doing a basic testing might now be selling it as Open Box. I think they are only $69 normally, so you saved $19, I wish you the best of luck with it.

You say you have plenty of power, which 3400 W is plenty, but you fail to say how it is being supplied. Is it one big server PSU, a server PSU and a normal desktop PSU, a couple of desktop PSUs?

From the limited information given, my suspicion is your problem is power related for the simple fact the Zcash algorithm usually draw a bit more power than mining Ethereum. So depending on how your cards and risers are being fed, maybe that little bit extra power draw is causing your headaches.

I have both Linux and Windows rigs as well and agree that Windows can be just as stable as Linux. The biggest issue is Linux is stable out of the box and with Windows you need to put in a fair amount of work to stabilize it. You need to shutoff auto updates and disable a fair amount of unneeded services, remove unneeded programs, apps, adjust networking and firewall settings, etc. But once you have done it, you can apply a script to future builds to automate most of the settings.

Anyway, I have optimized Windows builds with 3-4 month up-times too, even with running Claymore. EWBF hasn't been around as long, but I do have a couple of rigs with 2+ month miner up-times. Most of the time if a rig does go offline it is because I take the machine down to either install new drivers (the AMD blockchain compute was a big one) or do other maintenance.

Generally if you have a rig or miner program crashing all the time you have something in hardware (or possibly drivers) not right. Double check all connections and ensure your risers and GPUs are getting adequate power. If you have many rigs invest in a PSU tester/meter and make sure all the ATX voltages are within spec. Reseat RAM and all the motherboard power and riser connections . Ensure your CPU heatsink is on correctly and cools the CPU. If your problem is in the mining program maybe you are overclocking or under-volting too much. Back off a few clock cycles and see if it stabilizes. You will probably gain that half of Mhash or two you lose in increased system up-time and reliability.