Yeah, version 9 pushes them harder so they will run hot. I have mine in open air rigs and they run ~74-77C now with earlier versions they would be under 70C. Your 84C is on the high side, but would still be a worthy goal versus 90C. Undervolting might take you there, but you might also need to be prepared to give up a bit of hashrate and decrease the core clocks a little.

You probably should be spending your time looking into undervolting to lower temps, blowing the dust out of your cards, separating them from each other more for better airflow or relocating the rig for more efficient environmental heat removal, reapplying the thermal compound between the heat-sinks and GPU core, etc. There really isn't much difference between 90 and 100% fan speed when in comes to cooling, and you are quickly running out of headroom if you need to run that high to keep your cards at 90C. I have a few rigs with the 390x cards and I know they run hot, but I manage to keep them in the 70C range, I would be worried at 90C.

Yeah, I am already venting via keeping a window open, so it stays above freezing but not at room temperature or anything. I do not think condensation is an issue as the miners will always be on and warm, plus in winter the air is pretty dry. Also with the garage basically being heated it should drop the humidity down even more. I would guess the only issue maybe if the cars come in with a lot of snow to melt off or something, so I will try to keep that to a minimum.

I reverted my VBIOS back to stock settings on my test rig and managed to get the 16.12.1 drivers to install ok, but the bad news is I seem to have lost about 10-15 sols using the same settings as before. Using a MSI RX470 I am down from 215 sols (1250/1750) under 16.11.5 to only 200-205 sols with the 16.12.1 driver. Both tests were when using the stock bios for a fair comparison and Claymore v9.1. I am going back to the older driver for now, maybe in another release or two AMD will optimize the drivers some more and get rid of the annoying integrity check.

I got this error too when trying the new ReLive drivers on a 3 GPU test rig that I use to try out new things such as this. The interesting thing was I was able to get two of the cards to work, but never all three at the same time. I was using GPUs with a modified BIOS, but did not try the disable driver integrity step. I figure I will wait until AMD either removes the check in a later release or someone else reports enough of a performance improvement to make it worthwhile. Went back to 16.11.5 which I think was the last working version (for mining) before the 16.2.x ReLive versions.

Bump. Still have some codes available, make offer.

He is probably using a server PSU with an adapter board to break out the connections into a usable configuration. This is actually a pretty typical configuration and the server PSU's can be bought for little to nothing ($20-$50) depending on efficiency and capacity. Running at 240V inputs, a 2,000W-2,900W capacity server PSU is not that uncommon and readily available on places like eBay and Amazon.

I wouldn't place too much faith in the "unsupervised access" part of your story, even if you think you are the administrator. "John" could just as well be trying to run some computations for an enemy state or some other nefarious purpose which I am sure the owner would be very interested in keeping tabs on and preventing. Don't be so cock sure of yourself that you end up in prison for trying to skim a few bucks.

Lol, yeah 45 to 60 days ROI, give me some of what you are smoking. Even using 3 cent power, ROI figures are closer to 7 months right now for the most profitable coins. With higher power costs it will be closer to the 9 month end of the spectrum, and even with "free" power it will still take 6 months to ROI on just the hardware. So unless you are mining some super secret coin there is no way you are ROI or reaching "break-even" in just 1.5 to 2 months.

The only thing that will change is continued difficulty increases and lower coin prices resulting in even lower profits. This is still the gravy times actually as far as mining, if you are not making profit now you will be a hurting unit in about a months time. Forget about those rosy 60-90 day ROI dreams, the reality is closer to 6-9 months, which still is not really all that bad. Welcome to the desert of the real.

It's already been hinted at. As the mining software for Zcash nears its peak optimization the GPUs are being tasked harder and harder. At first with the initial Zcash releases the GPUs would spend very little time doing computations, that's why you could push them hard and they would still use very little power as it was like asking asking a math major to do a 2+2 calculation once every 10 minutes. Now as the optimizations roll in the GPUs are actually being taxed and the power requirements are increasing to meet this need, as well as they might start crashing when pushed to limits they previously could handle. Again asking a math major to calculate the circumference of the earth is straight-forward, but ask them to compute and sum the circumference of all the objects in the Milky-way and it gets a bit more challenging.

I have several game codes for AMD HITMAN that I acquired after purchasing video cards. These codes can be redeemed at the https://www.amdrewards.com/amdrewards/ website.

Selling for BTC, and will entertain any reasonable offers as I cannot use them all. Post or Private MSG offers and/or questions.

I don't know, I ordered a few of these cards initially and then ordered some more when NewEgg bumped the limit up to 5 per order. I now have 15 of these MSI Armor cards running in 3 different rigs and with Claymore's latest (v9) they are producing 200-210 sols each (Zcash), which is on par with any of the other RX470's I have.

As far as the back-plate and such, while such features may be nice, once my cards are in a rig they pretty much will stay there and the only things that matter come down to hash-rate, power draw, and longevity. As I said, the first two criteria seem to be the same as more expensive 470's and it is too early yet to judge them on longevity. They do carry the MSI 3-year warranty, so I assume they will hold up as well as any of the other cards.

Yes, a lot of people get worked up over seeing a new measurement, in this case hardware errors. It really doesn't matter that much (unless you are getting loads of them) what matters is what the pool is showing. Shares submitted and accepted are what is paying your bills in the end. The local readings are useful for making minor adjustments to your settings, but they offer only an approximation of reality. As you alluded to, Claymore's miner may very well generate HW errors as well, but since these are not specifically displayed no one really cares.

Think of it much like your car speedometer (love car analogies). While you use your speedometer to adjust your speed while driving, it is probably not 100% accurate. If you think you are driving 58 in a 55 zone you may not feel uneasy passing that cop hiding out in the bushes. However if his radar says you were actually going 62 you might get a ticket. It won't mean much to him if your speedometer (hashrate) reading differs from his "official" reading, and he is really not going to be influenced one way or another if your check engine light (HW errors) happens to be on. Much the same way that pools don't really give a rats arse about your miner's displayed hash-rate or any HW errors. While these readings can be useful to adjust your miner's performance, what the pool cares about is how many submitted and accepted shares you contribute. If you can, run both miners with the same settings at a pool for equal amounts of time and compare these results. This is where the rubber meets the road so to speak.

Yes, all the miners are at bench level or higher in the garage. I have noticed the effect of what you mentioned, as we often use the garage as an overflow refrigerator in the winters. Our canned items, soda, beer, etc are usually kept quite chilly when placed near the floor level, while you can feel the heat on your face as you open the door from the house. So I do know this layering effect is indeed happening. Thanks for the first hand experience feedback as it is more reassuring.

As far as the expanding metal, while I am sure this can happen, it is not like I am shutting them off and tossing them in a snowbank or something. I assume even with cold air coming in a small protective bubble of warm air develops around each one as long as they remain running. I also like to think keeping them grouped together offers some protection as well forming a layer of warmth as discussed above, but again hearing as many different opinions as possible is helpful.

Yes, I think if you under-volt you could even run 4 cards off of a 750 watt PSU. Most of my RX470 and RX480's only differ about 10 watts from each other when measured at the wall. I can dial in the RX470's to only pull about 140 Watts each mining Zcash and 150 Watts each while mining Ethereum. The RX480's do the same at about 150 Watts and 160 Watts respectively. These are at-the-wall measurements including the system (mobo, RAM, CPU) draw, as I usually run 5 GPU rigs and divide the total system draw by 5 to get these values.

A typical 5x RX470 rig of mine draws no more than 750 watts total, so in theory you could run 5 cards with your PSU, but in practice it is best to only run a PSU at 80-90% of its maximum load. So in your case you are looking at a system total of between 600 and 675 watts which 4 cards would put you safely within. This is especially true considering at-the-wall measurements also reflect the PSU overhead, or more correctly (in)efficiency, so this reading is usually 7-15% higher than the delivered power. Now with all this said, these readings are after tweaking power settings, so you want to make sure you do this as you add in cards, as stock mining settings might push these values higher. Most quality PSUs can go beyond there rating for a short while, but for 24/7 operation you will want to keep the load within that 80-90% range.

Thermal Shock may or may not be the best term to use, but what I am referring to is a sudden temperature change that miners can be exposed to.

I live in a cooler climate and with Winter setting in the outside temperatures are starting to drop below freezing. This year, I have moved many of my mining rigs into my garage due to the tremendous heat they produce if all were left inside the house, even in the Wintertime. However, while it is a good place to move some miners to I would still like to use my garage for its intended purpose, namely keeping my cars inside. So when it is below freezing outside, my garage remains close to room temperature inside when everything is closed up. I do keep a Window open slightly but overall it is pretty cozy in there.

My worry is as outside temperatures continue to drop, at which point do I need to worry about the extreme changes? So say if it is 10-20°C inside my garage and I open one of the doors and the outside temperature is -30°C, would the sudden inrush of cold air cause any issues? The miners are inside the garage a bit, along inside walls, so I assume there would be a sort of "air bubble" protecting them somewhat, but there would still be a significant rapid decrease in temperature.

So my question is is there a safe tolerance or is it any concern at all? My one thought is to keep more windows open and try to keep the average ambient temperature lower all the time, but on the coldest of days (it can get as low as -40°C on extreme nights where I live) I think I would still have a significant temperature drop should I open a big garage door under such conditions.

Any thoughts or experience on the matter are appreciated.

Yes, but this miner wasn't released until a week after launch and there were several miners already out, some open source, as well as Silent Army's. Granted Claymore upped the game, but it is still quite an achievement to have this much interest in such a short period of time.

I find it interesting that this thread is already at 330-some pages after not quite a month of existence while the similar Ethereum thread took 7 months to reach just 30 more (~370).

Just wondering aloud if this translates into more interest in Zcash in general. Also, it seems there are more mining software choices available after 30 days than there was for Ethereum, unless I am overlooking some.

I am pretty sure if he bought back in February he has already made ROI on those cards, probably 2-3 times over by now. I think it was close to 60-90 days back then to ROI on a full rig.

I had sold off most of my 2 GB cards on eBay but now I wish I hung on to them as you said, ZEC is making them quite profitable again.