7970 Rig

[bostik]

Hello guise,

I am new here, Been lurking for a few days.

Building my first rig using SAPPHIRE vapor x oc 7970

Anyone here use this hardware before?

How much does mobo, ram and cpu affec the hash rate?
What is the best value for money cards that I can get.

Cheers

[jongameson]

Hello guise,

I am new here, Been lurking for a few days.

Building my first rig using SAPPHIRE vapor x oc 7970

Anyone here use this hardware before?

How much does mobo, ram and cpu affec the hash rate?
What is the best value for money cards that I can get.

Cheers

i really think CPU plays a pretty hefty role (like 200 kH/s bottleneck if u have a slow one)
i'm only able to get 500 kH/s max on my P4-2.66ghz with 4GB of ram (Sapphire Radeon 7950)

[bostik]

I am thinking about getting an amd processor just because I like their brand.

Will having amd processor affect my speeds, I suppose most builds are for intel processors?

Have you tried running multiple cards in your pc.

[Gasai Yuno]

buy used and cheap hardwares.

use your money to gpus.

[That Guy]

Most people seem to be using the 7950 or a 7970 (280x), they both get around the same hashrate typically, although the 7950 is typically better as it uses 50w less of electricity, but your milage may vary anyway. I have a 7950 but can only get 530kH out of it, yet my 2x 280x cards cards can get around 700kH.

As for price, its near impossible to find these cards atm, and don't think you will find 7950s in stock again, but the 7970 and 280x do pop up now and then on various sites, but they are now being marked up due to demand.

As for the rest of your components, from what I have seen, they are not all that important, but I would try and have 4GB of RAM to play it safe, the rest does not matter much except for the power supply. Make sure you get a decent power supply, ideally one that is 80 Plus Bronze or better. If you are only using 1 7970, you would be fine with a good 500w PSU, but may want to get something higher if you plan to put another GPU in there.

If you want to get the best bang for your buck, a used 7970 from someone that used it to actually play games with would be best imo, although if there is no warranty, it could die due to mining, but should be fine as long as you keep the temperatures within spec.

Good luck man. Without the hardware its kinda hard to get in to it atm as Radeon GPUs are snatched up very quickly, but the rest of the gear should be easy to get.

[bostik]

Thanks for your reply

I just got my first 7970 yesterday (second hand)

Quit gaming a long time ago, took  a while for me to catch up on the technology used today.

I got a few questions if anyone feels like helping

Is it possible to link up multi gpu's in a pc (same brands?)

Do you ming using combined gpu power or does each gpu do its own mining

What type of operating system is reccomended for a mining rig?

How hot can a gfx card actually get before being damaged, is there any logs / way to test how hot a card has become ?

[lumberinvestments]

Hi

>Is it possible to link up multi gpu's in a pc (same brands?)

You don't have to link up any cards (as in SLI). Just insert those in the slots, power your computer install operating system and drivers then start mining.
Use guiminer scrypt version 0.04 for mining if you're not good with command line options but you won't have a high hash rate, you can't get the maximum out of your hardware.

>Do you ming using combined gpu power or does each gpu do its own mining

Cgminer is seeing each videocard as independent and you can control those independently using command line parameters. I've heard that it's not good sometimes to have multiple instances of cgminer for some cards as it will lower the hashrate.

>What type of operating system is reccomended for a mining rig?

I recommend Windows 7. Search the forum for the best driver version for your card, or just look up 'litecoin mining hardware comparison' on google, see which ATI driver people use for your type of cards. Also you need to install ATI SDK that needs to be compatible with specific driver.

>How hot can a gfx card actually get before being damaged, is there any logs / way to test how hot a card has become ?

I have cards that work at 100 degrees for more than 6 months now and they are still fine. But a temperature of less than 90 celsius degrees would be better.
The voltage will make a huge difference. I have two cards the same model in the same computer, one of them is working at 1.11 volts GPU and the other at 1.17 volts. The one at 1.11 volts will stay at 75 Celsius degrees, the other one will go up to 96 degrees. I am working now on a way to lower the volts on both cards as it seems that they are voltage locked. Some of the cards are easy to overclock or bring to the maximum hashrate, especially the Ghz editions.

Your card will shut down anyways as soon as it reaches a certain programmed high temperature. You can set up the fan speeds and shut down temperature by using cgminer but you need to get used to the command line options. Cgminer can show you always the card temperature.

Make sure that your rig is well ventilated, it is better if it's completely open, motherboard in horizontal position with the videocards sticking up. You can connect the videocards in between with a metal plate by using the hole where you screw it in the case so they will not move around freely. Make sure you put a big fan to blow on your rig in case they get too hot.
I have tried a nice case with a total of 4 powerful case fans, blowing in so many various directions, none of it helped to lower the temperature inside the case as the cards will be very close to each other, only few centimeters and you can never get enough airflow inside.

Good luck with starting to mine ! I have made a little fortune until now and i think it's never too late to get into the game.

[boxofspuds]

Thanks for your reply

I just got my first 7970 yesterday (second hand)

Quit gaming a long time ago, took  a while for me to catch up on the technology used today.

I got a few questions if anyone feels like helping

Is it possible to link up multi gpu's in a pc (same brands?)

Do you ming using combined gpu power or does each gpu do its own mining

What type of operating system is reccomended for a mining rig?

How hot can a gfx card actually get before being damaged, is there any logs / way to test how hot a card has become ?

No need to link gpus if you have a multigpu system - toss those xfire/sli boards at will!

Each gpu is seen separately by cgminer (i.e. gpu0, gpu1, gpu2, gpu3)  you can even pass separate constraints/parameters to each gpu within cgminer

OS is really your preference.  BAMT is a customized linux os meant to run off a usb stick to reduce software  (windows license) and hardware (hdd) costs.
I have heard some people got lower hash rates in linux, but there's so many variables it is hard to tell.
Windows is easier to undervolt through a variety of OC tools (that we use to under clock).  Linux you pretty much have to mod/hack the vbios each time you want to change voltages
Personally, I use windows for ease of use.

by default (i forget what cgminer is set to by default) it will shutdown if you reach a certain temp.  you can always run a monitoring program that logs like hwinfo or gpu-z ... but these WILL drop your hash rates.  you can also run the OC tools, some of which can log as well.  Since you have a 7970, I would try to keep it below 80s