Demetrius AstroBlack's Guide to Stable Mining
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Stable mining tricks that worked for me.
Did you just get your rig setup and mining, just to find that it has crashed after just a few hours? At first I thought I had a bad GPU, as slot 1 GPU always crashed. I swapped the order of my gpus and still slot 1 still crashed so I thought maybe it was the slot on my motherboard. I RMAed my mobo to ASUS and found the exact same problem on my new board. My system was only a little bit stable when running a card is the second PCIe slot. I went out and bought a different brand board (ASROCK) and still had stability problems. I tried different things for about a month before I was finally able to get my system stable for days. I can even now use my pc to do light gaming and surf the net WHILE mining without crashes. Here are some of the tricks that seemed to of worked for me. I would start in the order I list the directions but for some people it may be slightly different.
My Rig
My Hardware
CPU Intel i5 3450
Mobo ASROCK Z77 Extreme 4 (previously ASUS P8Z77-V LX)
GPUs 2x Gigabyte GV-R797OC-3GD and 1x Sapphire R9 270x 4GB
RAM Kingston Hyperx 2x4GB (model # KHX1600C9D3P1K2/8G)
PSU 1xCorsair HX850 and 1xCorsair RM750
1 Fixing Drivers
First thing I would do is check your drivers using third party software. I thought just reinstalling different versions of catalyst could be done by just installing another version. Boy was I wrong. Using Display Driver Uninstaller Download version 12.4(
http://www.guru3d.com/files_details/display_driver_uninstaller_download.html) I found that I had 7 different drivers installed. Each GPU should have 1 driver, so in my setup I was supposed to have 3 drivers (1 for each GPU) AND 1 Intel driver for my onboard video even though I don’t use it. When you first start DDU (display driver uninstaller) you will get two different messages. One that informs you that your default windows installer has been turned off (you can turn it back on easily don’t worry) and another message asking if you would like to restart in safe mode. Click yes and restart in safe mode. Once restarted in safe mode and DDU is running you can see exactly what drivers you have running. Under Select Graphic driver, select AMD, check remove C:/AMD and C:/Nvidia folders. Then click Uninstall the current and previous drivers and restart the computer. Your computer should uninstall all AMD drivers and restart normally. If for some reason your PC goes black during the uninstall, don’t worry. Just wait a few minutes and give your computer a hard power kill. Hold the power button down, or unplug, or flip the switch whatever you need to do. Once you have your PC back on, windows should look poorly as you’re running the default drivers. Open DDU again and restart in safe mode again. Once in safe mode with DDU running, select graphics driver Intel. Then click "Clean and Restart" again. Same procedure as before if your PC blacks out. Once back in windows you should now have no drivers installed, congrats.
Time to install clean drivers. I recommend AMD catalyst 13.12 as it works before for me but I believe any of the 13.XX drivers will work. I had nothing but problems with 14.2 and 14.3 Beta so I would avoid them. If you need to use even older drivers as your using older GPUs I would give it a try but I have not tested them.
Once you have your new clean AMD drivers installed you can attempt to mine. When I mined at this point, I found my system to be unstable and would crash after just a few hours. At this point I would run windows update and for me it says I need to install Intel graphics driver. I believe for my setup that I do need this driver to mine stable. Install what it suggests.
2 Turn off Catalyst control center at startup
Next I turned off the AMD Catalyst control center at startup. It really isn’t needed unless you want to quickly change settings, but I do believe it causes problems. You can turn it off by going under start and typing msconfig under the search bar then pressing enter. Under the startup tab uncheck AMD CCC and restart your pc. No more catalyst control center at startup but the drivers are still working fine.
3 Set PCIe to PCIe 2.x only.
At this point my system seemed to be mining fine but would still crash after random amount of time. My ASUS P8Z77-V LX has two different PCIe x16 slots. The first one is 3.0 and the other slot is 2.0. I strongly suspect that PCIE 3.0 has issues with my 7970 as slot 1 GPU seemed to always cause the crash. I don’t know why. Using my ASROCK extreme 4 mother board I am able to manually set my PCIe slots to gen 2 in the bios. These cards work better under 2.0. This instantly made a huge difference in my stability. My ASUS motherboard doesn't have this option under the bios. Slot 1 is always 3.0 and slot 2 is 2.0. I was unable to ever get the first slot working stable on the ASUS motherboard with 3.0.
4 Ditch old mining software
The last thing I can recommend is to ditch the old cgminer 2.7.2 I prefer kalroths fork of cgminer 2.7.2 which he dubs cgminer 2.7.3
http://k-dev.net/cgminer/ His changes all make sense, and I prefer his display interface greatly.
Conclusion
1 Multiple drivers cause havoc, use Display driver uninstaller to see what drivers you’re using and to uninstall easily. Install clean AMD drivers, AND use recommended Intel display driver under windows update.
2 Catalyst control center is not needed at startup and may cause problems. Turn it off.
3 PCIe 3.0 sucks, you don’t need it. Switch to pcie2.x (gen 2 on some bios) in your bios if you can.
4 Ditch the old cgminer 2.7.2 it isn't updated anymore.
TIPS or Need Help?
Feel free to ask me more questions on twitter @orbitcoinscam or send me a tip if your uptime has increased.
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