Sapphire HD 7970 Ghz ed. barely breaks 500 kh/s

[mercSuey]

Greetings!

Building a new mining rig and I'm in the tweaking phase, at least I hope tweaking will help.  First, here's my rig:

Sapphire Radeon Vapor-X HD 7970 GHz OC 3GB DDR5 DL-DVI-I/SL-DVI-D/HDMI/DP PCI-Express Graphics Card (11197-12-40G ) (plan is to run 5 of these with risers/cables in custom made frame)
MSI Z77A-GD65 Z77 DDR3 1600 LGA 1155 Motherboards
Intel Celeron G1620 2.70GHz LGA-1155 Processor BX80637G1620
LEPA G Series 1600-Watts ATX12V/EPS12V SLI Ready Crossfire 80 Plus Gold Certified Full Modular 240-Pin 1700 Power Supply (G1600-MA)
Corsair Vengeance 8 GB ( 2 x 4 GB ) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) 240-Pin DDR3 Memory Kit for Core i3, i5, i7 and Platforms SDRAM CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9
Kingston HyperX 3K 120 GB SATA III 2.5-Inch 6.0 Gb/s Solid State Drive
Windows 8 pro

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I'm using guiminer-scrypt and using default settings for 7970 (low usage), I barely crack 500kh/s and that's after letting it run for at least 15 minutes (the miner slows climbs to a peak at about 505kh).  And it will barely break 400kh when I switch to 'high-usage' default settings.  Using guiminer for BTC I can get about 650Mh/s (settings are the standard -v 1 -w 256).   I've researched quite a bit and I know XFX cards aren't great for mining, but I've heard only good things about Sapphire gpus.  My temp is hovering around 63 deg Celsius so that seems okay and I only have one gpu installed at the moment so it's not a psu issue.  Eight GB of quality RAM as well as a SSD drive.  Using MSI afterburner doesn't seem to help scrypt mining but it did bump up my BTC mining.  So that's curious.  But regardless, I figured with some simple tweaking I'd at least get close to 550-600kh for scrypt mining right out of the box, no?  So I'm starting to believe Windows 8 is the culprit.  Maybe something with its memory management that's different from Win7?  My dual 6870s ran smoothly at 600kh/s with default settings in guiminer-scrypt.   But the mining hardware comparisons wiki has some Win8 numbers on the list, so I'm not confident Win8 is really the issue.  Anyways, just thinking out loud at this point and I will continue to research and tweak.  But I have two of everything so I'm going to start building my other miner and put Win7 and Ubuntu on there and get some concrete comparisons.  But if anyone has any suggestions or advice then it will be very much appreciated.  Cheers!

[Therion]

Try tweaking your thread concurrency and set the intensity to 17-18

[zif33rs]

Post that .config...the culprit is probably your thread concurrency. Powertune set to 20?

[mercSuey]

Post that .config...the culprit is probably your thread concurrency. Powertune set to 20?

Thanks for replies.

My thread concurrency is currently at 8192, vectors at 1 or 2, gpu thread at 2, worksize at 256, and Intensity at 12.

My hashrate will actually decrease if I increase my intensity from here.  I increased thread concurrency to 20992 (that comes with high usage default settings) and that's when my hashrate won't even crack 400kh.  As for the .conf file itself I thought since I'm using guiminer it gets set when I changes settings on the gui, correct?  I'm looking in cgminer subfolder of guiminer-scrypt and I don't see actual .conf file, just the examples.conf file which hold the default values.  As for powertune, I'm not familiar.  Could you please elaborate?

[mercSuey]

Best tweak so far is:

thread con: 22392
vec: 1
gpu thread: 1
worksize: 256
Intensity: 13

giving me 537 kh/s

[lumpycustard]

It's definitely the bios.  Use atiwinflash to switch to one of the older 925/1375 bios from techpowerup.
http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/index.php?architecture=ATI&manufacturer=Sapphire&model=HD+7970&interface=&memType=&memSize=

Then restore clock speeds with --gpu-engine 1050 --gpu-memclock 1500 on cgminer.

We just run --thread-concurrency 8192 -I 13 -g 2 -w 256

Should be instant 740-750khash.

[Wilderness]

It's definitely the bios.  Use atiwinflash to switch to one of the older 925/1375 bios from techpowerup.
http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/index.php?architecture=ATI&manufacturer=Sapphire&model=HD+7970&interface=&memType=&memSize=

Then restore clock speeds with --gpu-engine 1050 --gpu-memclock 1500 on cgminer.

We just run --thread-concurrency 8192 -I 13 -g 2 -w 256

Should be instant 740-750khash.

wow pro tips, does the same technique work for all brands of cards?

[ymeiner]

i have same defs on my XFX 7970 BE but with -I 14, i get 675 max per card.

[Spetznaaz]

I've been helping people with this problem for like 2 days straight now lol It happened to me and i spent a week solid trying to figure it out.

I think i'm just gonna write a thread on step by step what to, as i've explained individually so many time now.

Give me like an hour

[Spetznaaz]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=200777.new#new There you go, let me know if you run into any problems

[lumpycustard]

It's definitely the bios.  Use atiwinflash to switch to one of the older 925/1375 bios from techpowerup.
http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/index.php?architecture=ATI&manufacturer=Sapphire&model=HD+7970&interface=&memType=&memSize=

Then restore clock speeds with --gpu-engine 1050 --gpu-memclock 1500 on cgminer.

We just run --thread-concurrency 8192 -I 13 -g 2 -w 256

Should be instant 740-750khash.

wow pro tips, does the same technique work for all brands of cards?

Probably yes in theory but it's hard to find an appropriate bios for some cards.  I know gigabyte has the same fix.  
At least if it has dual bios you can keep trying and trying with no fear 

[AzureEngineer]

I have two of these cards. They are the "bad" 7970's. Something in their BIOS prevents them from doing any good at mining. Mine wouldn't go above 530 kh/s until I flashed the BIOS. Now they hit 670 kh/s with very little overclocking.

This is a vague tutorial: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=174036.msg1980690#msg1980690

This is the BIOS I used (the tutorial uses a Gigabyte BIOS): http://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/129658/Sapphire.HD7970.3072.120926.html

[Prelude]

I use the following settings on 4x Sapphire HD 7970 Dual X cards, which should be fairly similar to the Vapor X I would think. All cards hit 725 KH/s

Core clock: 1030
Memory: 1700

-I 13 --shaders 2048 -g 2 -w 256

Forget any other intensity setting besides 13 on 7970s.

[sidelsky18]

Thanks for replies.

My thread concurrency is currently at 8192, vectors at 1 or 2, gpu thread at 2, worksize at 256, and Intensity at 12.

My hashrate will actually decrease if I increase my intensity from here.  I increased thread concurrency to 20992 (that comes with high usage default settings) and that's when my hashrate won't even crack 400kh.  As for the .conf file itself I thought since I'm using guiminer it gets set when I changes settings on the gui, correct?  I'm looking in cgminer subfolder of guiminer-scrypt and I don't see actual .conf file, just the examples.conf file which hold the default values.  As for powertune, I'm not familiar.  Could you please elaborate?

Nope, changing settings in CGminer won't update the .conf unless you go to settings -> write config file.

[mercSuey]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=200777.new#new There you go, let me know if you run into any problems

Thanks.  I saw a similar tutuorial on the litecoin forum.  After flashing my bios to the Dual-X bios I am at about 724kh.  I'm pretty satisfied now.

[valroth]

cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://pool.d2.cc:3333 -u xxxxx -p xxxxx --worksize 256 -g 2 -I 13 --lookup-gap 2 --gpu-engine 1100 --gpu-memclock 1500 --shaders 2048 --

I get approx 750 Kh/s with 1100 gpu and 1500 memory