Consolidated Litecoin Mining Guide for 5xxx, 6xxx, and 7xxx GPUs

[tacotime]

As I stated in the op, you have to bypass the ocl error check to use a large amount of memory as with the 7950. Coblee has stated he will not remove cgminers error checking.

Coblee?

Anyway, from the latest cgminer changelog (2.8.4) :

Scrypt will now not fail when setting high thread concurrency values that still return some ram even if opencl returns an error on that ram allocation.

Maybe you could try again with cgminer ?

ckolivas i meant, sorry.

i played with my 7950s tonight.  the lowest power consumption i could get was the following (1550kh/s for 3x 7950s):
Mem: 1550MHz
Core: 900MHz
vCore: 938v

Power at the wall per card: 177W
Efficiency: 2.92 KH/S/W AC current

The power consumption also goes down with temperature, and you can watch it go up when you just start mining due to heat.

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[philips]

And how about a higher thread concurrency, is it possible now to use larger values (ex 24576)?

[tacotime]

And how about a higher thread concurrency, is it possible now to use larger values (ex 24576)?

? They're fine to use in reaper, I think I'm using 24000.

[Rjb82]

And how about a higher thread concurrency, is it possible now to use larger values (ex 24576)?

Not as far as i can tell in Cgminer. I asked ckolivas to specify what "high concurrencies" meant since i still cant go above 8192 @ look-up gap 2.

[philips]

And how about a higher thread concurrency, is it possible now to use larger values (ex 24576)?

Not as far as i can tell in Cgminer. I asked ckolivas to specify what "high concurrencies" meant since i still cant go above 8192 @ look-up gap 2.

Aha thanks, that is exactly what I was asking.

I would of course try it myself, but I have a very small amount of RAM, which it would render my tests rather irrelevant for LTC mining.

[Cranky4u]

bump....great guide

[muqali]

I tried to use reaper with my 7970 at anything from 925-1050 and it tended to get the same or worse hashes than cgminer. It also killed my desktop interactivity so unless it near doubled my has rate it'd not be worthwhile when I'm at the PC. I used the default .conf file from the front page. Which settings should I drop or change to make my desktop smoother and maybe up the hash rate?

Also, as scrypt is a lot more dependent on RAM than bitcoin GPU mining was, would a 6GB card do anything for hash rate? Or is it merely bandwidth and we're not filling the VRAM?

edit - I ask about the vram because using cgminer with

Code:

"intensity" : "13",
"vectors" : "2",
"worksize" : "256",
"kernel" : "scrypt",
"lookup-gap" : "0",
"thread-concurrency" : "8192",
"shaders" : "2048",

I am at 2500 or so MB of vram in use.

[tacotime]

LTC mining requires 128kb of memory per circuit.  Both bandwidth and size are important.  Additionally, sometimes larger sizes are required for unknown reasons (especially for the 7xxx series).

For the 7970, cgminer currently gives about the same hash rate as reaper.  Theoretically the 7970 should get ~700kh/s, but no one seems to be able to achieve that with either program yet.

[meebs]

I did some testing earlier today on my 2x 7950 rig.

Here is what I got at various clock speeds. the "LTC" column represents k/hash as shown on the pool website and reaper combined for both cards.

Clock   Mem   Volt   LTC   Temps
850   1200   0.950   1050   55/60
900   1250   0.993   1080   58/65
950   1300   1.037   1140   62/67
1000   1300   1.062   1200   65/68
1050   1350   1.118   1250   67/73

[tacotime]

That sounds similar to my cards...  I'll note that TDP is usually a function of the square of the voltage, so the increase in power consumption with hash rate is unlikely to be linear.  For me, it takes an extra 28% of power to achieve an extra 20% in hash rate.

edit: I just got an extra 150 kh/s as well by disabling my cpu by adding the following to reaper.conf

Code:

platform 0
device 0
device 1
device 2

for 3x 7950s

[tacotime]

Also thanks to whoever sent me 10 LTC <3

Has anyone tried the 12.10 / 12.11b drivers yet?  Do they confer any additional kh/s?  Someone in another thread said they got a huge boost but it made their computer unstable

[Nolo]

I'm running a 5830 using cgminer at 900/1200.

My config file is cgminer --scrypt -o http://yourpool.com -u username -p password --thread-concurrency 5600 -I 20 -g 1 -w 256

I'm getting 288k/h.

Fan is set at 60% and I range in temp from 77-80C depending on ambient.  Any thoughts or suggestions or should I leave well enough alone?

[tacotime]

Updating to 12.10 is netting me an extra 25kh/s for 3x 7950s... a small improvement I guess.

I'm running a 5830 using cgminer at 900/1200.

My config file is cgminer --scrypt -o http://yourpool.com -u username -p password --thread-concurrency 5600 -I 20 -g 1 -w 256

I'm getting 288k/h.

Fan is set at 60% and I range in temp from 77-80C depending on ambient.  Any thoughts or suggestions or should I leave well enough alone?

Just try to get the memory as high as it will go... otherwise that's about as much as you'll get from that card.

[Rjb82]

edit: I just got an extra 150 kh/s as well by disabling my cpu by adding the following to reaper.conf

Code:

platform 0
device 0
device 1
device 2

for 3x 7950s

Reaper doesnt support LTC Cpu mining... never has.

So you really didn't do anything. Reaper tries to compile GPU code for any available devices (even if cpu is listed) ... i dont know HOW you'd be mining WITHOUT it disabled... on ALL my machines Reaper instantly crashes if the cpu is included in the mining list.

The dev ("dev" instead of butchering his name) said something to the effect of "i'm not putting it in because pooler already has a cpu miner program" ... IIRC

[tacotime]

The CPU kernel compiles fine for my AMD K10.5 CPU in Windows 7 (Reaper v13b4), and has no problem using it, so ymmv.  Whether or not it actually mines, I have no idea.

Without it disabled the CPU runs at 100%.  Additionally, it shows up in the list of valid platforms.

[Rjb82]

The CPU Isn't actually doing anything AFAIK.   Though if you disable all the gpu's i'd be interested in IF it actually produces a (Valid) result. I have no idea why it shows up under listed platforms, that's a question for the guy who made it.

The flag for cpu mining is "cpu-mining-threads" or something similar... not at my home comp so not sure. (put it in the litecoin.conf to try)

The program states something like "LTC cpu mining is not functional" the "cpu-mining-threads" flag was only for the SC side of Reaper.

I figured you had an AMD when you said it ACTUALLY ran. My main machine is an i7, and my 2nd is an opteron 165 (old, not worth cpu mining at all), so i could never test that. But hey if it mines, great.

[tacotime]

Well, you got me curious, so I decided to test it out



Apparently it compiles a kernel from the cl code or the solidcoin CPU algorithm (how?) and then uses CPU cycles for no reason (I have 5 of my 6 cores turned off so the CPU uses only ~25W, that's why you only see one thread).  Really wacky.  Make sure to disable the CPU then if you're using an AMD CPU, as it's a huge drain on kh/s for me.

[Rjb82]

so what do you get now that your cpu is idle?

[tacotime]

1800 kh/s versus 1600 kh/s

[meebs]

1800 kh/s versus 1600 kh/s

told ya 7950's are easily good for 600 each ;-)

Also, you can use the minerd program for your cpu mining. Espescially for those using rigs as heaters and those with free elctricity.. a good i5 is worth 50khash as well as any other quad/6 core chip should be around there or more.