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

[northcape]

I think I had them disabled already, but just for kicks I enabled one of the buttons on one card .. it destroyed the hashrate and now cgminer reports it as "sick" whatever that means

as an update, before i tried to push that blue button, i upgraded to 13.10 drivers and it got me about 5 more kh so I was at 525kh for each card... now i'm wrestling to get all 4 working again ... don't push that button!

Since the button just enables a second BIOS, I’d try powering the whole machine off completely, then disable the buttons and power it back on. That should put you right back to where you were.

[1713558255]

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[1713558255]

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[Crazy rider89]

does it show the GPUs in the list once it starts running?

it should show all the possible mining targets that it is setup for, so if you had 2 gpus it should show those on the list (in my experience anyway).

I had an issue where I had to rerun the aticonfig command once I added more GPUs or it would not recognize them.  Mine does not allow me to mine on the CPU however, so I don't know any more than that currently

if i write: cgminer -n, i get:
 [2013-04-07 15:14:09] CL Platform 0 vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.                    
 [2013-04-07 15:14:09] CL Platform 0 name: AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing                    
 [2013-04-07 15:14:09] CL Platform 0 version: OpenCL 1.1 AMD-APP-SDK-v2.4 (595.10)                    
 [2013-04-07 15:14:09] Platform 0 devices: 2                    
 [2013-04-07 15:14:09]    0   Cypress                    
 [2013-04-07 15:14:09]    1   Cypress                    
 [2013-04-07 15:14:09] 2 GPU devices max detected    

I think that the gpus are correctly configured.
I will try to update the driver.

I think i had to reinstall the driver after I booted the system with all cards plugged in.  The driver would not auto activate all cards.  So if you install the drivers with 1 card plugged in, then restart and plug all of them in, I had trouble getting it to show them all.  Then i reinstalled the drivers while the system had all cards plugged in and it worked after I re-ran:

sudo aticonfig --adapter=all -f --initiall

Thanks, but If I want to mine BTC everything works fine, I have a doubt....I set the memory GPU clock to 300mhz, but I've seen that a lot of users set an high memory speed (around 1200 for a 5870), my question is: do the LTC mining use also the GPU memory?

[chrcoe01]

yes, i believe it does because when you lower the gpu memory very low, the hashrate suffers

[chrcoe01]

I think I had them disabled already, but just for kicks I enabled one of the buttons on one card .. it destroyed the hashrate and now cgminer reports it as "sick" whatever that means

as an update, before i tried to push that blue button, i upgraded to 13.10 drivers and it got me about 5 more kh so I was at 525kh for each card... now i'm wrestling to get all 4 working again ... don't push that button!

Since the button just enables a second BIOS, I’d try powering the whole machine off completely, then disable the buttons and power it back on. That should put you right back to where you were.

i did this, then when it came back up from rebooting, bam! cgminer only saw 2 cards again.  so I went into my bios (asus rampage iv) which has a GPU post menu to see what GPUs the bios sees.  It seems that some times when I boot, it only sees 2, other times it sees 3, i've only had it see all 4 about twice.

i searched through the manual over and over to no avail.  There's an 'ez_plug' which is supposedly extra power for the pci-e slots, but i thought this is not needed if each card receives its own power (each from its own rail which is how i have it setup).

Maybe the bios needs the extra juice to just turn on all 4 slots at once.  I'll see about how to get an extra plug in there, maybe that's it. (wishful thinking lol)

edit: did some research on this and it turns out that you are supposed to plug in the ez_plug when running 4 GPUs which is an additional 6pin PCIe connector, which I seem to be lacking on my silverstone st1500... with 4 gpus, it takes up all the pcie connections, so I am going to have to use one of those dual molex to 6 pin adapters to get the extra power.  I guess it allows extra power to the x16 only slot to be able to turn on when there's 3 other gpus plugged into pcie slots 2,3 and 4...

oh well I guess i'll settle for 2 gpus mining until i can get to the store for that connector :/ 

in other news, the powerboost button, I turned it off on that one card, and have rebooted/reseated it several times and cgminer just keeps reporting it as being sick, then dead after 15 minutes.  It was working flawlessly (at the same crappy 525kh/s) prior to pushing that button.

I think since I have time, I will exchange it for one of the gigabyte versions that FullLife mentioned since he was able to get ~720 kh with it.  If that works with similar settings etc, I will probably exchange all three for that card.

[wowfreaks22]

7950 vapor-x with 950/1250 at 0.950volt, 170watt, 572 k/h

think new gigabyte cards are voltage locked, not sure if just up or both

[pekv2]

7950 vapor-x with 950/1250 at 0.950volt, 170watt, 572 k/h

think new gigabyte cards are voltage locked, not sure if just up or both

Nice, I mine @ 170watts for 400 khash/s. 5850. Nice electric cost with a big hash rate boost. Cannot wait for my 7950, thinking about picking up a http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202030

[jhd]

Hello, i have questions about 5970 cards.

Is it possible to use 3 cards (6 gpu) under windows? Dummy plugs are mandatories ??

How can i undervolt these cards to run 3 cards on 1000w psu.

Thanx in advance

[Flying Hellfish]

Newb question from a guy that is not very technical, sorry in advance if the questions I ask are silly.

I just bought a 7950 for fooling around with mining LTC.  I had installed the GUI Miner Scrypt (tyvm TacoTime) as I'm not really confident with CGMiner and couldn't even get mining with Reaper.

After installing the card and latest AMD drivers I loaded up GUIMiner and connected to Give-me-ltc pool (stratum server) using the pre-configured 7950 high settings (below).

worksize 256
vectors 1
aggression 20
threads_per_gpu 1
gpu_thread_concurrency 21712

I managed to get ~550 kh/s for a couple of hours (still a little low from what I read in this thread?).  I had to re-start the machine so I shut the miner off and re-started, when I opened GUIMiner and connected back to the pool I got connection error and hardware errors.  The only way I can get back mining is to set the pre-configured settings to 7950 low and its starts mining but I can only get to ~300kh/s now.  if I increase the settings back to the 7950 high settings above while mining it continues to run and only increase's my HR by about 10-15kh/s.

I did try to run cgminer directly but as I am green I can't see where to make all the changes to the different settings to match the above.  What is also interesting to me is that CGMiner reports my HR avg as ~550 mh/s but my pool dashboard shows me only at ~7kh/s

rig is a little old rough specs are:
intel core 2 duo CPU
4G Ram
OS Vista (eww ya I know but its an older machine I had around not being used so I figured I would throw a 7950 in and screw around mining LTC...)

Is there any advice one of you grizzled veterans/smart people could throw a newbie's way, please?

[IlbiStarz]

I have a 6870 and 5830 in one rig. When I use CGMiner both of them large amounts of HW errors, about 20-30%. Neither of them are overclocked...does anyone know why this is happening?

[rocks]

I have a 6870 and 5830 in one rig. When I use CGMiner both of them large amounts of HW errors, about 20-30%. Neither of them are overclocked...does anyone know why this is happening?

I had this exact same rate when my thread_concurrency was too low, bumping up the TC to 4x the number of shaders fixed it.

[Starlightbreaker]

finally got my 3x7950.

....voltage locked.

FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU

3 cards pulling 1kw = omfg.

[pekv2]

finally got my 3x7950.

....voltage locked.

FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU

3 cards pulling 1kw = omfg.

Which brand and model number? so others may know. I believe the voltage is unlocked for http://www.overclock.net/t/1378557/sapphire-100352-4l-and-21196-00-20ghd-7950-the-final-holy-grail-of-hd7950s

[Starlightbreaker]

HIS IceQ 7950, lol

shit, might have to sell and replace it with sapphire ones.

[chrcoe01]

anyone have any luck with sapphire's trixx program?

https://www.sapphireselectclub.com/ssc/trixx/trixx.aspx

it looks like it should be able to allow us to change the voltage on the vapor-x GHz 7970's (among others) there's a list at the bottom of that link which tells which features are supported for which cards.

[mufa23]

do the LTC mining use also the GPU memory?

I'm curious about this as well. I'm thinking about buying a bunch of 7850's, but didn't know if I should get the 2GB or 1GB model. The 2GB ones are typically $30 more.

[pox67]

finally got my 3x7950.

....voltage locked.

FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU

3 cards pulling 1kw = omfg.

Brutal, I have 4 7970's in two different computers (2 per computer) and they are pulling 1050watts for both rigs.
Advantage of being able to get VDDC down to 1.025-1.030.
Cards are Sapphire Dual-X OC and MSI OC Boost.

I was fiddling around some more last night and found something interesting.

On the Sapphire cards the best I have been able to get is 950/1425 for 650KHs. I am OK with that as they are drawing little power doing it.
I was pushing the memory up and down trying to get a little more out of them and found nothing better up to 1700mhz on the RAM. On a whim I tried 1220mhz RAM and got exactly 650KHs, weird. That seems to be the best so left them running at 950/1220, wish I could drop the RAM voltage below 1.5v...

This is using CGminer with 2048 shaders, 8192 Thread Concurency and - g2 and intensity 13.

[Anvi]

Hello, i have questions about 5970 cards.

Is it possible to use 3 cards (6 gpu) under windows? Dummy plugs are mandatories ??

How can i undervolt these cards to run 3 cards on 1000w psu.

Thanx in advance

I don't see a problem with it software wise, but u'll most likely need stronger PSU or add 2nd PSU to the system. Does your PSU have enough PCIe 6+2 cables?
Dummy plugs aren't required anymore (as of Catalyst 12.8 if I recall correctly)

Use MSI Afterburner to control voltage etc.

[northcape]

finally got my 3x7950.

....voltage locked.

FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU

3 cards pulling 1kw = omfg.

Yikes, I’d definitely send them back. My rig with four Sapphire 7950s pulls 940W and that’s using an i5 730 at default clock/voltage and two different PSUs.

[gfoot]

I have a few questions regarding LTC mining in general:

1) 7970 GHz edition: my card comes with factory clocks of 1050/1500; using various thread concurrency settings and intensity settings, I think the best I ever manage is a measly 450khash. I have also had issues with getting GUIminer-scrypt to work properly on this machine -- I think the best I got was maybe 300-350khash. If someone has some suggestions, I'm all ears!

Try --thread-concurrency 3072 -g 9 -I 13 --gpu-powertune 20, and possibly --worksize 256
Edit: terrible advice - although it reports a higher hash rate, it just generates garbage (never gets a share).

Do try using the --powertune option though, and possibly --thread-concurrency 8192 -g 5 or thereabouts - which does seem to give me a slight edge over large concurrencies and -g 1.

[Tejsei3]

My current best setup is 925/1250 at 0.962V for 560 kH/s at 170W or 3.29 kH/s/W, after many hours of systematically mapping gpu clock (

3.3 kh/J is great man!! Have you done any work with 58xx cards?
Cheers!

Just the 7950 but if I do I'll share it here. I think I mostly got lucky just lowering the voltage at the stock gpu clock and memclock. I looked all over for more efficient combinations and nothing was as efficient as 925/1250/0.962V.

I have four Sapphire 7950s and can confirm that these are by far the best settings I’ve found so far, thank you for sharing them.
I run four cards at 925/1250/0.950, although that 0.950 is set via --vddc in cgminer, and GPU-Z shows ~0.996V for all GPUs. So  I guess they are actually not undervolted at all.

I could probably squeeze some more efficiency out of the system by setting each card to its minimum stable voltage, but mapping the correct cards between cgminer, GPU-Z and Trixx/Afterburner is too much of a hassle.

Good to know. I got two more Sapphire 7950 100352-4L's which ARE voltage unlocked, and they also appear to thrive at 925/1250/0.975, 545kH/s, 188W, 2.90 kH/J.