HD 6770

[ATC777]

I'm looking at some HD 6770s starting @ $79.00 and below (depending on qty). IIRC, hashrate is > 200MH/s, but what is wattage?

I can get a bundle of these cards on the cheap-cheap, and they seem decent for the price... only concern is power consumption. But I can't find it online and I'm browsing on a piece of junk phone. Can anyone tell me the power consumption ASAP?

[KWH]

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/asus_radeon_hd_6770_directcu_silent_review,5.html

[ATC777]

Thanks, I bought one to try it out. 230MH/sec @ 88W for < $80 didn't sound bad at all, considering that my GTX-580 is only doing 140MH/s @ 240W!... That's about 3MH/$ and 2.61MH/W, which is pretty cost-effective for a GPU... If I like this GPU I can get bulk pricing on them for much, much cheaper... would be able to assemble a nice farm and sell the cards when I'm done with my investor demo.  

Just to be sure: There will not be any conflict running my GTX-580 and this new HD-6770 on my Gigabyte mobo, right?

[crazyates]

http://dev.bitcoinx.com/profit/ is your friend. Plug those numbers in (230Mh, 88watts, $80), and you can see your estimated earnings. It shows for me 0.03BTC/day, and would take over 3 years to break-even. I expect you will end up never breaking even, as that time frame does not take into account the 10x (minimum) increase in difficulty that will be as result of ASICs over the next 6 months. My 2 cents.

[KWH]

Unless you want to upgrade your PC to play around and you have free electricity, I would suggest purchasing coins.
As for the GPUs playing nice together, try it and see. I know some that mix as you want to do with good results while others complain of constant issues. Personally, I have never tried it as I have several boxes with only 1 brand in each. Good luck with whatever you decide.

[ATC777]

Thanks!  

I'm not trying to profit from this HD 6770. It's just for a live demo to show our shareholders how Bitcoin mining works, and prove to them that the Bitcoins produced can actually be converted to cold, hard cash.

Also, I view a GPU or any other mining equipment as part of the company's capital. The card can be re-sold to someone else to get back a portion of the initial investment (perhaps a bit more, because I can get em very cheap). So the card only needs to return a few bucks in a couple months time to be in the black. The important thing, however, is that my shareholders get to see the rig in person and see how it works... it would be hard to otherwise convince them I can spend a bunch of money on little computer chips and manufacture some strange new form of money called "Bitcoin" -- unless they see it for themselves.

@ crazyates ::

Oh yes, that calculator has already become my best friend. It was one of the first things that sold me on the idea of Bitcoin. ;-)

EDIT ::

Just installed the 6770 beneath my GTX-580 but the system doesn't detect its presence. The instructions didn't say anything about connecting a PCI-E power cable to the card, but it looks like it does indeed need one, correct (which explains why it ain't juicin up lol)?

Also, I haven't shopped for GPUs in a good while. Head-to-head, how does the 6770 compare to my 580? Is it a better card? Would I be better off running 2x 6770s in "Crossfire" mode (seems likely)?

[KWH]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

[ATC777]

Nevermind, I got it... for some reason the card didn't come with ANY of the necessary cables. Luckily, I had the right adapter in my desk drawer. Card now working fine.

[ATC777]

Well, no it isn't... The system detected it when I first booted it up and said it was installing drivers >> "Your device is now ready to use"...

But GUIMiner doesn't even detect the HD 6770... WTF... 

[crazyates]

Well, no it isn't... The system detected it when I first booted it up and said it was installing drivers >> "Your device is now ready to use"...

But GUIMiner doesn't even detect the HD 6770... WTF... 

Download the 11.12 drivers directly from ATI, as those were the newest drivers that included the 2.5 SDK. Install the drivers and the included SDK, and see what GUIminer says.

[ATC777]

Well, no it isn't... The system detected it when I first booted it up and said it was installing drivers >> "Your device is now ready to use"...

But GUIMiner doesn't even detect the HD 6770... WTF...  

Download the 11.12 drivers directly from ATI, as those were the newest drivers that included the 2.5 SDK. Install the drivers and the included SDK, and see what GUIminer says.

You got a link for that? I can't seem to find 11.12 drivers.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonaiw_vista64.aspx#1

That page shows me only v12.11 Beta drivers... Can't seem to find it anywhere else on the AMD site either...

EDIT ::

Note that at first the card was not working or even being detected by Win7... So I checked device manager -- it was showing the yellow exclamation mark for an unidentified graphics device. I then clicked "Update Driver" and it successfully downloaded and installed driver. Then it popped up as "HD RADEON 6770" as a new graphics device, and it says "Device is working properly" and shows "No conflicts". But GUIMiner still won't detect the card. Now I'm trying ATI's "auto-detect" driver installation tool to see if I have the latest/proper drivers. If that doesn't work either I'll have to manually find this v11.12 like you said...but I dunno where/how to find it.

[ATC777]

LOL! Ok, I used ATI's auto-detect driver installer tool... then I reboot my system and fire up GUIMiner... Now it shows my Intel i7 processor as a selectable device for mining; whereas before it only showed my GTX-580! Dunno why on earth installing ATI drivers for this HD 6770 would suddenly make GUIMiner detect my CPU but NOT the new GPU... WTF LOL!!!!

BTW, I'd actually prefer to use CGMiner over GUIMiner... I've used it for Litecoin mining before. As a matter of fact, I had my own batch file to run it and mine Litecoin on my GTX-580... But since I've installed this HD-6770 that suddenly stopped working. When I try to run the batch file ("Launch_LTC.bat") CGMiner just immediately returns and the console closes. Same thing if I click on cgminer.exe.

This is some weird stuff...

[crazyates]

The 11.12 driver I was telling you about can be found here: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/previous/11/Pages/radeon.aspx?os=Windows%20Vista%20-%2064-Bit%20Edition&rev=11.12

Open up a cmd prompt and run "cgminer.exe -n". You need 2 main things installed, a driver and an OpenCL runtime. Just installing the driver thru device manager will not install a runtime (or SDK). Device manager will tell you what driver you're using, and that command will tell you what runtime you have available.

[ATC777]

 lol

[crazyates]

So the Runtime is installed. Sounds like a driver issue?

Another random thought. I doubt very many headless rigs are running the 12.11 beta (which you said you installed), so maybe you need a dummy plug with that driver version? Try plugging an old/spare monitor into the 6770.

[ssateneth]

also it looks like he installed not 11.12, but 12.10 (or something like that), judging from the amd app version.

Dunno why your 6770 isnt detecting. I got 32 gpus spread across 6 rigs and they all mine. Using 11.12 or 12.1 driver, ATI Stream SDK 2.1 installed in addition to whatever sdk is normally installed with those drivers. I select "gpu-platform" : 1 in my config file, uses the older faster sdk, mines away happily.

But I'm also not using any nvidia. Try just the 6770.

[ATC777]

I dunno if I have a dummy plug... Well, I'm sure I do but it's buried under tons of fossilized computer parts (like DDR RAM chips and CRT monitor adapters lol).

But that does make sense, and I'll bet you're right. I'm sure switching my TV's HDMI cable to the 6770 would have the same effect? And if that doesn't work try switching my monitor to the 6770?

I tested my game engine against the 6770 and it says there's nothing wrong with it... My engine has what's called a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer), and I ran the implementations based on DXGI (DirectX Graphics Infrastructure) 1.0 and 1.1. Not only can it detect the card but my code can read all of its CAPs -- from amount of VRAM to VendorID. I didn't try but I'm also quite positive it would be trivial to run compute shaders or PhysX on it. So I firmly believe I've installed the card properly...

I'll try these recommendations and report back with the results...

Thanks,

--ATC--

[ATC777]

First tried my HDTV w/ HDMI connected to the card, then switched my actual monitor over... still no change -- the 6770 is not detected by GUIMiner and I can't get any other miner to work. I can't even mine Litecoin on my GTX-580 anymore with cgminer. Only thing that works is CPU mining or GTX-580 mining with GUIMiner.

Now I'm also seeing some queer things... when I start Windows a lot of programs are just crashing for no reason now. WTF!!! 

[KWH]

You will need a dummy plug and welcome to the world of mixed GPUs. You can make one pretty cheap. I would put it on the Nvidia and the monitor on the AMD and see if mining works.
http://www.overclock.net/t/384733/the-30-second-dummy-plug

[ATC777]

Yes, I've heard about the multitude of mixed-GPU problems...  and this is my first time doing it...

How about this... Would TWO of these HD 6770s setup in "Crossfire" mode out-perform my GTX-580 in gaming? Because I'll go buy another one today and do it in a heartbeat; would give me both a bad ass game development rig and a decent miner with low power reqs.