Adventures in Modding (Or how I got my 470 from 20 MH/s to 29 MH/s the hard way)

[OverEasy]

So I decided to buy a MSI 470 from that last Newegg sale and mod it to get close to the performance of my 390's.
I paid $159 Free shipping and got a $30 rebate
Here it is. Well boxed. Looks nice -



Also I use these USB risers.



From this point on I will put all issues in red.
Some basics first. All tests are done on Windows 7 Pro x64 using Claymore 7.4 Dual Eth /Decred mining at NiceHash.
The miner has been running perfectly on AMD Crimson 15.12
Ok so I popped in the card and fired Win7 back up.
Got this in device manager



Hmm OK so old AMD drivers not working with new card. No problem! I used DDU and after a wait (if you used DDU you know lol) I loaded the latest greatest AMD driver Crimson ReLive Edition 17.1.2
So I rebooted again and all was well with the world.

I fired up Claymore and just watched card run a while. Averaged 20 MH/s stock out of the box. Crappy huh?
Ok time to MOD!
I used 3 tools and from this point forward if you try any of this your on your own! I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR SHIT!
First off you will need GPU-Z. Great little tool. Just google it and make your getting the real tool from the right folks.

Immediately I started GPU-Z and made a copy of all 3 cards bios. Then I saved those copies on a USB drive. If I was gonna soft brick my cards I needed a way back.

Next up you need atiflash 2.74 and lastly you need something to actually change the bios. I used Polaris Bios Editor.

I made a copy of my saved 470's bios and renamed it to something short. I think it was 470mod.rom, then used Polaris to change some stuff.
Here is what I changed. I think its pretty standard. Copy the hex from the 1500 MHZ field and copy that hex over the next 3 fields. So you are changing 3 fields total.
Save the rom INTO YOUR ATIWINFLASH FOLDER

And now starts the trouble for me. Using the following command from an Admin command prompt, atiwinflash -f -p 1 470mod.rom things went south. From everything I read the "p" is supposed to equal your PCI slot the card your flashing is in. This was not true and after verifying the 470 was indeed in pci slot 1 I proceeded to flash my XFX 390 8 GB with a MSI 470 4GB rom.

Now I didn't know that was happening until it finished and I saw the original name...SHIT

OK take a breath. I VERY smartly made a copy of the original bios. I can fix this.

So now I decided I would unplug the 390 for now and come back to it later and repair it.
Lets move on! After rebooting and this time only having 2 cards in the rig I had to figure out what friggin "p" I was using. I guess all boards are different (mine is Asrock) and maybe OS's affect it too. I had 2 choices. p 0 or p 1 . My output to my monitor is coming off the old 270x. I will admit here I just friggin guessed. No tool was showing me what Atiwinflash wanted. I guessed right and flashed my 470 with the new bios. Whew! This shit is exciting!

Ok reboot time (390 still out). Asrock bios comes up! Good! Win7 starts to load! Good! and black screen! BAD
I tried many times. I finally deduced that the new relive AMD drivers were not playing nice with the modded card.

I had a backup plan in case I really hosed it up which i did. I always keep a old simple Nvidia VGA type card around for just such cases.

I popped in the Nvidia, hooked up the monitor, and rebooted into windows! Device manager showed the 470 but AMD said no friggin way. Now I got a modded card AMD didnt like lol.
Ok now this was crazy time consuming but using DDU I started removing drivers and installing older and older drivers until finally it worked!!!

The AMD driver that worked for me with the modded ROM is AMD Crimson 16.9.1 Man I hope that saves someone the hours I just spent...

Ok so we fire up Claymore and here is what I get



So now I went from 20 MH/s to 23.5! Woohoo. But not good enough lol.

I installed Trixx (use whatever you like) for the last tweaks.

Now that 390 was bothering me so I decided to fix it. Powered off, removed Nvidia, powered on to make sure all is well.
Powered off, plugged in 390, powered up. BLACK SCREEN AGAIN. now AMD was complaining (as it should) about 390.
Powered off, Nvidia back in, 390 still plugged in, powered up successfully!
Flashed the 390 back with its original bios, rebooted, checked device manager, watched AMD install device drivers.
Powered off, nvidia out, power on and holy shit I am back! 3 cards all recognized and one 470 modded bios. Hell yes.

Ok finally using Trixx I set Clock to 1100 and Mem to 2000 and power level to 25% and saved.

Results follow GPU 1 is now the 470 btw



I did later adjust fan speed to get it around 68 and also after running over 12 hours now average speed is 29.

Success!

My ASUS ROG 470 4GB will arrive in a few days. Now I know sorta what I am doing it should go smooth. I'll let ya know....

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[fr4nkthetank]

Oh god you need a beer.  God stuff, the horrors we go through for extra hashes.  Lol @ flashed a 470 bios on the 390, I feel your pain.  Anyways yeah the relive drivers are sheet so far, I use 16.11.x ones and its all good.  Good story It was a good read

[meeow]

the gpu outputting display signal is always gpu0 so just use a rig with 1 or 2 gpus and you won't mess up the indicies. also check for mem errors with hwinfo, i have 8 470s with hynix vram including 2 armors and most cant get close to 1900mhz strapped without millions of mem errors causing instability. averaging 26.5 mhs with my hynix cards and 29.5 with elpida cards, so the latter, or samsung, are the way to go here

[fr4nkthetank]

Thats an interesting subject.  I have cards with millions and millions of mem errors, yet they do not produce any incorrect shares and run very stable.  So i'm not sure what to think about all that.  I usually just push the cards, if they produce invalid shares, I scale back until I get 0.  Would love to hear thoughts on this, but so far i'm not losing any sleep especially since most of the memory errors are on cards with warranties still good.

[Marvell1]

you can set the mem to 2000 in polaris bios editor
btw a powelimit that high and and dcr mining over 24
dcri will take a 470 from around 130 watts to 160

i doubt if it will last long

these new cards are not built to last like the old 280x and 390 cards

[Jdope]

Looks awesome, i was thinking of getting the same card but i heard that its not a great fit for mining, Does it make alot of noise? and whats the power consumption like?

[meeow]

Looks awesome, i was thinking of getting the same card but i heard that its not a great fit for mining, Does it make alot of noise? and whats the power consumption like?

Not a big sample size but both of mine are high asic%/low power draw, can be run at 900mV or less. One has a problem with temps though...I repasted it and its still shit, my best guess right now is the black rubber bumper pads at the corners of the gpu die are out of spec. Will try to remove them next time I open up the card. The heatsink design is half assed if you ask me, some of the mem modules are sinked, some are not, and one chip is sinked on half of it only. The single heatpipe has a somewhat large gap between it and the aluminum block it is in, creating a potential hotspot on the gpu die. Noise is about average for a 470, comparable to xfx or gigabyte cards, unless you get one with temp issues. Mining is a high stress use case for GPUs, I would put an extra $10 in and get a gaming X or sapphire/vt reference 470

[fr4nkthetank]

Yeah the Gaming X cooler is really sweet.  Blower type fans are still the best I suppose, but make more noise.  Rule of thumb armor model is 10c higher than Gaming X and fans run a bit faster.  But I asked MSI and the armor still uses double ball bearings so they should last long.

[kcheel]

Great read, good info.  I am in process of putting a rig together for the first time in a couple of years, so great info for me.  I am currently trying to decide which GPU to buy and had pretty much narrowed it down to the 470 Armor or the 470 Gaming.  Hope to get them ordered today if I can finally decide between the two.