Please explain the love for the 5830s and 5850s

[unmitigated]

Yeah, my partner and I can't find anything near that.

[qwat]

I personally use 5770s. Easy to get, and great price to performance ratio.

[Sannyasi]

5770s are the most efficient IMO (just check wiki site to find effiency (mj/s). I just added a new one to my rig today (yay!). And when you do the math it does make a difference. I get my energy cheap (8 cent /k i beleive). I also have a 5870 and running these two 24/7 (which is how they run unless im in doing my game design crap). Also, as the difficulty increases the hardware becomes less and less efficient while energy will go up if anything- usually. so if you are planning ahead only the most efficient cards will be pulling their own weight in the end and then eventually even they will be paperweights compared to new tech.

5770 = 6.00 a month
5870 = 15.00 a month

So I consider that 1.5-2 BTC that will be lost a month due to electricity.... this number will also increase with difficulty as a result no doubt.

But then as problems get harder I'm sure value will rise without as many new BTC coming into the market.

[ingrown]

I've seen a couple of reports in this thread of 4850's getting 80-90 mhash/s.  I've been mining on two for the past week and a half, trying to tweak them, but only reliably getting 55-60 out of them.  One is on a laptop, so that's to be expected... its gpu is clocked at 500 mhz by default.  The desktop's running at slightly over stock,  too, but I need to get the card cooler before trying any overclocking.  It's currrently running at 103 degrees C.  It's an old setup, so the fans could probably use some cleaning.  I've read that people recommend underclocking the memory, is that to reduce temps?

Most of this is a moot point, I was lucky enough to find a 5830 in stock at Newegg last week, so I'll get a nice boost in mining and gaming performance when it comes in tomorrow. I'll still want to use the 4850 in a linux server i have running, so I do want to figure out how to get that card mining optimally. I've looked at the mining hardware comparison chart, but I can't get anywhere near those numbers.

If it makes any difference, I'm running phoenix miner with fastloop, aggression 3, and worksize 128.  Trial and error has shown that seems to work well and allow the pc to be used.  Raising the aggression only gets me a couple mhash extra, but makes it unusable.  Raising it too high makes the pc crash.

I apologize for being long winded, I haven't had enough coffee this morning.  I guess I'm just feeling the need to vent and find out options to optomize my mining.

Oh, I've been mining on both systems for 12 days or so and have earned 1.15 BTC from the pool i'm connected to.  Is this low for 110-120 MH/s?


Edit: I think it's a cooling problem.  I stopped mining, let the GPU cool, then restarted it.  I was running at 67 MH/s until it hit about 100 degrees, then it dropped down.

[speckman]

I've seen a couple of reports in this thread of 4850's getting 80-90 mhash/s.  I've been mining on two for the past week and a half, trying to tweak them, but only reliably getting 55-60 out of them.  One is on a laptop, so that's to be expected... its gpu is clocked at 500 mhz by default.  The desktop's running at slightly over stock,  too, but I need to get the card cooler before trying any overclocking.  It's currrently running at 103 degrees C.  It's an old setup, so the fans could probably use some cleaning.  I've read that people recommend underclocking the memory, is that to reduce temps?
...
Edit: I think it's a cooling problem.  I stopped mining, let the GPU cool, then restarted it.  I was running at 67 MH/s until it hit about 100 degrees, then it dropped down.

Wow, I think the cards are rated to somewhere like 90C.  100C is really hot.  I personally don't like my cards at 80C.  I'm new to this but I never use the stock fan control.  I either set it manually in windows with the catalyst control panel or use AMDOverdriveCtrl in linux.  Especially in a laptop, I think you're going to burn something up, like your cards.   And yes, underclock memory to reduce temps.   Too low will also reduce hashes so experiment or use other people's values.  If I don't turn the fan speed up, my cards will rocket to high temps very fast.  Yeah, I'm stressing out the fans more but I've also read on here that higher temps shorten the life of your chips (just as higher fan speeds shorten the fan life)