Is that Max TDP for this model of the 7950 "SAPPHIRE HD 7970 3GB GDDR5 (21197-00)" or for all of them in general? And I didn't plan to OC for the same reason as you, so if I could get by with an 850 gold PSU that'd be great. If you don't mind me asking what kind of hash rates do you get with that setup? I'm trying to get a ball park feel for how much I could mine a day/week/month with that setup. Also how much power does 850 watt PSU draw on your electric bill, is it just 850 watts an hour, 20.4kwh a day, and so like 612 kwh a month? Or is that not calculated correctly. My apartment doesn't have an electrical cap and utilities are included, but If I had 10 of these rigs sucking up 6,120 kwh a month I think they would have a problem lol.
Max TDP should be for the 7950 model. not specific to an one card. But I can see where mileage may vary, it depends on quality of parts. I'm mainly mining LTC and FC now. I get about 2,250kH/s average running intensity -19 on cgminer per rig.
I orders a kill-a-watt meter off amazon so I can get a real idea of how much juice I'm pulling on these machines. The machines probably draw about 700 to 800 watts each. But you have to figure out how much your apartment can handle. You might trip a breaker if you load up too many machines. For example I cant run 3 machines in the same room. The circuit is 15AMPs so 15 * 120 volts is 1800 watts. I can put two in the room but I do trip the breaker when I add the 3rd one.
I've been running these machines for about a week. Still new to all this, and it was mostly tweaking the first few days. So I haven't received the electric bill. But an estimate of what it will cost me. 2400 watts or 2.4kW per hour. at .10/kW = $0.24/hr or $5.76 per day. So I'm adding just under $200 a month.
Also consider that the increased usage might alert the electric company and they might reprice your service. That happens in some places. If you are in an apartment it might not affect you much but if the landlord sees a big spike in his bill you might not have the free electricity option for long.
Very good info, I'm liking what I hear so far. I got my first two cards yesterday, two 7950's and popped them in. With my pre existing 650w corsair, that was a no go. It booted but only one card, and the drivers were crashing and the system was locking up horriably. So I took one card out, and problem solved. 850w psu gets here any minute now, its 80 gold certified so hopefully I can run at least 3 if not 4 with it. I ordered some pcie x1 to x16 extender cables so I'll aslo be testing to see if I can take advantage of the two x1 slots I have on top of the other two x16 slots.
As for the power thing, I live in a "huge" apartment complex that all shares power, like 1000 units. So I don't think coporate is going to see a spike in the bill from just me and convientantly enough summer is approaching in sunny florida and everyone is cranking the AC up so it should just blend right in with that. As for flipping a breaker, yeah theres a good chance that happens if all the machines are coming from the same room. Right now I'll only have a rig and a half but come a couple weeks from now I want to build 3-5 more with hopefully x5 or x6 a piece and If I can't power them in my place I have friends down the hall I could pay like $10/week to have plugged in and running in the corner of there room lol
I have another concern though, I'm having a hard time pulling high hash rates with my currenrtly running 7950, I can only pull about 380kh/s with auto settings, after some tweaking and very high fan speeds, like 100% and i 20 I was pulling high 500's but I was trying all sorts of different setups from what people had recomended for 7950's and couldnt get stable high hash rate and a high U and MU I think it is? I was pooling with wemineltc and my hash rate was like 450 but my to U rates were 0? and the site was showing that I was only pulling like 20kh/s so I don't know whats up with that.
Can anyone recommend a good profile for a 7950 and a good pooling service to go with it? Im in the US so I know some sites offer US servers and that tends to help a little.
Any recommendations and input is highly appreciated!
