My new mining rig - quad 7970 - Going for 3Gh/s

[pontiacg5]

Hey everyone, I just finished building my first mining rig, thought I'd post it up here and see what you all think  

How it started...





I didn't take pictures of bending it up. Press brakes are pretty damn intimidating, no distractions lol

Testing for fitment!





I managed to get everything right the first time around!

The components...



Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3 board. Z77, 1155. Gotta love all the pcie bandwidth!
Intel i3 3220. Probably overkill, but I want to use this for other things occasionally too.
16GB of some off brand 1600 ram
and
4 gigabyte 7970 Ghz editions



Testing out the nut riveter and standoffs.



The power supply, 1300W. Lots and lots of PCI-e plugs!





Dang, that's gonna be hard to keep cool....



My "idea" of a solution...



Cable ties, built in so I can lightly pull the cards apart.



Fan grilles in a few choice spots to keep cables away from fans. I split the chassis fan headers to power all these fans, this board only had 4.
Oh, and a couple of baby resistors to make it all go. Anyone familiar with GM's early vats lol





I hate these stupid intel fans. I've built at least 6 machines with these heatsinks and I've never been able to reliably use the built in wire ties!



This thing is a gigantic piece of crap. Unfortunately my ol' trusty Maxtor died on me

And finally, a little results...



Damn!! Too much heat, not enough room to get rid of it! Three of the 4 are throttling at around 95-97 degrees. The one on the end manages to get 630-640 at stock clocks, -v -w128 in guiminer.



And with a bit of clocking... I can't get any higher than 1175 stable right now. At those clocks I'm averaging around 680. I'm hoping for a little more when I get these spaced out and cooled down a little.

So, my new plan of attack is going to be spacing these cards out. I've ordered 4 8x to 16x cable risers, 8x because that's all the bandwidth my processor has for each. I know I don't need any more than 1x for mining, but I want to use it for other things too haha.

Even crippled up she's still averaging around 1900 MH/s. I've got the top three cards severely underclocked right now. Any recommendations to increase that are greatly appreciated haha


Stay tuned, interesting things happening when the risers decide to show up  


I just realized that the lights are flickering in my living room because of this beast! Good thing it's going to run in a machine shop, free power!

[mccminer]

You should end up pretty close to 3Gh/s.  I'm running a similar configuration with (5) Gigabyte 7970's (non-GHz editions), and I'm conservatively averaging about 3.4Gh/s.  I cranked the settings on up, and it ran faster, but wasn't stable.  I didn't like waking up in the morning and finding out that I hadn't been mining for 10+ hours because everything locked up!     Just for comparisons sake, my setup is running Linux and cgminer.

[pontiacg5]

I'm assuming you spaced yours apart with riser cables right? Are you using the powered version? My motherboard has a sata plug that supposedly adds extra power to the pci-e bus. Won't even boot without it if you've got more than three cards in there. If I wanted to upgrade to a few extra cards would you recommend the powered versions? I wanted to try and run them all on the mobo, but since that isn't possible I might as well add more haha

Are you running the reference clock? If not what sort of clock are you running to get that hashrate? I'd be a bit dissapointed to learn that you were able to generate the same average per card hashrate as I do at a slower clock lol. I might just return these ghz editions and switch to reference cards.

Would I see a gain in hashrate moving to Linux? I assume that the gui kinda takes away from efficiency a bit, right?

Thanks for the post Mccminer!

[notaek]

I'm assuming you spaced yours apart with riser cables right? Are you using the powered version? My motherboard has a sata plug that supposedly adds extra power to the pci-e bus. Won't even boot without it if you've got more than three cards in there. If I wanted to upgrade to a few extra cards would you recommend the powered versions? I wanted to try and run them all on the mobo, but since that isn't possible I might as well add more haha

Are you running the reference clock? If not what sort of clock are you running to get that hashrate? I'd be a bit dissapointed to learn that you were able to generate the same average per card hashrate as I do at a slower clock lol. I might just return these ghz editions and switch to reference cards.

Would I see a gain in hashrate moving to Linux? I assume that the gui kinda takes away from efficiency a bit, right?

Thanks for the post Mccminer!

Not sure about Linux, but I know that you would get a benefit from moving to CGminer.

[pontiacg5]

Cool, I'll give it a try. Doesn't look too terribly complicated.

Thanks!

[tronath]

There wasn't a difference in hashing speed on either windows or linux for me, but using cgminer should help quite a bit. I think the diablo or phatk kernel is best (it is for me anyway). I like your case

[Random Bit]

Same Gigabyte cards I have, the way they dump heat from one card to the next is horrid, thought you had a great idea with plenty of fans but doesn't seem to have helped.  

Mine are spaced 2 1/2 inches between and still have heating problems.  Keeping and eye on this thread to see how you work it out, please keep us updated.

Very clean build, looks great   

[samyrp]

I like your case 

[bitbrandon]

Just curious how much that sheet metal cost and where you got it from.

EDIT: Thought I would give some advice for the airflow. Not sure how you have the fans blowing at the end of the card where the dvi ports etc. are, but those should be pulling air away and not blowing on the cards. Then have the ones at the back of the cards pushing air on them. Also, if possible, I would have the case flipped on the side so that the connector side of the cards are pointing up. This should help aid in removing the heat if you follow how I said you should have your fans blowing because heat rises.

[wolfgod]

I have 4 x gigabyte 7970s ghz edition and it over heats... does anyone know about water blocks for these cards? where can i get it? i saw frozencpu.com but im not sure if it will fit the PCB on that card.

[pontiacg5]

Thanks for the comments on my case everyone, too bad it's not so functional right now haha

cgminer is a little improvement, at least in dealing with my hot cards. I'm getting an average 2.5GH/s now. The open air card still seems to do pretty good, so hopefully opening them all up helps!

I'm running diablo kernel -w256 and -v1, averaging around 690MH/s on the 70 degree card.

Random bit - I was thinking I could get away with around an inch of free space between the cards, assuming they stay in the little fan box. Are you just relying on the video card fans to cool them with that much spacing?

Tronath - Thanks! I've never bothered to learn to use Linux so I'm glad I don't have to start now lol

Diablo seems to be best for me so far, phatk was causing some serious artifacts. I'll need to try again when I get the temps under control I guess

Bitbrandon - I got the sheet from work, ordered in on a truck. I could hook you up with my supplier, but if you are out of their area their trucks run it won't do much good. It's made of 16 gauge stainless, and I forget exactly what a sheet runs. Luckily I don't work the purchasing dept lol

I haven't tried flipping the fans yet, but I'll give that a shot. I don't really see it being much help, but I guess it can't hurt.

Wolfgod - I believe we are out of luck as our cards are not the reference format. Universal blocks are the only real option, and I don't consider those an option lol

I do have a few mills at work though, making waterblocks for these cards would be simple. That's a lot of extra $$$ though, for radiators and pumps since I can't make those. I'd rather buy more air cooled cards personally.

[caesarsauce]

Great looking setup.

[notaek]

Have you thought about mining Litecoin?  Its 1.3x as profitable as BTC right now.

[pontiacg5]

Thanks Caesarsauce!

Notaek - I've thought about litecoin a bit, and the plan is to switch to that as soon as ASICs make GPU mining totally impossible. In the meantime I'm hoping to pay for this machine with bitcoins. If ASICs hold out for three months I should be good

[Coinseeker]

Awesome photos!  Definitely keeping my eye on this thread. 

[GodHatesFigs]

Love the case!

[bitbrandon]

Well, the reason I said to flip the case and reverse the fans at the end of the cards is to help move the hot air away from the cards. The way you have it right now, the fans may be blowing air on them, but the air flow is all screwed up and the heat doesn't have a good way to escape so it sticks around the cards instead.

[pontiacg5]

I think due to the design on these cards there's no good way for me to place the fans. They draw air in from the front, and mostly exhaust through the top leading edge of the card. The heatsink fins run perpendicular to the length of the card, so not much air can make it out the end. The rear of the card does seem to vent a bit, but I'm pretty sure most of it comes out the top or directly inside the case.

I swapped the fans and it's not much better like expected. One card seems to run a tad bit cooler (90 instead of 95), but I still have it slowed way down. The others are all still running at 95 or so, throttling every now and then. I don't much care for the cooler design on these cards!

Thanks for the comments guys!

Edit: I think I might have a problem with the thermal compound on one of these cards. It sure seems to idle higher than the others. Taking the cooler off is going to void my warranty though, isn't it?

[qqriice]

setup looks fantastic

[meathelix]

I am a CNC Machine Operator for a 3 meter by 1.5 meter sheet at 3mm thick is about $170 You would only use half that for a case.

I am thinking of doing the same as you but main problem is your cards over heating I was thinking of getting the "EVGA X79 Classified" motherboard since it has 3 graphics card slots evenly spreed out a lot of room be twin them.

How much did that setup cost you? I have around 5k to spend and am looking at getting 1 dedicated pc or 2-3 pc's with 3 7950's
What would you guys recommend to do I will be using it just to mine coins.