Sapphire HD 7970 over 700kh/s - Windows 7 - CGMiner

[Xmansk]

I'm still fighting this fight!

You mention you have 2g of system ram that went up to 10g of system ram but isn't this still lower than the GPUs ram? If you have four 7970s with 3g each isn't that 12?

I current'y have 12 gigs of GPU ram and only 4gigs of ram on my mobo. Looks like I should upgrade, but I'm not sure how much to get.

No i have 8gb of system ram in total, not 10. As far as I understand it, you need to have more system ram then your one GPU has.

So if my cards are 3g does having 4g of system ram make it enough assuming I have four 3g cards?

Yes i think it is enough. But if you have opportunity to add more ram for free just for test - try it. If it helps - buy it

[-ck]

As far as I know Reaper is the only mining app that requires a lot of ram.

My 6x 7970s with cgminer use 325MB of system ram.  This is on a system that currently has 16GB of ram.

Cgminer itself does not use lots of ram indeed, however you DO need that large amount of ram just to create the buffers to speak to the GPU, even if they don't show up as used ram.

[Xmansk]

cgminer --scrypt -o ... -u ... -p ... -o ... -u ... -p ... --no-submit-stale -I 20 --lookup-gap 2 --gpu-vddc 1.050 --gpu-memclock 1470 --gpu-engine 1040 --gpu-fan 100 --temp-cutoff 85

You are going to wear your card fans out quickly by setting your GPU fan at 100%.  If you are having that much of a problem with GPU temps you should get an external fan to improve air flow between the cards and reduce ambient temperature.  It will make a difference.

Currently there is no other way. I have to tame the warmest GPU. I have 3x12cm at 1500rpm fans blowing air into GPUs, but with this temps outside, it's mission impossible to keep them cold. Currently I am thinking about buying water cooling system, so I hope that the fans will last until such time as I decide.

[lazydna]

you know, you could just space out your gpu's a bit further apart and stagger them

[jdebunt]

Back down on the settings a bit. Your temp. isn't good for long term mining. You'll wear your card out quickly.

I'm not letting it run above 75°C for most of the day, i just lowered the fan speed because i had visitors sitting next to me (which is also pretty much next to that card hashing away)

[TheFuneral]

As far as I know Reaper is the only mining app that requires a lot of ram.

My 6x 7970s with cgminer use 325MB of system ram.  This is on a system that currently has 16GB of ram.

Cgminer itself does not use lots of ram indeed, however you DO need that large amount of ram just to create the buffers to speak to the GPU, even if they don't show up as used ram.

What is the proper amounts we are looking for if you don't mind me asking? I currently have a system with 4x7970s that each have 3GB of ram on them. Would we need a 1:1 of GPU ram to SYS ram?

[ronaldinho_07]

at this profitablity,i prefer the higher p/w 

680Khash and 0.981Volt
it's about 170W per card  ~ 4khash/1W

[Prelude]

As far as I know Reaper is the only mining app that requires a lot of ram.

My 6x 7970s with cgminer use 325MB of system ram.  This is on a system that currently has 16GB of ram.

Cgminer itself does not use lots of ram indeed, however you DO need that large amount of ram just to create the buffers to speak to the GPU, even if they don't show up as used ram.

ckolivas,


Could you elaborate? Are you saying you need minimum 3GB of system ram if you're running a/multiple video cards which have 3GB VRAM each? Or would you recommend having 3GB for each card? Say 12GB of system RAM for 4x 3GB VRAM video cards?

Personally I'm running a few rigs with 6x 7970s in each, all at 740KH/s per card. Rigs have either 4GB DDR3 or 6GB DDR3 and I've had zero issues.

[BlazinBeaches]

As far as I know Reaper is the only mining app that requires a lot of ram.

My 6x 7970s with cgminer use 325MB of system ram.  This is on a system that currently has 16GB of ram.

Cgminer itself does not use lots of ram indeed, however you DO need that large amount of ram just to create the buffers to speak to the GPU, even if they don't show up as used ram.

I was planning to turn the rig into a dedicated unit this week since it's my main rig right now and throw 4GB of ram on it, so you think that won't be enough for 6x7970s?  

[snowcrashed]

As far as I know Reaper is the only mining app that requires a lot of ram.

My 6x 7970s with cgminer use 325MB of system ram.  This is on a system that currently has 16GB of ram.

It isn't a question of the RAM the mining software uses, but the memory required by the algorithm the coin uses.  SHA-256 (Bitcoin) does not require a large amount of memory to hash efficiently, while Scrypt (Litecoin) does.

[Charles999]

I can't seem to get my 7970 card to mine correctly.  I have two cards in the same box and one is hashing at 520mhs and the other is 575 mhs. 

I tried the following settings:  --expiry 1 --scan-time 1 --queue 0 --gpu-engine 1090 --gpu-memclock 1500 --shaders 2048 --thread-concurrency 8192 -I 13 -g 2 -w 256 --lookup-gap 2 --no-submit-stale


Do I need to change the settings in Afterburner also?  Or will Cgminer just do it.  I have 8 Gb ram.  Also why does one card hash less than the other?

Thanks

[TheFuneral]

I currently have a machine with 4x7970 Vapor-X's.

I ran a quick/dirty test per what ckolias said;

4gb    2.348Mh/s    30m
8gb    2.338Mh/s    30m
         2.353Mh/s    60m

As you can see I didn't really notice much of a difference going ffom 4gb to 8gb. Am I supposed to have 12gb?

[BlazinBeaches]

Cgminer itself does not use lots of ram indeed, however you DO need that large amount of ram just to create the buffers to speak to the GPU, even if they don't show up as used ram.

It isn't a question of the RAM the mining software uses, but the memory required by the algorithm the coin uses.  SHA-256 (Bitcoin) does not require a large amount of memory to hash efficiently, while Scrypt (Litecoin) does.

You guys are right.  I set up two dedicated rigs today taking all the cards off my main rig and put 4GB RAM on each. The rig with 6 7970s would not mine all cards.  It would only do 2-3 at a time.  I was worried something broke.  I even re-imaged the operating system.  Then what you guys said occurred to me.  I put 8GB on the big rig and now all 6 cards can mine again. using scrypt.

8GB will do 6 7970s using tc-8192 with full speed hashrate, which is perfect since that's all that is needed on these cards. But just for test, I noticed I couldn't go higher than 8192 like I was able to do on the machine with 16GB. Just something for anyone else to keep in mind. Mainly with lots of 7950s I know you guys use high thread concurrency, how much ram are you using with high thread concurrency and 5-6 cards? More than 8GB?

Very awesome

[Beans]

I have almost the exact same setup as the OP, only thing different is the brand of ram he's using. I get the same hashrates but when intensity is over 13 the shares are never accepted by the pool. Shares just show up in the HW section of cgminer. With I 13 I can't seem to get ever 600kh. I've tried the cards in a differn't pc, same result. I haven't been able to find the driver and sdk version the OP is using though.

[jdebunt]

I have almost the exact same setup as the OP, only thing different is the brand of ram he's using. I get the same hashrates but when intensity is over 13 the shares are never accepted by the pool. Shares just show up in the HW section of cgminer. With I 13 I can't seem to get ever 600kh. I've tried the cards in a differn't pc, same result. I haven't been able to find the driver and sdk version the OP is using though.

12.8 drivers : http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=367183

APP SDK 2.7 : http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/heterogeneous-computing/amd-accelerated-parallel-processing-app-sdk/downloads/download-archive/  (scroll down once or twice, you'll see 2.7 for different OSes)