GTX 1080 cards underperforming

[jmayniac]

I have a couple 1080 (non-Ti) cards that are mining ZenCash.  I noticed that Whattomine.com says I should be getting 550 sol/s out of them, but I'm only getting about 500 sol/s.  Does anyone know if the whattomine.com stat is overclocked?  I wouldn't think so, but I'm not sure.

I'm not doing any undervolting or overclocking on the cards, or changing anything at all.  I'm just trying to get a baseline for the performance before I do anything.

The cards are using about 170w each and run at about 70C each with the fans at about 75%.  For now, each card is on it's own 750w power supply (i planned on adding more cards later).  This is on a GA-H110-D3A motherboard with a G4400 Pentium and 4GB RAM and an SSD.  I've tried both Windows and Linux and they both perform the same with no tweaks.

Any ideas?

[Vann]

My MSI Gamixg X 1080 easily gets 575-585 H/s at 75% Power Limit with Temp Limit 83C, Core +185 MHz Memory +1000 MHz in Afterburner. I can get it over 600 H/s if I increase the power limit.

[jmayniac]

My MSI Gamixg X 1080 easily gets 575-585 H/s at 75% Power Limit with Temp Limit 83C, Core +185 MHz Memory +1000 MHz in Afterburner. I can get it over 600 H/s if I increase the power limit.

These are actually EVGA FTW 1080 cards.  I tried to overclock them a little, but they don't like it at all.  I can't even get +25 core and +100 on either at stock power limits.  I seem to have lost the silicon lottery bad.  They both have Micron memory.

[Vann]

I noticed Nvidia cards do better when I set the PCI-E slot to GEN 3 in the Bios. Also try increasing the virtual ram in Windows to 16GB or more 500 H/s is too low for a 1080. The 385.41 drivers work the best for me on Windows 10. Newer drivers aren't as good for mining. Try those after a DDU.

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/123219/en-us

My Zotac AMP Exterme 1070 gets 470 H/s at 80% power limit.

[jmayniac]

I noticed Nvidia cards do better when I set the PCI-E slot to GEN 3 in the Bios. Also try increasing the virtual ram in Windows to 16GB or more 500 H/s is too low for a 1080. The 385.41 drivers work the best for me on Windows 10. Newer drivers aren't as good for mining. Try those after a DDU.

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/123219/en-us

My Zotac AMP Exterme 1070 gets 470 H/s at 80% power limit.

I had the PCIe set to AUTO before, but I set it o GEN1 as that is what i read as recommended.  I didn't notice any difference.

I have my virtual memory set to 32GB now.  I am on the 385.41 driver as well mainly because I just never upgraded.

[Vann]

According to NiceHash, using a GEN 3 PCI-E lane can make a 1-2% difference in hash rate from the higher bandwidth, especially for some data transfer intensive algorithms.

We also checked with GPU-Z and all cards were successfully detected and linked with PCI-e v3.0, which is another bonus compared to other motherboards that usually work with 6+ cards only under PCI-e v1.1. The higher bandwidth speed may not look like an important factor, but the slower link can take 1-2% off of card's performance, especially in algorithms that are sending a lot of data from/to CPU/GPU.

https://www.nicehash.com/?p=news&id=155

Wouldn't hurt to also do a clean install of the drivers after a DDU. If you move cards around, there are registry entries left in Device Manager that can cause problems.