Hey Flash, thanks for the welcome.
Hehe, golden iceberg! Yeah I know what you mean, the drama on here is quite something to behold, lol.
Yep, that is exactly what I've been seeing with other people's speed too. Something has to be making the difference here, but I don't know what it could be. I looked up a comparison between the 640MB 8800GTS vs your 9600GT and by all accounts, yours should be outperforming mine.
The memory bandwidth is slightly better in the 8800, but only by 10%. So I can't see that making much difference. Without overclocking, my 8800 was getting around 29.75kh with cudaminer. Oh that sucks, yeah hopefully a new version will work better for you.
Since your clock speeds are faster than mine by default, you should be able to easily use my exact settings. Here's what I use to launch cudaminer from a BAT file:
cudaminer -o http://your-pool:port -O username:password -d 0 -i 0 -l 24x2 -C 0 -m 1 -D
Ouch, yeah that 280 might be beyond hope, but it's always worth a shot.
I was also given a bad one. At first it didn't work at all, so I had just let it sit on the shelf for months. I guess oxidation or something bridged the bad solder spots in that time, because it fired up when I tried it again and it let me hash away at 93kh.
Unfortunately, it messed up again when I shut down and pulled it out to get some better cooling in the case. I think the solder micro-fracturing happens very easily when the card goes from full-load-hot to cooled off in a short time. It did the whole slew of things from the screen going dead, to all pink, white, green, etc and also the fun multicolored screen with big box mouse cursor, lol. That's when I found out about the oven baking. I've had to do it twice now though. The second time it messed up was when I shut down to add my Kill-O-Watt to the outlet. The first bake was at 350F for 8min, 2nd was around 385F for 10min. Of course, that's assuming the oven's gauge is accurate.
Yeah, if you are good with a heat gun, it is the best way to go so you can avoid cooking the entire card. I've never used one, so I would probably end up cooking it extra crispy or something, lol.
The common problem is with the memory chip solder, so I would aim specifically at the memory chips and see if that works. You can also deflect heat away from the other parts with aluminum foil. If you can do it with your specific heat gun, I would also let them cool gradually. With the oven, I just shut it off after the 8-10 minutes, opened the door and let it cool for 10 more minutes before attempting to move it. Then I let it cool completely for another 30-60min before re-assembling and powering it on. One issue to be aware of is if you have the card flipped over to do the flat side's memory chips, gpu facing down, parts can and have fallen off of the card when the solder melts, lol. I don't know though if the heat gun would heat the opposite side of the card enough to do that.
I hate that the temps shoot up and down so fast when starting and closing the miner, that has to be the worst thing to do to any video card. I've setup some batch files to load in sequence, each with different settings, in order to warm and cool the card more gradually. But, that won't help if/when the connection drops, the card drops to idle, then spikes up again when the work resumes. What would be great is if someone could program the miners to gradually step up the work load until it reaches the max setting and step down before closing/idling.
Cheers!
Edit: Oh and I got the 280 up to 110kh without overclocking the memory. Overclocking the memory only gave me 3 more kh (113kh), so it wasn't worth it. I would need better cooling for that though. Unfortunately, I don't have the stock fan anymore since I accidentally fried it, lol. It also added another 6C to the temps. Going from 93-100kh was only a 1C jump, so that extra 10kh probably isn't even worth it power-wise.
