XFX 6950 questions

[CyberPhunk]

Hello, pretty new to this bitcoin thing, and the GPU tweaking that goes along with mining for it.

I have been playing around with the XFX 6950 card I have in my gaming rig.

2GB ram, stock core 840/1250 with two monitors, 24" 1080p and 21" 1280/1024 Win7 pro 64bit

I have flashed it with an XFX 6970 bios which opens up a bit more range, along with the extra shaders.

Playing around, I have found that 900 is about as high as I can get and keep the system stable. Pretty sure I'm missing something here, since I'm not too confident in my overclocking knowledge.

905/1250 gave me a stable system with about 360-365Mhash/s without any flags

900/1250 gives me a stable system(so far, 3 hours in) with the voltage bumped to 1.175 I get ~397Mhash/s with -v -w128 set

One problem I have, though, while mining I can not view ANY video at all, or the whole system freezes, and I have to reboot.


Few questions:

What if any flags should I be using within GUIminer? Should I be using another miner?

I understand boosting the core of the gpu= more Mhash/s, what affect if any does modifying the memory core have, up or down?

Is it possible to get a 6950 bios that allows core speeds of 900 for this card? If so, where? I tried looking around, and couldn't get one to let me go over 880.

I have MSI Afterburner, and even with that couldn't get the GPU core over 880 without having to flash the 6970 bios. :-(

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

[pbj sammich]

Would be interesting to hear some more experienced peoples responses.

I have the exact same card XFX 6950 (unlocked shaders mod only not full bios flash) and currently just using the Catalyst Control Center with 840/1250 and +5% on the power control setting gives me ~369 MHash/s consistently (well for the last 3 weeks its been that way)

Also I think that the video is a flash type thing as it does the exact same thing to me. If I don't check the link and it send me to youtube etc... it just freezes. Although it seems that I am still mining my computer is locked and requires a hard reboot.

[Jointops420]

Got 2 xfx6950 1 gig and had same drama with vids freezing the system. Turn off hardware acceleration in the video players and I had no probs after I did that.

[WebMonkey]

it's the 69xx series opencl "glitch".

any program "tapping" the video card while it is mining will lock up the system.

somethings like flash, can have video acceleration turned off.  other programs, do not have an option to leave your card alone when they open and will lock up the system.

say, opening gpu-z while you're mining, that'll do it.

'monkey

[CyberPhunk]

it's the 69xx series opencl "glitch".

any program "tapping" the video card while it is mining will lock up the system.

somethings like flash, can have video acceleration turned off.  other programs, do not have an option to leave your card alone when they open and will lock up the system.

say, opening gpu-z while you're mining, that'll do it.

'monkey

Yeah, noticed the issue with opening GPU-z while mining, so I open it before I start, to keep an eye on the temps while mining.

Guess I only mine with this rig while it's not being used.

[CyberPhunk]

Well, thanks to a wonderfully helpful post about MSI Afterburner, I went back to the stock bios, unlocked the shaders and have the card running at 910/625 at 1.175v and I'm getting a stable ~400Mh/s now. Might try for 915 and see if it's as stable.

Temps stay around 72-75c with the fans at most 58% in a closed case. They even drop below 70c at night. :-)

Much better using the stock 6950 bios and MSI afterburner letting me use higher core settings.