Inconsistent LTC mining hashrate?

[crazyates]

I'm a little new to LTC mining, but I figured I'd try it out. I have a Gigabyte 7970 GHz Edition. I'm using 12.8 drivers with CGMiner 3.3.1.

I can sometimes tweak it to over 550KH/s, but it's usually less than that. I've tried all sorts of combinations of TC, LG, worksize, threads, etc. Nothing really works. I finally just set it to the CGMiner defaults with TC of 8192. I heard for GHz cards, 8192 is best. When I'm mining now, I'm only getting 522KH/s. Kinda sucky.

Well last night I was sick of messing with it, so I left it alone at 522KH/s and went to bed. I got up this morning, and woke my computer up, and it said my average had risen to >715KH/s. Huh? My WU: rate was also significantly higher as well, so it's not misreporting. It said my 5s average was back down into the low 500s, and my overall average of 715 was now slowly dropping.

So my question is this: Why is CGMiner gettting good results when the screen is off, but pretty crappy results when it's on? And how do I change this so it's mining at >700KH/s all the time?

[crazyates]

Woops I may have mis-spoke. It's not the computer going to sleep that does it. My computer is set to not go to sleep. It's turning off my monitor that does it. The monitor is still plugged in (via HDMI), but when I shut it off, the hashrate goes from ~525 all the way to over 700. I'm still watching my pool website to see what it reports the hashrate as.

[crazyates]

And for the record, ULPS is disabled in the registry before I started mining.

I turned the screen off, and after 10 minutes ozcoin ltc website shows the worker as hashing at ~725KH/s. What would cause this?

[cryptocoinmkt.com]

I'm a little new to LTC mining, but I figured I'd try it out. I have a Gigabyte 7970 GHz Edition. I'm using 12.8 drivers with CGMiner 3.3.1.

I can sometimes tweak it to over 550KH/s, but it's usually less than that. I've tried all sorts of combinations of TC, LG, worksize, threads, etc. Nothing really works. I finally just set it to the CGMiner defaults with TC of 8192. I heard for GHz cards, 8192 is best. When I'm mining now, I'm only getting 522KH/s. Kinda sucky.

Well last night I was sick of messing with it, so I left it alone at 522KH/s and went to bed. I got up this morning, and woke my computer up, and it said my average had risen to >715KH/s. Huh? My WU: rate was also significantly higher as well, so it's not misreporting. It said my 5s average was back down into the low 500s, and my overall average of 715 was now slowly dropping.

So my question is this: Why is CGMiner gettting good results when the screen is off, but pretty crappy results when it's on? And how do I change this so it's mining at >700KH/s all the time?

I've been mining with Give-Me-LTC.com , they are pretty good...never had much problems with them at all, their stats will show KH/s that fluctuates up and down, it is never consistent because it is the hash rate as measured on the mining pool side...avergae KH/s at a specific interval or captured moment in time.

For instanc, if I am hashing at 600 KH/s in cgminer, when looking at the stats it will show 500, 450, 650, 700....you get the picture.  I've been doing this for a while and if you ask most people I am sure they may have similar answers.

CryptoCoinMKT

[crazyates]

I've been mining with Give-Me-LTC.com , they are pretty good...never had much problems with them at all, their stats will show KH/s that fluctuates up and down, it is never consistent because it is the hash rate as measured on the mining pool side...avergae KH/s at a specific interval or captured moment in time.

For instanc, if I am hashing at 600 KH/s in cgminer, when looking at the stats it will show 500, 450, 650, 700....you get the picture.  I've been doing this for a while and if you ask most people I am sure they may have similar answers.

CryptoCoinMKT

Hey thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, this isn't just an issue of a pool mis-estimating my hashrate. This is something CGMiner itself is showing. Both the exact hashrate, U:, and WU: are all higher when the screen is shut off. I just used the pool's reported stats to confirm this.

[coinerd]

It sounds like when you stop using the card's processors and memory to maintain a desktop, the hash rate goes up.

This is to be expected - when you free up more resources you hash faster.

HDMI interface can report the state of the monitor to the card so...


Turn on monitor -> Card sets aside resources for that, hash rate goes down.

Turn off monitor -> after a couple of seconds the card sees it has free resources, hash rate goes up.

[crazyates]

It sounds like when you stop using the card's processors and memory to maintain a desktop, the hash rate goes up.

This is to be expected - when you free up more resources you hash faster.

HDMI interface can report the state of the monitor to the card so...

Turn on monitor -> Card sets aside resources for that, hash rate goes down.

Turn off monitor -> after a couple of seconds the card sees it has free resources, hash rate goes up.

That's what I figured as well, but it's really a 200KH/s difference? I mean I would expect a few % maybe, but not a 40% increase in hashrate.

My monitor only supports HDMI, so maybe I"ll try another monitor that only has VGA and see if that makes a difference.

[coinerd]

While the numbers may be slightly different, I suspect what you'll see with VGA is that you always hash at the slower rate.

The card will have no way to free resources if it can't see the state of the monitor and I don't think that was part of VGA spec.

So, like my computer here, it will just always reserve resources for the monitor.

EDIT though I'm interested to hear, if you test it with a newer card.

[crazyates]

While the numbers may be slightly different, I suspect what you'll see with VGA is that you always hash at the slower rate.

The card will have no way to free resources if it can't see the state of the monitor and I don't think that was part of VGA spec.

So, like my computer here, it will just always reserve resources for the monitor.

EDIT though I'm interested to hear, if you test it with a newer card.

Ya VGA didn't solve anything. I didn't test VGA with the monitor off, as I really don't care about the slower hashrate.

What do you mean test it with a newer card?

[coinerd]

While the numbers may be slightly different, I suspect what you'll see with VGA is that you always hash at the slower rate.

The card will have no way to free resources if it can't see the state of the monitor and I don't think that was part of VGA spec.

So, like my computer here, it will just always reserve resources for the monitor.

EDIT though I'm interested to hear, if you test it with a newer card.

Ya VGA didn't solve anything. I didn't test VGA with the monitor off, as I really don't care about the slower hashrate.

What do you mean test it with a newer card?

Well, some cards do things that are outside the spec.  If they build in functionality to monitor signal for HDMI and it was relatively easy to port it a card might be able to detect a monitor's power state via a VGA interface.

Also, I just have a tendency to ramble.

[crazyates]

While the numbers may be slightly different, I suspect what you'll see with VGA is that you always hash at the slower rate.

The card will have no way to free resources if it can't see the state of the monitor and I don't think that was part of VGA spec.

So, like my computer here, it will just always reserve resources for the monitor.

EDIT though I'm interested to hear, if you test it with a newer card.

Ya VGA didn't solve anything. I didn't test VGA with the monitor off, as I really don't care about the slower hashrate.

What do you mean test it with a newer card?

Well, some cards do things that are outside the spec.  If they build in functionality to monitor signal for HDMI and it was relatively easy to port it a card might be able to detect a monitor's power state via a VGA interface.

I turned the monitor off, and it seems to be doing the same thing with VGA. Pool is reporting it as 770KH/s right now, tho I doubt it's really that high. Still, 770 is kinda out of the "standard variance" range for a 520KH/s card, so I'm fairly certain it's doing the same thing.

[greenbtc]

I'm a little new to LTC mining, but I figured I'd try it out. I have a Gigabyte 7970 GHz Edition. I'm using 12.8 drivers with CGMiner 3.3.1.

I can sometimes tweak it to over 550KH/s, but it's usually less than that. I've tried all sorts of combinations of TC, LG, worksize, threads, etc. Nothing really works. I finally just set it to the CGMiner defaults with TC of 8192. I heard for GHz cards, 8192 is best. When I'm mining now, I'm only getting 522KH/s. Kinda sucky.

Well last night I was sick of messing with it, so I left it alone at 522KH/s and went to bed. I got up this morning, and woke my computer up, and it said my average had risen to >715KH/s. Huh? My WU: rate was also significantly higher as well, so it's not misreporting. It said my 5s average was back down into the low 500s, and my overall average of 715 was now slowly dropping.

So my question is this: Why is CGMiner gettting good results when the screen is off, but pretty crappy results when it's on? And how do I change this so it's mining at >700KH/s all the time?

Funny, this actually happened to me two days ago. I am currently using a couple 6970's to mine LTC and stock at intensity of 18-19 I was getting around 480kh/s. Overclocking the cards under the same gives about 500-515kh/s so yours definitely should be higher.

However, the other night, I went to bed, and set it up hashing away at it's normal speed (~500kh/s) and when I woke up the average had risen to 650kh/s, and everything else had increased like you said...but my 5s dropped and my average had started to drop as well.

Bizarre.

EDIT: I've been doing this for a few weeks now the same way, and that night was an off-thing. I have a machine with no monitors hooked up getting the same as the one with monitors hooked up. What mining pool were you using? I'm curious if it was just that...I was using www.wemineltc.com

[greenbtc]

While the numbers may be slightly different, I suspect what you'll see with VGA is that you always hash at the slower rate.

The card will have no way to free resources if it can't see the state of the monitor and I don't think that was part of VGA spec.

So, like my computer here, it will just always reserve resources for the monitor.

EDIT though I'm interested to hear, if you test it with a newer card.

Ya VGA didn't solve anything. I didn't test VGA with the monitor off, as I really don't care about the slower hashrate.

What do you mean test it with a newer card?

Well, some cards do things that are outside the spec.  If they build in functionality to monitor signal for HDMI and it was relatively easy to port it a card might be able to detect a monitor's power state via a VGA interface.

I turned the monitor off, and it seems to be doing the same thing with VGA. Pool is reporting it as 770KH/s right now, tho I doubt it's really that high. Still, 770 is kinda out of the "standard variance" range for a 520KH/s card, so I'm fairly certain it's doing the same thing.

If you are going off the pool's website as reporting 770kh/s, that is normal. The website generally does report all sorts of whacky numbers, but cgminer is pretty consistent.

EDIT:

Guess it was maybe 3 days ago (since it looks like I started it the afternoon before that following morning). I forgot that I had taken a screenshot of cgminer because it was so weird and I was even going to post on the forum and ask if anyone knew anything (like you had) about an occurrence such as this. I had seen the fluctuation in readings on the website, but the average had never been higher than what the card was actually running at (anywhere from 480-504kh/s on that card depending on how I was using the machine it was on). So I don't know how a card that produced 504kh/s somehow ran long enough at a high enough speed to change the average to that high...Not sure.

[crazyates]

Funny, this actually happened to me two days ago. I am currently using a couple 6970's to mine LTC and stock at intensity of 18-19 I was getting around 480kh/s. Overclocking the cards under the same gives about 500-515kh/s so yours definitely should be higher.

However, the other night, I went to bed, and set it up hashing away at it's normal speed (~500kh/s) and when I woke up the average had risen to 650kh/s, and everything else had increased like you said...but my 5s dropped and my average had started to drop as well.

Bizarre.

EDIT: I've been doing this for a few weeks now the same way, and that night was an off-thing. I have a machine with no monitors hooked up getting the same as the one with monitors hooked up. What mining pool were you using? I'm curious if it was just that...I was using www.wemineltc.com

Guess it was maybe 3 days ago (since it looks like I started it the afternoon before that following morning). I forgot that I had taken a screenshot of cgminer because it was so weird and I was even going to post on the forum and ask if anyone knew anything (like you had) about an occurrence such as this. I had seen the fluctuation in readings on the website, but the average had never been higher than what the card was actually running at (anywhere from 480-504kh/s on that card depending on how I was using the machine it was on). So I don't know how a card that produced 504kh/s somehow ran long enough at a high enough speed to change the average to that high...Not sure.

Yep, that almost perfectly describes what had happened to me! Your average is much higher than your 5s average, and it was proabably slowly dropping back down to the 5s average, right? Your WU: is also higher than it should be, as was mine. This happened to me about 2-3 nights ago, I can't remember.

I was on lc.ozcoin.net, so it's not a pool issue.

I've been trying to replicate it, and it seems it's not an issue with the monitor like I originally thought. I've been testing it with HDMI, VGA, unplugged, plugged in, turned on, turned off, leaving it for hours (at work or sleeping), and I can't get it to recreate the higher hashrate. I'm at a loss for what caused it,but at least I'm not the only one!

[greenbtc]

Funny, this actually happened to me two days ago. I am currently using a couple 6970's to mine LTC and stock at intensity of 18-19 I was getting around 480kh/s. Overclocking the cards under the same gives about 500-515kh/s so yours definitely should be higher.

However, the other night, I went to bed, and set it up hashing away at it's normal speed (~500kh/s) and when I woke up the average had risen to 650kh/s, and everything else had increased like you said...but my 5s dropped and my average had started to drop as well.

Bizarre.

EDIT: I've been doing this for a few weeks now the same way, and that night was an off-thing. I have a machine with no monitors hooked up getting the same as the one with monitors hooked up. What mining pool were you using? I'm curious if it was just that...I was using www.wemineltc.com

Guess it was maybe 3 days ago (since it looks like I started it the afternoon before that following morning). I forgot that I had taken a screenshot of cgminer because it was so weird and I was even going to post on the forum and ask if anyone knew anything (like you had) about an occurrence such as this. I had seen the fluctuation in readings on the website, but the average had never been higher than what the card was actually running at (anywhere from 480-504kh/s on that card depending on how I was using the machine it was on). So I don't know how a card that produced 504kh/s somehow ran long enough at a high enough speed to change the average to that high...Not sure.

Yep, that almost perfectly describes what had happened to me! Your average is much higher than your 5s average, and it was proabably slowly dropping back down to the 5s average, right? Your WU: is also higher than it should be, as was mine. This happened to me about 2-3 nights ago, I can't remember.

I was on lc.ozcoin.net, so it's not a pool issue.

I've been trying to replicate it, and it seems it's not an issue with the monitor like I originally thought. I've been testing it with HDMI, VGA, unplugged, plugged in, turned on, turned off, leaving it for hours (at work or sleeping), and I can't get it to recreate the higher hashrate. I'm at a loss for what caused it,but at least I'm not the only one!

Yeah, I would love if my card ran at 600+kh/s all the time--so if you figure it out, let me know!

I haven't been able to reproduce it and from what I can tell, turning off a monitor or leaving the computer solely to mining only increases the hash rate minutely (I go up from around 500Kh/s to around 510-515kh/s when completely idle)

What did that 7970 GHz edition get mining bitcoins? I feel like you still should be getting a much higher hash rate on scrypt over a 6970.

[Fallout]

Did you do the : setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 in a console?

If not, I could imagine, that some of the GPU RAM is reserved for the monitor output ... That's the only thing I came up with as a possible explanation

[crazyates]

Yeah, I would love if my card ran at 600+kh/s all the time--so if you figure it out, let me know!

I haven't been able to reproduce it and from what I can tell, turning off a monitor or leaving the computer solely to mining only increases the hash rate minutely (I go up from around 500Kh/s to around 510-515kh/s when completely idle)

What did that 7970 GHz edition get mining bitcoins? I feel like you still should be getting a much higher hash rate on scrypt over a 6970.

I posted in the CGMiner thread, but no one there has any answer. I also haven't been able to reproduce it, which is kind of annoying. My 7970 should be getting more than the ~525KH/s it is getting. When it went to >700, I knew it wasn't a false report cuz I know these cards are capable of doing it.

Did you do the : setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 in a console?

Yep I have a batch file that runs that command at startup. I don't need to run it in the same batch as the miner, do I?

I've also tried it with and without GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1, but that doesn't seem to do anything.

[greenbtc]

Yeah, I would love if my card ran at 600+kh/s all the time--so if you figure it out, let me know!

I haven't been able to reproduce it and from what I can tell, turning off a monitor or leaving the computer solely to mining only increases the hash rate minutely (I go up from around 500Kh/s to around 510-515kh/s when completely idle)

What did that 7970 GHz edition get mining bitcoins? I feel like you still should be getting a much higher hash rate on scrypt over a 6970.

I posted in the CGMiner thread, but no one there has any answer. I also haven't been able to reproduce it, which is kind of annoying. My 7970 should be getting more than the ~525KH/s it is getting. When it went to >700, I knew it wasn't a false report cuz I know these cards are capable of doing it.

Did you do the : setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100 in a console?

Yep I have a batch file that runs that command at startup. I don't need to run it in the same batch as the miner, do I?

I've also tried it with and without GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1, but that doesn't seem to do anything.

Yeah, I use that setting as well.

Have you tried mining anything other than LTC on that card?

[crazyates]

Have you tried mining anything other than LTC on that card?

Oh it mines BTC beautifully. OCs to 1200MHz, for ~722MH/s. Temps in the low 70s and VRM temps in the 80-90s.

[crazyates]

So I tried flashing the GPU to the newest BIOS (direct download from Gigabyte's website, F62), and it bricked the GPU. I flipped the switch, and tried again, and same results. I'm gonna RMA it. Mine was a Rev 1.0, maybe the BIOS on the website was for Rev 2.1 and they didn't tell anyone?? Idk. Either way, hopefully they send me A) the same GPU with the newest BIOS or B) a newer revision that can LTC mine better.