Powercolor HD 7970 Guiminer-scrypt Driver Crash

[dan7733]

Hi!

There seems to be a problem with this card and/or the guiminer-scrypt config.
It's a Powercolor HD 7970 (non-ghz, non-ref), and after a restart of the system, on the first try, will mine in guiminer-scrypt at around 630 kh/sec consistently for about 2 minutes. After this period of time, the AMD display driver will crash, and then recover. Stopping and starting the mining in guiminer-scrypt will only result in a top speed of anywhere between 30 and 200 kh/sec, with the only way to recover the 630 speed being to restart the computer again.

Any ideas for this odd behavior?

Thanks!

[tacotime]

Not enough voltage, too much heat, or the card is borked

[bitwarrior]

Hi!

There seems to be a problem with this card and/or the guiminer-scrypt config.
It's a Powercolor HD 7970 (non-ghz, non-ref), and after a restart of the system, on the first try, will mine in guiminer-scrypt at around 630 kh/sec consistently for about 2 minutes. After this period of time, the AMD display driver will crash, and then recover. Stopping and starting the mining in guiminer-scrypt will only result in a top speed of anywhere between 30 and 200 kh/sec, with the only way to recover the 630 speed being to restart the computer again.

Any ideas for this odd behavior?

Thanks!

why dont you use the cgminer instead.

[FiiNALiZE]

Hi!

There seems to be a problem with this card and/or the guiminer-scrypt config.
It's a Powercolor HD 7970 (non-ghz, non-ref), and after a restart of the system, on the first try, will mine in guiminer-scrypt at around 630 kh/sec consistently for about 2 minutes. After this period of time, the AMD display driver will crash, and then recover. Stopping and starting the mining in guiminer-scrypt will only result in a top speed of anywhere between 30 and 200 kh/sec, with the only way to recover the 630 speed being to restart the computer again.

Any ideas for this odd behavior?

Thanks!

why dont you use the cgminer instead.

^

Try cgminer and see if it still crashes.

[hendo420]

Not enough voltage, too much heat, or the card is borked

I have a borked sapphire, thank god its under warranty, that bsod on 3 dif rigs. One it bsod at start up, the 2nd one as soon as it starts mining, and all of them bsod when reinstalling drivers. These are the symptoms of a borked card. test in multiple systems and you can be sure.

[dan7733]

Thanks for the suggestions!
I'm now in the process of trying cgminer on some other cards... some MSI Twin Frozr 7950's

My cgminer settings are as follows:
(first setx GPU_MAX.....)
cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://poolurl -u username -p password -I 13 --shaders 1792 -g 2 -w 256 -s 1

And with my 2 7950s I'm getting 520 kh/sec and 484 kh/s

Anyone getting better speeds with these cards? Or, any suggestions for the settings?

Thanks!

[dan7733]

So it turns out that the Powercolor 7970 crashes in cgminer too, and is most certainly faulty.
My question now is what should I tell powercolor in the RMA, how can I prove that the card is broken?
I doubt that I can just say that it doesn't mine correctly, and it does work fine most of the time when gaming...

Thanks a lot!

[elmismo]

Hi there I got 2 powercolor 7970 HD and one of them is mining quite good. I'm waiting for the raiser so i can conect just one at a time. I got 715 khs normal temperatures with one gpu but the other gpu crashes after 1 minute mining.
Cgminer starts and start mining, with the same setup that I get 715khs and crashes the screen gets black, but fans keep working.
It doesn´t matter if I lower the setup or leave the cgminer to try to get the better setup it will crash after a minute or so.
As both are second hand I've made stress test and benchmark to both in the same PC and the results are same. Actually the one that crashes has a lil bit better results. So I guess there is no hardware problems and I checked the bios in both is the same.

is it posible that same model of cards has problems with same drivers a minersofts?

my setup is:

on the side i use msi afterburner 2.2.2. to undervoltage so temperature is reduced. But If i leave stock voltage the gpu crashes same way.

cgminer 3.6.1
catalyst 13.4

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
cgminer --scrypt --quota "50;stratum+tcp://stratum01.hashco.ws:8888" -u XXXX -p XX --quota "50;stratum+tcp://stratum2.wemineltc.com:3334" -u XXXX -p XX
--intensity 13
--shaders 2048
--thread-concurrency 8192
--gpu-engine 1040
--gpu-memclock 1500
--lookup-gap 2
-g 2
-w 256  
--auto-fan --temp-target 75 --temp-overheat 80 --temp-cutoff 88
--load-balance

thank you for any help!!!

EDIT: while I was writing I had a crash but It was the driver and could recover. so definitely is the driver. Can I trust the tessmark test and the shadertoy test to discard any hardware problem??