I have a bunch of machines, a mixture of 5770s, 5830s, 5870s, 6870s and 6950s. Basically, I wanted to see first hand what these cards had to offer in terms of price, kw/h, and mh/s.
Two (out of five) of my 6870s lock up almost every day. I have scripts running that keep their temps set to 72C max. Similarly, they never run more than 97% of max core clock (970/1000) or mem cock (1212/1250).
They seem perfectly happy running like this for hours and hours. But for reasons I can't seem to pin down, they lock up. I've taken to setting them to even lower params at night (peak temp of 69C and max clock of 90%. That seems to work. But I don't like leaving them set that low all day long. They're not working to their fullest potential then.
Is there something up with the 6870s? I'm not very happy with the cards to be honest. I hate it when they freeze up and I can't get home to restart them. The lockup is of such a nature that the entire machine locks up. Can't ssh. Cron doesn't reboot the machine either.
Upon manual restart, however, the cards are fine once again for hours and hours.
I guess I need to start dialing back to 96% down through to 90% and see where the happy "high" medium is. But the odd things is, it's only two of my cards out of five. The other three sit in adjacent locations on my server shelf. So why do these two lock up so much and not the others. The machines are also identical in every other way.
Either way, a big -1 for the 6870s here.
Run them at 950/330. You should have no problems now.