HD7970 gets lowish (420-520) kh/s. Tried everything...suggestions?

[majic]

Hi all!

So. First card I have to give up upon. I usually manage to get decent values that are in the upper ranges of what can be achieved with my other cards (7790, 7770 and 7750) whilst mining scrypt.

So. This is a 100% fresh install Win7 on E5200 c2d, powersupply is a high quality 520w Corsair 80+.
I have tried two other cards in this system and they worked flawlessly and with high performance.

At first replacement with the Sapphire 7970 (SAPPHIRE HD 7970 3GB GDDR5 (21197-00)) I managed to get 560kh/sec with the standard, optimal settings:
-I 13 -g 2 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 8192 --gpu-powertune 19
Driver : ATI 13.9, stock bios.

I found this to be quite low, so I tried fiddling with settings. Nothing seemed to work, so I flashed improved/recommended 3072.1.20926 bios.
This made results worse - I was stuck at 420kh/sec now.

I flashed back to original bios. With identical settings as before I got 560kh/sec again. I flashed a different bios that was recommended. 420kh again...
Unfortunately after flashing back to stock bios, rates were stuck at 420kh/sec (99% gpu usage).

Tried every clock speed between stock and 1080/1550 (mild improvement in kh/sec but nothing major)
Tried 0-20 powertune.
Tried under/overvolting.
Tried fanspeed @ 100% and opening window (temps <65c)
Tried installing 13.9, 13.11, 13.10 drivers (with and without driver sweeper in between)

Finally I gave up. I tried some more settings and found out that setting gpu to 1 instead of 2 threads at least gave me 519kh/sec @ 94% gpu util.

I really don't know what to do. I even flashed MSI bios that gave no better performance. It's like this card is bewitched..

If anyone wants to help out - I'd be happy to accept. Teamviewer access is possible.

[atticamo]

Everything you have tried is at or beyond my skill level with scrypt gpu mining. What happens when you mine a SHA-256 coin?

[Mirsad]

Intensity 17-19 should work much better.

[BlueDragon747]

well if you were mining Blakecoin you would be getting ~2.2GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 7970  

I had an issue like this with one of my rigs and in the end it was the Ati drivers had to use Atiman uninstaller 7.0.2 (might be newer version out) to remove 13.1 fully and then re-installed with 11.11c and boom increase of an extra 100KH/s on scrypt based coins and 150MH/s on Blakecoin  

YRMV  

[Mortimer452]

This is a great site showing different video card hashrates, and what GPU/memory speeds and cgminer settings were used to achieve them:

https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison

[MisO69]

Copy/Paste this and see what happens.. 

--lookup-gap 2 --thread-concurrency 11200 -g 2 -I 13 -w 256 --auto-fan --gpu-fan 30-75 --temp-cutoff 90 --temp-overheat 85 --temp-target 72 --gpu-memclock 1500 --gpu-engine 1080 --gpu-powertune -20 --expiry 1 --scan-time 1 --queue 0 --no-submit-stale

[majic]

I sold the card, got myself a 7950 back that was way quieter (dual-cooling setup) and can church out 640kh without too much trouble

In the end I never quite figured it out, although I suspect it might have something to do with the 2gb ram of the system (people mentioned that sometimes getting 4gb fixes issues like mine).

Thank you all for the kind help!

[zvs]

This is a great site showing different video card hashrates, and what GPU/memory speeds and cgminer settings were used to achieve them:

https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison

i get 315khash on 5830  with 899 core 899 memory, no need for the crazy 950/1250 shit.  wouldnt be able to do that with my fanless cards for sure

[zvs]

I sold the card, got myself a 7950 back that was way quieter (dual-cooling setup) and can church out 640kh without too much trouble

In the end I never quite figured it out, although I suspect it might have something to do with the 2gb ram of the system (people mentioned that sometimes getting 4gb fixes issues like mine).

Thank you all for the kind help!

yeah, I have a 2GB 7850 that i can't get max speed on since the system itself needs more RAM (to raise the thread-concurrency value, i think?)

[cinnamon_carter]

fresh install of drivers should correct
suggest setting --gpu-engine 1085 --gpu-memclock 1500 --thread-concurrency 8192 -I 13 -g 2 -s 1 -E 1
if solomining
if swapping cards out did not maintain the problem i would have suggested stock cgminer settings except for -g 1 for 15 minutes then always remember to delete the tahiti.bin file each time you retry. Then after running 1 thread the g 1 setting for 15 minutes go back to running optimized settings. 

Before trying to correct the driver conflict a system check for bad/ corrupt memory sectors may not be a bad idea.

You are deleting the scrypt tahiti .bin file each time ? correct ?

[Sejnt]

yeah, I have a 2GB 7850 that i can't get max speed on since the system itself needs more RAM (to raise the thread-concurrency value, i think?)

Can someone explain why cgminer is taking around 40 MB of RAM but I can't run bigger thread-concurrency when I put 2 GB RAM instead of 4?

[cinnamon_carter]

Sorry for double post I just reread your post and see you tried the -g 1 trick allready.
Run the check for corrupteddisk but it is probably not the fix.
Your issue is a driver conflict most likely.
Manually removing them is a pain in the ass & I would have to look it up how to do correctly.

BlueDragon the developer of Blake Coin gave you the best answer.