7950 only 290kh/s. What's wrong? (thread concurrency:8960 max)

[rojuwah]

cheers to all. Trying to set up mining configuration for my newly bought sapphire 7950. I installed latest AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta9.5 driver for my win7 along with app slk drivers. Well I read the scrypt readme of cgminer and I suppose I did everything correctly.

I allowed cgminer decide on the thread concurrency and I read the parameter from the .bin file created. It is 8960 (yes, this low).  Intensity above 13 results in hardware errors. -g 2 does not work either. The parameters that work for people for 7950 on mining hardware comparison do not work for me at all. The thread-concurrencies that are a multiple of my shaders does no help either. Highest tc I can get is 8960. I am driving mad. Running;

"cgminer --scrypt -o poolhttp:8888 -u user -p pass -I 13 -g 1  --thread-concurrency 8960" with a .bat file (no config file) and getting around 290kh/s and that's the best I can get  

The only possible reason I am left with is that my system ram is 2gb only and my mainboard is quite old (like 4 years or so) and it supports  PCI-E 1.1. Do you guys think that PCI-E version is capable of causing this kind of a problem? I read at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=273432.0 that it should not matter. So I am left out with no solutions.  

[SolidStateSurvivor]

First of all, I run 7970s and 7950s on computers with PCI-E 1.1 from 2006-2007, no problem getting them up to 620/740 KH/s.

For the 7950 -I 18-20 and -g 1, is the way to go, but I think you might be getting HW errors because on the 7950 you
need more TC than 8xxx or such. All the 7950 I know of runs a TC of 16384 - 24000, that is usually their best range. But for that higher TC you need 3-4 GB of RAM and Win 7 64 Bit.

[SardonicJester]

cgminer versions 2.11.3 and up can be used to mine with high thread concurrencies now.  Follow these instructions:
WINDOWS: Open console and type
Code:
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
Now, close the console (it will not work if you open cgminer in the same window).  Open cgminer using a .bat or a new console, high thread concurrencies will now work.

LINUX: Open terminal and type
Code:
export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
Now high thread concurrencies should work in cgminer.

From: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117221.msg1256502#msg1256502

cgminer --scrypt -w 256 -v 1 -I 20 -g 1 -l 1 -T  --thread-concurrency 21712

voltage - 1087
core - 1050
memory - 1500

I do not have Sapphire, but this gives me 630 kh/s on my 7950s. (MSI)

[rojuwah]

thx guys, I will upgrade to 4gb ram then. It will take a few days to do so and I will let you know if the issue is solved. Meanwhile, I will install and try on an ubuntu, as the ram requirement is said to be less.

[F9F0F]

Sounds like the classic problem where you have forgotten to add the following commands to the bat-file:
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECT 1

[rojuwah]

oh I forgat to mention I already did so. Hence those lines are not the issue, thx anyway, cheers.