A 5970 makes a continuous beep whenever I mine using two GPUs

[Mahkul]

I am on Ubuntu 10.10, just installed my new Sapphire 5970 and started to mine. Every time I start mining on two GPUs, after a few seconds, a continues beep appears. As soon as I stop one miner (doesn't matter which one, so this doesn't seem to depend on one, particular GPU) the noise goes off. Any thoughts?

The temperature on the GPUs is ~55 degrees so the card is not overheating for sure.

[gusti]

seem that PSU cannot stand for both cards working at the same time

[urizane]

I wasn't aware that the 5970 had a piezo speaker.  I could be mistaken, but it could instead be chokes near the VRMs on your board that are causing the noise.  One of two things could be wrong here.  Either you've got a faulty choke on your 5970 which could fail at any moment or your power supply can't supply ripple free power on the PCI express power connectors.  If you've got less than a 650W power supply, I would suggest finding a better one to test with (and probably not a $60 unit, either.  Try somewhere in the $110-$140 range, or more if you want a high efficiency PSU).  If that fixes your issue, great.  If not, RMA that piece.  I'll assume that you hear the same noise when running Furmark (well, that is if you have Windows) on both GPUs as well.

Just for giggles, if you're not getting roughly 275 Mhash/sec on each GPU, that'll be another indicator that something is wrong.

[Beremat]

It could be coil noise, but I haven't heard of anyone getting coil noise from their 5970s before. Maybe it's coming from your PSU or motherboard?

[[Tycho]]

Do you see any red LEDs flashing or glowing on your 5970 ?
May be near 12v power connectors or somewhere else.

[Garrett Burgwardt]

I wasn't aware that the 5970 had a piezo speaker.  I could be mistaken, but it could instead be chokes near the VRMs on your board that are causing the noise.  One of two things could be wrong here.  Either you've got a faulty choke on your 5970 which could fail at any moment or your power supply can't supply ripple free power on the PCI express power connectors.  If you've got less than a 650W power supply, I would suggest finding a better one to test with (and probably not a $60 unit, either.  Try somewhere in the $110-$140 range, or more if you want a high efficiency PSU).  If that fixes your issue, great.  If not, RMA that piece.  I'll assume that you hear the same noise when running Furmark (well, that is if you have Windows) on both GPUs as well.

Just for giggles, if you're not getting roughly 275 Mhash/sec on each GPU, that'll be another indicator that something is wrong.

Nope, beeping from a 5970 means that the PSU isn't supplying enough current and/or voltage.

[snedie]

As TheKid says, it's when the card isn't getthing enough juice. They make the same noise if you forget to plug the power cables in too: I did this when I first got them, in my excitment to get rolling I forgot. Well lets just say it felt like someone just stabbed me, and then kicked me in the nuts, and then put the video on youtube.

[Mahkul]

Thanks for all the responses guys. Yes, it turned out that the PSU was faulty (750W, was giving much less than that) - I replaced it and everything works perfectly. Thanks again.

[snedie]

Thanks for all the responses guys. Yes, it turned out that the PSU was faulty (750W, was giving much less than that) - I replaced it and everything works perfectly. Thanks again.

What did you replace it with? It's not so much the Watts the PSU can provide but the Amps available on the 12v rail. You shouldn't use a PSU with multiple 12v rails, which is a sign of cheap production, because the Amps available on each is very small and cannot be shared. With a single rail the entire capacity of the PSU is available to all devices connected (There are exceptions to this, with some using multiple rails that can provide over 70amps on each). My system is running the Corsair 950Watt-TX which is giving me 75Amps on the 12v rail, of which both 5970's draw a total of 69Amps.

There are cheap 1000 and even 1200&1500 Watt PSU's out there that have silly amp ratings of around 25 on each rail, with 2-4 rails per PSU. It's these devices that trap first time builders of large systems and usually give the symptoms you had.

[urizane]

Thanks for all the responses guys. Yes, it turned out that the PSU was faulty (750W, was giving much less than that) - I replaced it and everything works perfectly. Thanks again.

What did you replace it with? It's not so much the Watts the PSU can provide but the Amps available on the 12v rail. You shouldn't use a PSU with multiple 12v rails, which is a sign of cheap production, because the Amps available on each is very small and cannot be shared. With a single rail the entire capacity of the PSU is available to all devices connected (There are exceptions to this, with some using multiple rails that can provide over 70amps on each). My system is running the Corsair 950Watt-TX which is giving me 75Amps on the 12v rail, of which both 5970's draw a total of 69Amps.

There are cheap 1000 and even 1200&1500 Watt PSU's out there that have silly amp ratings of around 25 on each rail, with 2-4 rails per PSU. It's these devices that trap first time builders of large systems and usually give the symptoms you had.

Well, I guess I'll agree that a dual 5970 owner would probably benefit from a single +12V rail style PSU to simplify selecting a PSU that will work, but multiple +12V rails doesn't necessarily mean that the power supply is produced cheaply.  25A at 12V is 300W, by the way.  PCI express standards published by PCI-SIG specify that a single PCI express device should not exceed 225W external power plus 75W bus power (300W total).  The 5970 at stock clocks falls within this standard, so even a 25A rail by itself could feed this card just fine, typically only needing to feed it 19A anyway.  I underline should not because as the 6990 (and almost definately the upcoming GTX 590) shows that AMD and nVidia don't really care about an established standard.  Even at 375W, a PCI express rail going into one of these cards need only provide 25A (but should probably be rated 30A).

Your 5970's draw (roughly) 828W of power?  Does that mean you're running something like 950 MHz on all 4 cores?  If they are drawing that much power and the card is connected by the default 8-pin + 6-pin power plugs, I'd worry more about your solder joints.

[snedie]

Typo, I meant to put 64Amps  (64.5Amps to be precise). I am running at 900Mhz though, but I have my memory clocked at 500Mhz (Apparently the lowest official clock?)