AMD Tahiti GPUs (Radeon 7950 / 7970 / 280X / 7990 ) Owners Appreciation Thread

[adaseb]

So the Tahiti based GPUs of AMD were first introduced in January 2012 and they are actually the "Best mining GPU of all time".

They were introduced at a time when you could actually mine BTC with them back in 2012.

They were the most effective at mining Scrypt back in 2013. People were pulling in $10/day mining Litecoin and Dogecoin in late 2013 and early 2014.

They were the most effective at mining ETH back in 2016. Since the DAG was low and didn't require as much memory, you could mine ETH at 27MH/s back in Nov of 2015. And it hashed at 21-22 MH/s throughout most of 2016 before the RX series came out.

They were KILLERS at mining ZCASH when it was introduced back in late 2016 due to its huge memory bandwidth. The newer RX and Nvidia GPUs couldn't keep up.

Now as always thanks to ASICs they are no longer effective at mining ZCASH. Since they consume around 200 Watts while hashing at 300H/s.

However you can actually mine Cryptonight V7 (XMR) with them quite effectively with an bios undervolt.

Depending on your ASIC Quality (listed in GPU-z) you should be able to run these at the lowest voltage acceptable which is 0.950V and should run your Engine clock at 1000 Mhz and Memory between 1500-1600Mhz.

Make a copy of bios with Atiwinflash and Go into VBE7 and

Change #0 Core Clock to 950 Mhz and Memory Clock to 1500 Mhz, set VDDC to 956 mV.

Now restart the rig and let it run for a few minutes. If its stable then slowly increase your Core clock all the way up to 1100Mhz until its no longer stable. After a few hours, try and increase your Memory clock past 1500Mhz all the way up to 1700Mhz. Depending on memory type and straps, it might or might not cause a speed boost.

Measured from the wall at 1050Mhz/1650Mhz at 0.956V, one of my R9 280X only consumes 120 Watts from the wall. Basically same power usage as an RX Series GPU which mines ETH.

The speed in Claymore XMR miner registered is 595H/S which at the moment generates about $0.52 USD per day. If your power costs are $0.10 per KWH, then you should make a net profit of $0.250 USD per day.

Post your results and lets give these amazing AMD GPUs one last hash before they are finally packaged away and forgotten...

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[smaxz]

great idea for a thread.

7950's were to mining what satoshi was to crypto.

legends in their own accord.

i had a platoon of sapphire dual-x i picked up new and used back in the day that i since resold but kept one of my gigabyte models that i customized with some extra heatsinks.

if there is ever a grass roots mining convention it certainly should hold its inauguration in Tahiti.

[Lafu]

Post your results and lets give these amazing AMD GPUs one last hash before they are finally packaged away and forgotten...

You forgot the good old Lady R9 270 X VaporX serie Cards ,



they also was good and are good i used them a few years !  

[leowonderful]

The best part of the story is that these cards will likely still have a use, most likely in budget gaming builds if the price for these cards is right, so hopefully these cards won't be packaged and stored in a dusty basement never to be seen again. It's still incredible to me how powerful the Tahiti cards really were and still are today, even with their stock wattage being somewhat high, and Tahiti was also the generation that forced Nvidia to up their game in the mid-range and drop prices a bit for cards like the 770. Truly a great generation!

[badbart]

So the Tahiti based GPUs of AMD were first introduced in January 2012 and they are actually the "Best mining GPU of all time".

They were introduced at a time when you could actually mine BTC with them back in 2012.

They were the most effective at mining Scrypt back in 2013. People were pulling in $10/day mining Litecoin and Dogecoin in late 2013 and early 2014.

They were the most effective at mining ETH back in 2016. Since the DAG was low and didn't require as much memory, you could mine ETH at 27MH/s back in Nov of 2015. And it hashed at 21-22 MH/s throughout most of 2016 before the RX series came out.

They were KILLERS at mining ZCASH when it was introduced back in late 2016 due to its huge memory bandwidth. The newer RX and Nvidia GPUs couldn't keep up.

Now as always thanks to ASICs they are no longer effective at mining ZCASH. Since they consume around 200 Watts while hashing at 300H/s.

However you can actually mine Cryptonight V7 (XMR) with them quite effectively with an bios undervolt.

Depending on your ASIC Quality (listed in GPU-z) you should be able to run these at the lowest voltage acceptable which is 0.950V and should run your Engine clock at 1000 Mhz and Memory between 1500-1600Mhz.

Make a copy of bios with Atiwinflash and Go into VBE7 and

Change #0 Core Clock to 950 Mhz and Memory Clock to 1500 Mhz, set VDDC to 956 mV.

Now restart the rig and let it run for a few minutes. If its stable then slowly increase your Core clock all the way up to 1100Mhz until its no longer stable. After a few hours, try and increase your Memory clock past 1500Mhz all the way up to 1700Mhz. Depending on memory type and straps, it might or might not cause a speed boost.

Measured from the wall at 1050Mhz/1650Mhz at 0.956V, one of my R9 280X only consumes 120 Watts from the wall. Basically same power usage as an RX Series GPU which mines ETH.

The speed in Claymore XMR miner registered is 595H/S which at the moment generates about $0.52 USD per day. If your power costs are $0.10 per KWH, then you should make a net profit of $0.250 USD per day.

Post your results and lets give these amazing AMD GPUs one last hash before they are finally packaged away and forgotten...

Can you mod a bios on a 7990?  I have 4 I stopped using because of the power usage.

[Marvell2]

lol this is a timely post

i have two boxes of hd 7950s 3gb i bought used back in 2013

had a few spare rigs and decided to clean them and mine cn7 with em

440 mhs stock and 100 watts power.  I got like 20 more lol

[Bulitt]

Im looking at getting one of these (7850-R9 280x) for my "hobby" rig which has a R9 270X 2GB and a 1GB Sapphire HD 6950. The 6950 can still play games fine, and its just an old Pentium Dual Core E2160 running the 2 cards with 1 on a riser. Ideally I would get another 500W power supply and take a really old Athlon 64 LE 1640 and put the 6950 in that.

[adaseb]

So the Tahiti based GPUs of AMD were first introduced in January 2012 and they are actually the "Best mining GPU of all time".

They were introduced at a time when you could actually mine BTC with them back in 2012.

They were the most effective at mining Scrypt back in 2013. People were pulling in $10/day mining Litecoin and Dogecoin in late 2013 and early 2014.

They were the most effective at mining ETH back in 2016. Since the DAG was low and didn't require as much memory, you could mine ETH at 27MH/s back in Nov of 2015. And it hashed at 21-22 MH/s throughout most of 2016 before the RX series came out.

They were KILLERS at mining ZCASH when it was introduced back in late 2016 due to its huge memory bandwidth. The newer RX and Nvidia GPUs couldn't keep up.

Now as always thanks to ASICs they are no longer effective at mining ZCASH. Since they consume around 200 Watts while hashing at 300H/s.

However you can actually mine Cryptonight V7 (XMR) with them quite effectively with an bios undervolt.

Depending on your ASIC Quality (listed in GPU-z) you should be able to run these at the lowest voltage acceptable which is 0.950V and should run your Engine clock at 1000 Mhz and Memory between 1500-1600Mhz.

Make a copy of bios with Atiwinflash and Go into VBE7 and

Change #0 Core Clock to 950 Mhz and Memory Clock to 1500 Mhz, set VDDC to 956 mV.

Now restart the rig and let it run for a few minutes. If its stable then slowly increase your Core clock all the way up to 1100Mhz until its no longer stable. After a few hours, try and increase your Memory clock past 1500Mhz all the way up to 1700Mhz. Depending on memory type and straps, it might or might not cause a speed boost.

Measured from the wall at 1050Mhz/1650Mhz at 0.956V, one of my R9 280X only consumes 120 Watts from the wall. Basically same power usage as an RX Series GPU which mines ETH.

The speed in Claymore XMR miner registered is 595H/S which at the moment generates about $0.52 USD per day. If your power costs are $0.10 per KWH, then you should make a net profit of $0.250 USD per day.

Post your results and lets give these amazing AMD GPUs one last hash before they are finally packaged away and forgotten...

Can you mod a bios on a 7990?  I have 4 I stopped using because of the power usage.

I've never owned an 7990, however I've had a 6990 before and it basically has 4 bios's in total. Each BIOS switch has 2 bios for each GPU, so in total 4 bioses.

So you will need to backup each core with Atiwinflash and open up VBE to mode the voltages and clocks and what-not.

The 7990 are special however and they fetch a pretty penny on eBay because they are a collector GPU pretty much. So if you can't get decent efficiency mining with them you can always sell them to a hobbyist.

Here is a good video of the 7990 mining. The beast of a GPU was pulling 750 Watts from the wall mining Litecoin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBy_KtUr4Kg

[kryx]

I still use my R9 280x to mine crytonite in some "new" coins where difficulty still acceptable. Never did undervolting, not sure how to do it, which software to use, etc... If anyone wants to share their experience more detailed in how to, I'd appreciate

[adaseb]

I still use my R9 280x to mine crytonite in some "new" coins where difficulty still acceptable. Never did undervolting, not sure how to do it, which software to use, etc... If anyone wants to share their experience more detailed in how to, I'd appreciate

Download ATIWINFLASH to backup and flash your bios

Command is something like

atiwinflash -s 0 your_bios.rom

to backup

atiwinflash -f -p 0 your_bios.rom

to flash your GPU

And you use VBE7 to modify your bios.

You can probably even use MSI Afterburner but it works better just modding the bios. Its pretty safe since there are 2 bioses usually for the Tahitis.

[Grim]

7950 paired with an acorn fpga?!?!

 

[antantti]

I saw ROI in three weeks only three times (short periods) with Tahiti.

1) Buying new cards late in 2013 to mine LTC, sold them later and bought Nvidia.

2) Buying back second hand cards during ETH launch Aug 2015 to pool/ solomine ETH.

3) Selling Nvidia's and buying back even more Tahiti/ Hawaii early 2016 to solomine ETH.

Later they again did quite well mining XMR/ ZEC with modded straps.

I'm completely out of mining right now but i still like to lurk here, 7970 can STILL do quite well on some algos but you need to use right OS/ driver/ bios combo. If there was a contest for the fastest ROI Tahiti would still be on the podium although now it would take months to ROI.

Respect.  

[kryx]

I still use my R9 280x to mine crytonite in some "new" coins where difficulty still acceptable. Never did undervolting, not sure how to do it, which software to use, etc... If anyone wants to share their experience more detailed in how to, I'd appreciate

Download ATIWINFLASH to backup and flash your bios

Command is something like

atiwinflash -s 0 your_bios.rom

to backup

atiwinflash -f -p 0 your_bios.rom

to flash your GPU

And you use VBE7 to modify your bios.

You can probably even use MSI Afterburner but it works better just modding the bios. Its pretty safe since there are 2 bioses usually for the Tahitis.

Thanks for your answer, I'll try to make it.
If I had merit I would give you some

[Coindgr]

I still use my R9 280x to mine crytonite in some "new" coins where difficulty still acceptable. Never did undervolting, not sure how to do it, which software to use, etc... If anyone wants to share their experience more detailed in how to, I'd appreciate

Download ATIWINFLASH to backup and flash your bios

Command is something like

atiwinflash -s 0 your_bios.rom

to backup

atiwinflash -f -p 0 your_bios.rom

to flash your GPU

And you use VBE7 to modify your bios.

You can probably even use MSI Afterburner but it works better just modding the bios. Its pretty safe since there are 2 bioses usually for the Tahitis.

Thanks for your answer, I'll try to make it.
If I had merit I would give you some

                                   
I have some, and gave one to adaseb, nice topic, keep up

[hammuh]

I still use my tahitis . Try cryptonight haven/heavy/tube.

[Coindgr]

I still use my tahitis . Try cryptonight haven/heavy/tube.

I'm still using mines also, for cryptonight during night time (electricity costs half during night time)

[SBRSAB]

I have twelve of these cards, 7950/7970/280/280x. Fantastic workhorses.

They just became unprofitable for me though due to high electricity price right now. I have some tips and questions for you Tahiti owners. Perhaps we can make them profitable once again?

Tips

Monero mining

Mine algorithms that have low power usage, like Monero.

I get around 750-810 h/s on these cards on Monero v7 with good undervolt. A short test for highest speed hit above 850 h/s but efficiency was not as good. Here are the hard details for my rig.

Room temp: 36 C!
Core: 980-1060 MHz at 956-1020 mV.
Mem: 11 cards at 1500 MHz, one at 1575. All with mining timings. Two have a bit looser timings than the others.
Power usage: 1780 Watt for the whole rig, estimate 140 Watt per card. This is from the 240 Volt side. PSUs are roughly 93% efficient at this load.
OS: HiveOS with export of env vars to make miners start on 280x (and increase max utilization on Polaris).

Run two threads per GPU
I could not get Claymore Cryptonight to run on this rig. In SGminer all you need is to add "threads": "2" to the config. For XMR-stak, copy the config for each gpu (two entries on the same index) and halve the intensity per thread. This helps quite a bit, perhaps 10-15% or so.

Worksize of 6 is typically better for 7970/280x, and worksize of 8 is typically better for 7950/280. Perhaps just on my cards.

sgminer-gm, latest:

Code:

"rawintensity": "744"
"gpu-threads": "2"
"worksize": "6,6,8,6,6,6,6,8,8,6,8,6"
"autofan": false
"noadl": true
"monero": true

XMR-stak fire-ice, latest:

Code:

"gpu_threads_conf" : [
    { "index" : 0, "intensity" : 744, "worksize" : 6, "affine_to_cpu" : false, 
      "strided_index" : 2, "mem_chunk" : 2, "comp_mode" : false
    },
    { "index" : 0, "intensity" : 744, "worksize" : 6, "affine_to_cpu" : false, 
      "strided_index" : 2, "mem_chunk" : 2, "comp_mode" : false
    },
    { "index" : 1, "intensity" : 744, "worksize" : 6, "affine_to_cpu" : false, 
      "strided_index" : 2, "mem_chunk" : 2, "comp_mode" : false
    },
    { "index" : 1, "intensity" : 744, "worksize" : 6, "affine_to_cpu" : false, 
      "strided_index" : 2, "mem_chunk" : 2, "comp_mode" : false
    },
    ...

Optimize mining timings
This helps an additional 10-15% or so since mem latency is reduced. Helps more on Hynix MFR since those stock timings are quite bad. Stock Hynix AFR is good and Elpida is right in between AFR and MFR. With mining timings all cards perform slightly better than stock AFR timings do.

If you're lucky you can get a hold of a Stilt or an Anoraks mining bios for your card.  Those already have mining memory timings and likely also VRM switching frequency mod to reduce power usage a bit. Anorak has a guide on how to modify the memory timings using a hex editor:

https://anorak.tech/community/t/anoraks-amd-vbios-hex-modification-tutorial/126/7

The timings I use are listed here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1676474.0;all

Perhaps the timings could be improved further, the FAW and FAW32 values are not zero, but that might work. Ohgodadecodetool can be used to decode the strap into separate timings. Nerdralph's "strapmod.py" should apply 0 to those timings as well.

Use the heat
If you live in a cold climate like me - use a heat pump. Mine sucks hot air from the rig, heats water in a tank for hot water and house heating, then blow the colder air either outside or back into the room. Where the colder air goes depends on outdoor temp but I have to manually switch where the air goes so I only do it with the seasons.

Questions

Optimize VRM switching frequency?
No VRM is perfectly efficient. Lowering VRM switching frequency lowers heat loss and that in turn improves efficiency further. "Actually Hardcore Overclocking
" on Youtube has an excellent video on VRMs and equations to calculate max power, heatloss, as well as how mosfets ans VRM work.

Fewer phases usually means higher efficiency and lower power limit (a limit we don't care about really since we're undervolting).

I think Stilt's mining bioses include a reduced VRM switching frequency from the default of 500 KHz to 290 KHz but I'm not sure. I also think that only ASUS Matrix gpus  includes the data in the bios to set the frequency - all other cards use the default. It is probably possible to add the data needed in the bios for the registers that needs to be changed. I think it's register 22 or 23, as that is what I've seen for newer generations.

Lower switching frequency could result in lower stable clocks due to increased voltage ripple (the now bigger voltage dips could cause crashes). That might be something we could combat by adding capacitors to the filtering stage of the VRMs, but capacitors reduce efficiency. Don't know how to calculate what would happen here.

1. Does anyone know how to modify VRM switching frequency on non-matrix cards?

2. How much lower can power usage go thanks to that?

VRM Phase shedding
Newer gen cards (Polaris?) can turn off one or more VRM phases when load is low - this typically increases efficiency.

3. Could we shed VRM phases on the Tahitis too? In BIOS or by physically altering the VRM controller?

Load Line Calibration
I think it would be possible to undervolt a bit more if load line calibration was off, but I don't know how to turn it off in the BIOS. The rationale is that LLC sometimes is too slow to compensate vdroop causing a hang. LLC off would need a higher bios voltage, but it would droop down to the voltage we want instead of being dynamically compensated up to that voltage. There is plenty to read about LLC and vdroop on the net. Will dig out a link eventually.

4. Can LLC be disabled in BIOS?

Physically disabling unused chips
5. Can we disable chips we don't use? In BIOS or in hardware? The displayport and HDMI controller comes to mind. Would be hard to sell the card to gamers afterwards...

Future ideas

A) Frankenstein tech

Acorns
The memory bandwidth on the Tahitis is massive, higher than on Polaris really (Polaris is often memory bandwidth constrained). The Tahitis seem to be mostly core constrained. Acorns could perhaps let us improve hashrate by quite a bit without increasing power usage very much.

Combine with more efficient gpus
Perhaps we could offload calculations from the Tahitis onto other gpus that are not core constrained. That is - we offload one or more steps in the algorithm to other gpus that have more power efficient cores such as Vega/Polaris or even Pascal really. Requires a whole lot of mobos though to support the bndwidth requirments to move data around on the bus... Would require a new generation of miners similar to Squirrelminer.

External VRM
Design an exgernal VRM that can supply say 956 mV to 12 gpus with very high efficiency. Probably way way too expensive.

B) Design a new PoW algorithm tailored for Tahiti
The 384-bit wide bus could ve used to read/write data in 1 cycle where a 256-bit bus would require 2 cycles. This should make Tahitis more efficient than Polaris for example.

The Tahitis have strong double precision compute power? This could perhaps be used to compete more efficiently?

Getting a popular coin to use that algorithm would be hard. Building a "Tahiti Appreciation Coin" seems equally difficult.


Links
79xx & 280 VBIOS Optimization Index (Read the Comments sheet too)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1odJXgWbHUcIS9fAxaXB-nPD8WWH1sBdd_XBOe3F3jo0/edit#gid=0

Archive of Stilts bioses?
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B2XVfIhkHZlfMTM0c1k0VDRERmc

Info on VRM switching frequency mod on the R9 290 (can it be done to the Tahiti too?)
https://www.overclock.net/photopost/data/1381417/4/49/49a792ea_guide.jpeg
https://www.overclock.net/forum/70-ati-drivers-overclocking-software/1605757-vrmtool-simple-tool-read-write-i2c-vrm-controllers.html

VRM info by Actually Hardcore Overclocking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDRHV3qtSWc&list=LLIxXaFjGhxoPbyEhvUKcTNA&index=3&t=0s

Don't have more ideas right now. Would be fun to revive these beasts once more.

Let me know if the miner settings improved your hashrate.
If you can't find a bios by the Stilt or Anorak and don't feel comfortable applying the timings yourself I can do the mod for some hashrate donation to the pool+address I mine to.

[adaseb]

I have twelve of these cards, 7950/7970/280/280x. Fantastic workhorses.

They just became unprofitable for me though due to high electricity price right now. I have some tips and questions for you Tahiti owners. Perhaps we can make them profitable once again?

Thanks alot for providing this info.

I will try and see what speeds/power consumption I get with XMR-Stak and SGMiner. Which versions are you using exactly?

XMR-Stak I assume you are using the latest but there are tons of SGMiner forks out there.

I think the best way to optimize would be the memory straps. In the past I think I've took the lower memory straps and pasted them into the higher memory timings like we all do with the RX series. It worked however the issue was when a GPU crashed it froze the entire rig instead of just crashing the miner program or Windows and it needed a hard-reboot. So it was too time consuming so I just left them stock.

[swogerino]

The 7990 is an awesome card and can be used for mining even in nowadays taking into consideration that you have somewhat near free or free electricity. This is the powerhouse of all the Tahiti cards and if I had free electricity I would buy one today.

The price is very low for a card of this performance for gaming, it is about 230 dollars used and I think it is still a beast for gaming as it handles whatever you throw at it. Running Witcher 3 at maximum settings with 75-80 fps I think if I hadn't a gaming card I would buy this one.

[SBRSAB]

I will try and see what speeds/power consumption I get with XMR-Stak and SGMiner. Which versions are you using exactly?

Oh good point, I use sgminer-gm (has no devfee). I get the same speed with xmr-stak fire-ice, but that one has devfee.

In the past I think I've took the lower memory straps and pasted them into the higher memory timings like we all do with the RX series.

I use the one-click patch in polaris bios editor for the RX series, better performance than using lower straps? I too think the timings that I linked to can be improved further, tailor them to Monero v7 algorithm precisely?

The core is very power hungry though, don't think there is anything we can do there. Upping core speed definitely boosts cryptonight hashrate.