[ANN] sph-sgminer: multi-coin multi-algorithm GPU miner

For people having 290(X) troubles - there is a new/updated 6-meg "amdcleanuputility" on the AMD site that seems to have worked wonders for me (for one day only). <-- Edit, sigh.

I have a Gigabyte Windforce 290X that had become unusable except as a basic featureless VGA card. I couldn't mine or game or watch YT or - anything much - without getting BSODs (black or blue), random crashes, artifacts, throttling, lines on startup screens - you name it - for the last couple of weeks. There are posts all over the Net from people having these kinds of issues, and all sorts of opinions about causes. Elpida memory is often cited, but not everyone agrees. I tried many suggestions, some seemed to work for a while, but not convincingly. It felt like drivers were getting corrupted, but it could have been so many things - power supply, badly seated card, defective card, overheating, bad memory - on and on.

Anyway - tada - I've been mining Dark for 23 hours while running all sorts of other stuff and so far everything runs perfectly since I used the AMD cleanup utility.

My batch file (not optimized yet) is very sparse:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx DISPLAY 0
cd C:/sgminer_Mar_22_2014/sgminer/
sgminer.exe --kernel darkcoin -o poolstuff1 -u userstuff1 -p pw1 -o poolstuff2 -u userstuff2 -p pw2 -I 16 --no-submit-stale

Note the low intensity. The card is running relatively cool at 82C, with the fan only turning 1525 RPM and hashing reported at a steady 2.5+ Mh/s all day long. GPU-Z reports VRM temperature 1 at 84C, but apparently that is normal for these cards. This is on a Win7 64 machine with the card's BIOS switch set to uber.

I just went back to the AMD site to get a link for you and I couldn't find it easily! It isn't mentioned in the main blurbs about removing Catalyst. I don't know why it's off in a relatively obscure corner of their site:

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Clean-Uninstall-Utility.aspx

Also, if you Google "amd cleanup utility" you'll see several (older) stories about people who claim the utility made their problems WORSE. As far as I can tell, none of these refers to the March 17 version that I used, but BE CAREFUL and back up what you can before you start mucking with it. I was desperate when I tried it, as everything else had failed and I didn't have much to lose.

I hope this helps someone, and good luck!

Edit: Update - about one hour after this post (24 hours of mining at 2.5Mh/s) the card suddenly throttled for no apparent reason when I entered a routine (non-graphic) link in a Firefox tab. Things seemed fine again after a reboot, but my 290X saga obviously isn't over yet. The issues of prevention and recovery may or may not be separate - the cleanup utility may recover effectively but something else may reintroduce instability after some trigger event. If so, the trigger does not seem to be one of the things people usually talk about - temperature, memory, lack of power, and so forth - murky stuff still, but the cleanup utility is was still the best thing I've found so far. ymmv, of course.

Edit: Update - a day later. All the original problems are back. Card frequently throttles at startup. Wavy lines and artifacts. BSODs. The AMD clean install utility now does not resolve anything. Neither does the 12.6.2.0 DDU uninstaller. I can run the 290X perfectly as a VGA card with generic VGA drivers, but nothing beyond that is reliable. No mining or gaming. My big discovery has fizzled, although for reasons unknown it worked superbly for a day or so. Back to trial and error testing.

Edit: Update - another day later. All problems are gone now (he says, tempting fate again). This time the fix was just getting back to basics by removing the various utilities that had accumulated on the machine, utilities that had the potential to set graphics settings and/or interfere with each other. I removed or disabled CCC, Gigabyte OC Guru II, Asus AI Suite II, possibly more that I can't remember, and left only MSI Afterburner (v. 3.0.0.2354 beta). In it I disabled ULPS, which seems to have resolved all the wavy lines and artifacts. Sph-sgminer ran well again at 2.5+ Mh/s but shut down after a couple of hours so I set power limit to +50 in AB and everything has been stable ever since. If problems appear again I may tweak the core voltage setting in AB also.