new Mining rig; I have some questions

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Hello Guys;

In the process of building a mining rig. I currently have

• 1 1475Watt thermaltake gold 80 plus psu
• 1 Asrock H81 pro
• 1 Intel Pentium Processor G3220 3.0 GHz
• 1 120gb kingston ssd
• 2 4gb kingston hyper x 1333mhz ram
• 3 usb 3.0 power riser
• 1 sapphire reference hd 7950
• 1 Asus DCU2 280x
• 1 XFX 280x Black Edition

I have installed windows 8.1 pro 64 bit I have not plugged the molex into the motherboard
as when I installed when I had no card installed i believe they were the cause for the cpu fan
burning up, which i replaced with a spare cpu fan, also am using a power usb riser so i don't think I need them. I have the monitor connected to the vga on the motherboard.

I connected all my gpus to the motherboard via riser shown below.





I have connected the xfx in the  pciex1 next to the molex, asus on the pciex16 and the sapphire on the last pcie as am planning to add three more card hopefully, which will mean another 1475 watt psu.

Am currently mining litecoin via guiminer scrypt alpha. I have installed catalyst software suite 13.12 and AMD APP SDK 2.9. I have plug the gpus start out of the box and the highest am getting is:

• XFX 280x: 590Khash/sec
• Asus 280x: 600Khash/sec
• sapphire 7950: 434Khash/sec (Low usage so it doesn't overheat)

Ill keep it this way until I get the room well ventilated.
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the setting used were the default for their model from guiminer:
Thread Concurrency: 8192
Worksize: 256
Intensity: 13 (increasing it for the 280x barely showed any difference)
Vectors: 1
Gpu thread: 2
use stratum: yes

I tried using cgminer but it would close (crash) the moment I opened it. :/

I started mining but as a noob with amd and mining (I have used cudaminer a bit before) I have a few questions:

• Is there to get a visual the fan speed and the gpu temp? As gpu-z gives me zeros.
• Is there a way to overclock them via usb riser?

here is a pic of my current rig. I have yet to build a case for it.




Update1: This is what I get from cgminer:
            Start output
            

            Main display
            

Any insight?

Update1.5: Came from work to find the asus 280x and the sapphire 7950 have been knocked face down, probably from the adjacent from door being slamed. The card fans were scratching the rough table and the card were too hot to touch, but thank god they were fine. screwed the riser board to the plywood that I was setting them on.

Update2: solution to questions in update 1 was that I was trying to run the latest release of cgminer which according to people who have faced this problem their solution was get the scrypt code from the source and recompile it with the nedd release. I when back to cgminer 3.72.

I was able to get gpu temp and fan speed changing the vga primary to pcie instead of onboard, which mean connecting the monitor to the gpu card on the x16 slot connected via riser.

Next problem: Getting better hash rates  

Update2.5:[/u] Tried bluejays951 settings on all three cards on cgminer, diminished the hashrate of both asus 280x and the sapphire 7950, but gave 650 khash/sec on the xfx and raised the temp to high for my taste. I stopped cgminer when the temp reached 85c.

Update3: Asus down clocked to 1050 and mem to 1500 getting 69c and for the xfx upclocked to 1100 and mem to 1500 getting 72c both now are giving me +670 Khash/sec via guiminer with the following parameters:
Thread Concurrency: 11200
Worksize: 256
Intensity: 13 (increasing it for the 280x barely showed any difference)
Vectors: 1
Gpu thread: 2
use stratum: yes

planning to switch to sgminer.

Update4: Woke up to find the speeds went down to +630 and at night +650 for the 280x

Update5: Using sgminer 4.1 getting about 700khash/sec from asus and +750khash/sec from xfx. Difference from above setting (update 3) powertune 20. Saphhire 7950 getting 620khash/sec. But I think I should be getting alot high rating than 700khash. Not change in oc setting, an increase in core resulted in lower hash rate for the asus 280x.

There seems to be a mistake with sgminer mixed up temp values. showing xfx temp for asus and when changing setting i have to input device 1 when i want to change device 0, but hash rate are correct.

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anyone with advise please share. 

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Thanks for replying I have the 2.2 version.  
But I never heard of the ver 3.0 I only knew that xfx had to models for the 280x a black edition (model: TDBD, core: 1080mhz) and a Double edition (model: TDFD, core: 1000Mhz). I have the black edition but it says ver 2.2 and gpu-z says 1080mhz.

Will definitely try that but my current problem that I need to resolve is that am not getting any temp values from my gpus, so I don't know if they are overheating now or not. Am not sure if that is because of the usb riser or not?

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GPU-z does detect the cards gives me r9 200 series instead of r9 280x and hd 7900 series instead of hd 7950. I'll try removing the cards an d pluging one after another to see if it gives a exact name for the card and also I just remembered there is a driver installation with the asrock motherbnoard that tries to detect gpus but I ran the driver with no cards connected.

[Bionic345]

I have the exact same board (H81 pro btc), just ot let you know, I have 2 PSUs and one has a single cable connected with both Mainboard power ports and I also use powered risers for all cards. I have never seen such risers as yours,  do they come with a driver? Your problems might occur from a driver problem. I bet the problem either comes from the riser boards or simply your GPU drivers. I know AMD is a bitch, I had plenty of problems myself. Have you tried to connect each card to their own to that x16 slot? I would plug in each card alone and see what cards get detected under win8. I never connect my monitor to the mainboard btw, I alsoways choose the first GPU of the rig.

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I have the exact same board (H81 pro btc), just ot let you know, I have 2 PSUs and one has a single cable connected with both Mainboard power ports and I also use powered risers for all cards. I have never seen such risers as yours,  do they come with a driver? Your problems might occur from a driver problem. I bet the problem either comes from the riser boards or simply your GPU drivers. I know AMD is a bitch, I had plenty of problems myself. Have you tried to connect each card to their own to that x16 slot? I would plug in each card alone and see what cards get detected under win8. I never connect my monitor to the mainboard btw, I alsoways choose the first GPU of the rig.

The risers don't come with drivers, tried connecting one by one via riser but nothing changed. I'll try connecting the asus card directly to the x16 slot.

GPU-z does detect the cards gives me r9 200 series instead of r9 280x and hd 7900 series instead of hd 7950. I'll try removing the cards an d pluging one after another to see if it gives a exact name for the card and also I just remembered there is a driver installation with the asrock motherbnoard that tries to detect gpus but I ran the driver with no cards connected.

Try uninstalling Catalyst and reinstalling it with all your cards plugged in.

Tried that about 5 times.

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Got the gpu temp and fan speed to work yay

In bios changed the vga from onboard to pcie and enabled "igpu multi-monitoring". Changing it to the vga pcie allowed the gpu temp and fan speed to be displayed.

avoided the pcie before because the screen would twitch every few seconds lowering the resolution stopped it.

Next try to get better hashrates.  

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increase hashrate for two 280x cards (in update3) will try to increase 7950.