Im convinced mining or some settings while mining destroys 5970's VRAM... =*(

[GenTarkin]

I have 3 5970's now and been through another one previously that I RMA'd because of corrupted RAM.
I received a rather new 5970 recently from a fellow trusted miner and it also has bad RAM. I suspect another one of my 5970's has it now as well.
But, something we doing or either the way mining has effects on RAM ultimately causes it to go bad.
These affected cards will mine perfectly fine, but playing games...forget it. The display corruption is horrible.
If its not the RAM getting destroyed then its the ROP's .. which AFAIK we dont use while mining but those are primary components of gaming.

Either way, it really sucks, the cards will resell next to nothing in this condition.
If anyone else is running 5970's I recommend before selling them put them through a 3dmark11 run or something to make sure they are ok.

Anyone else willing to test theirs out and post results in this thread, that would be awesome to see how many are possibly affected. Because I heard others mention this before as well.

[drakahn]

i need to reset clocks and restart in order to play games on my 5970's, my 5850/70's don't need the restart, but i game fine on my 5970's (at least the two i have plugged in as the first card)

[GenTarkin]

what clocks / voltages you run urs at? Also, I did restart PC and ensure clocks were default.

[GenTarkin]

OOPS, I just realized I put this in wrong section, meant to put in mining hardware section...can someone move it for me?

[drakahn]

i run at between 800 and 900 core, 300 mem, 1.05-1.1v - had to replace a few fans, but no other issue, one of them has been going since last november (one of the ones i use as first card, so its used for games) - it was second hand from ebay as well

core temps never go above 80*C, vrm temps have been as high as 120*C but i aim to keep them at 90*C or below

[GenTarkin]

thats odd, I wonder whats going on w/ some of these 5970's then =(

[420]

im running 850 core 284 ram 1.1v, CGMINER running just a few days on refurbished cards

hope OP belief is untrue

[GenTarkin]

Like I said, the damage is not seen in mining btc. It shows up when trying to do gaming =/

[420]

Like I said, the damage is not seen in mining btc. It shows up when trying to do gaming =/

note to self: may be limited to bitcointalk.org marketplace when re-selling 5970's when mining with them becomes unprofitable

[Littleshop]

Like I said, the damage is not seen in mining btc. It shows up when trying to do gaming =/

note to self: may be limited to bitcointalk.org marketplace when re-selling 5970's when mining with them becomes unprofitable

Run them at lower speeds and voltages and they will be fine even for gaming so long as they run in a hot environment and you keep the fans working.

[GenTarkin]

Like I said, the damage is not seen in mining btc. It shows up when trying to do gaming =/

note to self: may be limited to bitcointalk.org marketplace when re-selling 5970's when mining with them becomes unprofitable

Run them at lower speeds and voltages and they will be fine even for gaming so long as they run in a hot environment and you keep the fans working.

Im thinking the lower speeds + the constant heat may be whats killing the RAM... I dont know, its just weird and really sucks.
Ive tested my other 2 5970's and their RAM is still good. So, thats 2 thats been bad and 2 thats been good - for me.

Ive never, NEVER, overvolted them either. Ran them stock or lower voltage.

[crazyates]

Like I said, the damage is not seen in mining btc. It shows up when trying to do gaming =/

note to self: may be limited to bitcointalk.org marketplace when re-selling 5970's when mining with them becomes unprofitable

Run them at lower speeds and voltages and they will be fine even for gaming so long as they run in a hot environment and you keep the fans working.

Im thinking the lower speeds + the constant heat may be whats killing the RAM... I dont know, its just weird and really sucks.
Ive tested my other 2 5970's and their RAM is still good. So, thats 2 thats been bad and 2 thats been good - for me.

Ive never, NEVER, overvolted them either. Ran them stock or lower voltage.

Most coolers have the core and memory on the same heatsink, right? I wouldn't be surprised if extended heat exposure (heat moving from the GPU -> memory chips) shortened the life of the memory. However, I don't see how lowering the memory speeds would damage the RAM. If anything, the lower heat might actually prolong the cards useful life.

[420]

I'm running 1.1v up to 92C a core and maybe 115VRAm i guess i should be worried. seen them throttling this morning before i turned A/C on

[GenTarkin]

I'm running 1.1v up to 92C a core and maybe 115VRAm i guess i should be worried. seen them throttling this morning before i turned A/C on

Yeah thats kind dangerous, imo abusive.

[GenTarkin]

Like I said, the damage is not seen in mining btc. It shows up when trying to do gaming =/

note to self: may be limited to bitcointalk.org marketplace when re-selling 5970's when mining with them becomes unprofitable

Run them at lower speeds and voltages and they will be fine even for gaming so long as they run in a hot environment and you keep the fans working.

Im thinking the lower speeds + the constant heat may be whats killing the RAM... I dont know, its just weird and really sucks.
Ive tested my other 2 5970's and their RAM is still good. So, thats 2 thats been bad and 2 thats been good - for me.

Ive never, NEVER, overvolted them either. Ran them stock or lower voltage.

Most coolers have the core and memory on the same heatsink, right? I wouldn't be surprised if extended heat exposure (heat moving from the GPU -> memory chips) shortened the life of the memory. However, I don't see how lowering the memory speeds would damage the RAM. If anything, the lower heat might actually prolong the cards useful life.

Yes, you would think keeping the RAM lower would help prolong it. But what if its something strange like the anomaly found in i7(bloomfield) cpu's where if the RAM voltage is .5 volts different from the Uncore voltage, u risk destroying ur cpu....

Just something like that, where too much difference could be damaging...in some explainable way that we know of..lol

[420]

I'm running 1.1v up to 92C a core and maybe 115VRAm i guess i should be worried. seen them throttling this morning before i turned A/C on

Yeah thats kind dangerous, imo abusive.

tried to keep all my cores at 85-90 but woudln't let me overclock over 1.05v with CGMiner as you saw from my other thread

[GenTarkin]

Hey guys, I just wanted to update this thread w/ more findings and Im pretty sure at this point BTC mining does indeed destroy 5970RAM.
Another card I received in working condition from RMA bout 8 months back(tested 3d perfectly)..
Has been mining fine w/ no issues , no errors.
I recently took it into my shop to clean it out, and change its fan(making slight noise but spinning fine). Before taking her all apart, I put together a machine to 3d check it again and make sure the RAM is still fine.
Funny thing is, RAM was very very bad. Horrible display issues in 3d, texture corruption everywhere, and eventually caused freezing / BSOD w/ ati driver freaking out. Yet, BTC mining went fine =)
The RAM is not to the point of causing an issue while mining, but it must be getting close.

My other 5970 which has really really really bad RAM on one GPU..does have issues mining it throws HW errors every once in a while. A few months back I set the RAM to bout 200mhz from 300mhz and HW errors went away, well recently @ 200mhz they started coming back. I lowered to 175mhz and the HW errors happen less often. That GPU is royally fucked, virtually no good RAM left in it. So, it happens slowly overtime it degrades.

So far this is 3/5 5970's that have bad RAM. They all started out fine...

In short, before you guys sell your 5970's to gamers or LTC miners .. please PLEASE test them in 3d that uses a decent amount of RAM. (heaven benchmark or 3dmark 11)
If, at default clocks you experience any anomalies dont rip the other person off =/

[420]

do we have to worry about nvidia cards too :O 

[GenTarkin]

do we have to worry about nvidia cards too :O 

Well so far Ive only seen this behaviour in 5970's .. my 5850's & 5830 seem to be fine still, as well as my 6950.
Who knows bout nv cards =P

[monstrs]

My 5870 SOC edition from gigabyte went dead few days ago. Had one fan not spinning on it, so i tryed to rplaci it, bad results, now the temps ar kind of good, but after a while it just drops dead again, it makes every PC unstable