Mining new user and graphic card problem

Bernardo

Hello everyone. In the last days I got a bit into crypto currency and after some research I wanted to try mining some feathercoins.

I bought a gigabyte windforce hd7950, mounted it on my old p7h55 mobo with an i5-750,4gb ram and 700watt PSU. I am running win 7, and I have a fresh install (the disk is brand new).

I am using CGminer and the d2 pool. I already did some mining with my gtx570, and it was working fine. However now with ati I am having a lot of problems. When I first started the card was doing 15 kh/s, not exactly good I guess. I tried to change something in the bat file and now, what ever I try the computer will totally crash. Black screen and restart.

I am a total newbie both with mining and with ati cards. Could you please help me here? I am trying to understand if the problem occur only with mining or it is a problem of the card (I don’t think the rest of the hardware because I used it for a lot of time without problems).

I hope someone can help me!

Thanks a lot in advance!

Bernardo

A quick update.

I see that with the default bat (the one I got from d2 pool) cgminer starts and it runs at 15kh/s. The intensity is set to 8. I can go up to 12, obtaining about 140kh/s, but as soon as I set it to 13 or above the computer crashes. I see there are other settings but I do not know what to do with them, I just tried the automatic option.

What can I do? Does it look like a hardware problem (the card is brand new…) or is it about the settings?

Wellenreiter

My first Idea: What about your power supply?

The 7950 pulls a lot of current, and you need more than the standart power supply.

I’d say 400W supply is the minimum, if you don’t have a lot of other things in the machine

[edit]
forget it, I’ve just seen you have a 700W supply :-[

could you please post your detailed cgminer settings + clockspeeds?

Bernardo

thanks for the answer Wellenreiter, but as you said 700watt should me more than enough.

with the intensity to 12 the card is running at around 200 kh/s, a bit better, but still far from the 500-600 kh/s that I was expecting.

I tried to make a 3d mark benchmark and the computer crashed in the same way twice at the same exact point. It looks like the card cannot hit 100% load, or that however is missing something that prevent going beyond that limit, so it crashes. I did not touch anything with OC, the card is out of the box.

I also tried to run a render in lux render in openCL mode and everything went fine (the render lasted 10 minutes). The problem is that the gpu load never went over 94%, which is exactly the same load it has now in cgminer at 12 intensity.

I am starting to wonder if the card is failed… temps are really good, never seen it go over 60-62, even if for now I cannot load it at the maximum. Anyway I exclude that the crashes are from high temps.

What do you think?

PS: about cg miner settings you mean my bat file? Sorry, as I said I am a newbie.

Bernardo

here are a couple of screens from the cgminer [url=http://postimg.org/image/wtkqkw06b/][img]http://s21.postimg.org/wtkqkw06b/cgminer01.jpg[/img][/url][url=http://postimg.org/image/qvpir0v2l/][img]http://s30.postimg.org/qvpir0v2l/cgminer02.jpg[/img][/url]

a screen from gpuz
[IMG]http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/13/11/29/778.png[/img]

my bat file looks like this
cgminer.exe -o stratum+tcp://pool.d2.cc:3333 --scrypt -u Bernardo.hd7950 -p piramo --intensity 12

if you need some more info let me know!

Since I am here I have another question. I see that quite often my pool is not sending work to do, so in that moment I am not mining. I remember that I read somewhere that there is the possibility to set up some kind of backup pool for these situations… is it a good method? Could you eventually point me to some guideon how to do it?

Thanks a lot for your help! :)

3dm crashes? that’s no good. I had similar troubles when I replaced my gf560ti with ati cards. I even had a bluescreen during ATI driver installation. Installing the lasted ATI BETA drivers seemed to fix it for me.

In the end - for my dedicated mining rig I used a fresh install of windows + latest ATI BETA drivers -> all fine.

my FTC.bat looks like this:

[code]
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
cgminer --scrypt -o http://somepool:3336 -u username -p 1234 --temp-target 70 --auto-fan --gpu-engine 1000 --gpu-memclock 1350 -I 18 -w 256 --thread-concurrency 16384
[/code]

[b]edit:[/b] please try cgminer version 3.7.2 - seems to be most reliable. HW:8 that many errors is not good after such short time. ideally this should be HW:0

yeah, you should totally add a backup pool.
add it like this to the end of your cgminer line:
[code]
–failover-only -o http://backuppool:3333 -u username -p 12345
[/code]

Bernardo

thanks a lot for the help nimmneun!

The computer is after a super fresh install… I bought a new disk, so it could be fresher :D

I have catalyst 13.9 and cgminer 3.7.0. I will try to download the 3.7.2.

About the HW value, I did not even know what it was (I do not know about any of that). For what reason could it be I get so many errors? Could be a slightly failed card? I have my warranty, I can come back to the shop tomorrow. Anyway now is already at HW+13 :(

Thanks a lot for your bat file (do you have a 7950?). I am going to study it! :D

You’re welcome =)
Yes, I have 3x PowerColor 7950 PCS+ running stable for 20+ days with these settings. Especially --thread-concurrency can produce errors. 8192 or 16384 seem to be good settings for decent performance and 0 HW errors for 7950 cards.

btw I had a typo in my reply before the edit. 16384 is the proper setting I wrote 16834 or so at first. please double check you have the correct value of 16384 =)

I’m using this driver version [url=http://www2.ati.com/drivers/beta/amd_catalyst_13.11_betav9.4.exe]http://www2.ati.com/drivers/beta/amd_catalyst_13.11_betav9.4.exe[/url]

Bernardo

yeah the value is correct: 16384. Okay, with your bat and the 3.7.2 I gained a bit of speed, now I run at around 260hs/s, but if I had to set the Intensity at 12, beacuse if I go one click up I get a crash :(.

I dunno, even not being an expert miner, I smeel failed hardware. Last thing I have to try is to mount it on my other computer (i7 4770k, 16gb ram and asus z87 deluxe) and see what happens). If I get the same things, tomorrow morning I will go back to the shop.

What do you think?

Did you try the BETA driver? If the Beta driver does not fix it, it’s probably a faulty card :(
If even 3dm crashes the card, something’s fishy.

Bernardo

downloading them… should I unistall the previous drivers or I can install over them?

with ati I’ve read it’s better to uninstall old drivers first. worked for me.

Bernardo

still crashing… :( running out of options…

=( ok, i think the last option before returning card is testing it in the 4770k box.

Bernardo

looks like we were wrong. On the i7 4770k works fine. I can go all the way up to intensity 20 and I run at around 520kh/s. Do not know if it is still a bit low, but still, looks like now is working. I don’t know if to be happy or not, since I do not want to mine on this computer, as I use for work :D

I guess I will try to install linux on the i5… do you think this could help? Is it hard to set up cgminer on linux?

btw, thanks a lot for all the help so far, you have been really really kind! :)

Bernardo

also 3dmark did fine, with a score of 6376, which looks fine. I really cannot understand what could be the reason of such problems on the i5 machine. I was ready to say the graphic card was faulty… maybe the PSU is not so in shape anymore? Is 4 years old and is kraun, so not the best brand I guess. I am thinking that the psu could be one of the possible reason, the first that come to my mind for such a behaviour.

Do you have any ideas?

yeah, replacing the gfx card eventually would have been less of a hassle :p you could try switching the PSU, if you’re not too lazy =)

I also had my first 2 cards running with an i5-760 + asus p7p55d-e, but replaced it with an asrock am3+ mobo with athlon x2 cpu which I got off of ebay for like 60EUR b/c I wanted to add a 3rd card. The system is also using ~40watts less power now compared to the i5+asus. Could be an option for you, if the PSU is not the issue =)

Bernardo

I will try to switch the psu and see what happens… In the mean time the card worked at 620 kh/s at intensity 18, so I guess the speed is good. There was another problem though. I left the i74770k mining all the night to see what happens. temp and all was fine, but when I came back this morning it was not mining and cgminer said failed something and instead of the hs/s there was written DEAD… not nice a all! :-\ I tried to restart cgminer and it was working but at a much lower speed (around 300 kh/s). I tried a 3dmark and it was finished but the score was almost half of the yesterday’s score. I restarted the computer and everything went back to normal. However I did not like this thing at all…

I just woke up when I saw the problem, so I did not think about taking a screen of cgminer, I was still sleepy…

I am going to switch the PSU and see what happens.

PS: the radeon makes a hell of a noise! my 570 in comparison is like total silence…

Bernardo

it was the psu! 700watt, but not good anymore I guess. Already bought a new one, working good now!

Thanks a lot to anyone who helped me, is nice to see such an open and supportive community here! I have more questions about feather coins, but I guess is better to open a thread in the proper section now!

Good mining to everyone!