Mining new user and graphic card problem

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!

awesome! glad you finally got it to work!

happy mining ;)