7970/280x underperforming?

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mkrohn

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This thread was in the altcoin thread but got burried and it keeps coming up SO if you know what you're doing and are still getting crap performance from a 7970/280x then the problem is actually memory timings which in some cards its simply horrible.

There was also recent talk about RAM speed between 1250/1500 and this is SPECIFIC to these models. When RAM timings in the BIOS are set properly 1250/1500 will produce the same.

What you do is search the thread to see if he's already covered your model THEN if you don't come across it then you post your existing BIOS file.
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=12369.0

he then edits the BIOS for ya and if you can you donate some change to the guy. The first "crap 280x" I did instantly got over 700 when it was down in the 500 range before. I've been meaning to do the rest but just haven't had a chance to yet. I wasted too much time rearranging my rigs yesterday and trying to find a way to get more out of the other cards like those 7850/7870's that are suck down around 300 (still)
 
I have two 7970's in my "basket" rig that seem to only want to run at 585khash -- I tinkered with it for a few hours but had no luck.

My living room PC has a 7970 and a 280x in it, and it's humming along at 650+ (still need to tweak it) Just got a lot going on with work + home improvement projects.

Need to find some time to experiment with some of the settings I've seen here on hardforum and wring out an extra 200khash from my laundry basket rig :)
 
collegeboy69us said:
I have two 7970's in my "basket" rig that seem to only want to run at 585khash -- I tinkered with it for a few hours but had no luck.

My living room PC has a 7970 and a 280x in it, and it's humming along at 650+ (still need to tweak it) Just got a lot going on with work + home improvement projects.

Need to find some time to experiment with some of the settings I've seen here on hardforum and wring out an extra 200khash from my laundry basket rig :)
Click to expand...

7970 and 280x should be perfect at 1050/1500 TC 8192 and intensity 13 gap 2 are the only things you need to bother with. If they don't just fly like that then its a BIOS issue with the RAM timings so dig out your model numbers and find them in that forum or post them.

Here's my list of models. The HIS and Asus are fantastic while the rest certainly suffer from crap timings and I'm lucky to even hit 600 on them. Trust me when I say no matter how much tuning you do you won't get much over 600 and certainly not in the 700's like they should be without a modified BIOS. It seems to be the Elpida RAM that sucks and Hynix is great.
HIS: H280XQMT3G2M | https://www.dropbox.com/s/br8v59rh7hw9cny/HIS_SV6G02-105_VT_AGR.zip | Good card, tweaked VRM to be cooler
XFX: R9-280x-TDBD | https://www.dropbox.com/s/9vorfjony7ysiae/XFX_797A3DF_GD5_AGR.zip
MSI: R7970-2PMD3GD5 | https://www.dropbox.com/s/45wuz80u6kd00ts/C3860100_AGR.zip
Asus: R9280x-DC2T-3GD5 | Good
Diamond: R9280xD53GXOC | https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ekp7276ixh4oca/HIS_SV6G03-105_AGR.zip
Gigabyte: GV-R928XOC-3GD | https://www.dropbox.com/s/51d87ch0ps1ja9f/GV-R928XOC-3GD_F60_AGR_ORG.zip
 
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I used his vram edits a few weeks ago on my xfx 280x cards, i was getting 715 before, and getting 735 after, along with a tweaked scrypt kernel. good stuff.
 
thanks for the tip and links on the 280 bios's -- I have an XFX 280x and will be experimenting when I get home from work later today.

Outside of the folding part -- even though XFX is not a top tier company in my mind like Gigabyte or MSI, their 280X is a DAMN fine engineered product in terms of looks/feel/quality. (Maybe the ram sucks) but when I opened the box I was like "damn" this thing looks like it cost 700 dollars.
 
Do you think he would edit Tahiti LE bios? Mine get 320kh/s which is less than some regular 7870s and run super hot even after several fan mods. Doesn't make sense to me.
 
collegeboy69us said:
thanks for the tip and links on the 280 bios's -- I have an XFX 280x and will be experimenting when I get home from work later today.

Outside of the folding part -- even though XFX is not a top tier company in my mind like Gigabyte or MSI, their 280X is a DAMN fine engineered product in terms of looks/feel/quality. (Maybe the ram sucks) but when I opened the box I was like "damn" this thing looks like it cost 700 dollars.
Click to expand...

All of my cards thus far have been XFX in the R9 series anyway. I really like them. Give them plenty of air flow and they'll treat ya nice.

Edit: Currently getting 745-750 per XFX 280x.
 
Thanks for posting a summary.

Explains why my Asus DC2 280x cards behave so much better than the other ones.
 
collegeboy69us said:
Outside of the folding part -- even though XFX is not a top tier company in my mind like Gigabyte or MSI, their 280X is a DAMN fine engineered product in terms of looks/feel/quality. (Maybe the ram sucks) but when I opened the box I was like "damn" this thing looks like it cost 700 dollars.
Click to expand...

I feel the same way about XFX and EVGA. But the biggest part of it is they are stellar to deal with for RMA's. I've had to RMA 2 XFX cards and 3 EVGA cards in the past few years and always they have asked no questions whatsoever and sent me a replacement within a week or so. Four of the five times they automatically upgraded me to the current gen of cards. With service like that I'll always look to buy either EVGA or XFX first.
 
I have an EVGA 780 SLI that I recently retired (read spilled water on it from my loop and it corroded), that work from the day I bought it shortly after release till just a few weeks ago. Also have two 460 GTX that still perform great, with zero issues.

Mining is my first experiment with XFX, but have yet to have any issues with the products themselves, registering them was super easy. And they mine pretty well to boot.
 
Wow good article, this might explain why my sapphire vaporx 7970 to 280x bios made such a huge difference in khash performance. Hovering around 745 now where before was in the sub 700 range. I would bet with the product cycle refresh they were able to put better ram profiles in for the card.

Along those lines would any of you know how to tweak a ref 290x with elpidia ram, I am running a box with 2 290's and 2 290x's and the 290s get near 900 khash 1000/1500 (hynix) where I have the 290x's in the 850 range at 1000/1500...

Thanks
 
rhansen5_99 said:
Wow good article, this might explain why my sapphire vaporx 7970 to 280x bios made such a huge difference in khash performance. Hovering around 745 now where before was in the sub 700 range. I would bet with the product cycle refresh they were able to put better ram profiles in for the card.

Along those lines would any of you know how to tweak a ref 290x with elpidia ram, I am running a box with 2 290's and 2 290x's and the 290s get near 900 khash 1000/1500 (hynix) where I have the 290x's in the 850 range at 1000/1500...

Thanks
Click to expand...

which manufacturers of the 290's do you have? I only have a 290x and I'm lucky to get a little over 800 with it and it SUCKS, keep thinking about just sending it back to amazon. It is an XFX 290x reference. I've been considering buying a bunch of 290's because they perform nicely but the 290x just isn't worth the added $150
 
For the 290x's they are msi for the 290s they are sapphire, also looks like this dude is working on a bios patch for the 290 series https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=12830.0

I also have a buddy with the gigabyte 290x and it gets pretty crappy hashes too elpidia of course.

Assuming there were more stock of stuff/ not super inflated prices I would totally agree that the 290s appear to be a better value proposition ... kinda like the 7950s are *better* than 7970s
 
collegeboy69us said:
thanks for the tip and links on the 280 bios's -- I have an XFX 280x and will be experimenting when I get home from work later today.

Outside of the folding part -- even though XFX is not a top tier company in my mind like Gigabyte or MSI, their 280X is a DAMN fine engineered product in terms of looks/feel/quality. (Maybe the ram sucks) but when I opened the box I was like "damn" this thing looks like it cost 700 dollars.
Click to expand...

How did your XFX's turn out, I have 3 of the DD versions that aren't very good and I am definitely interested in increasing their performance.
 
draksia said:
How did your XFX's turn out, I have 3 of the DD versions that aren't very good and I am definitely interested in increasing their performance.
Click to expand...

my XFX 280 is currently hashing at 680kHash.... not great but not bad. not running overclocked i need to do more tweaking across the board.

The fact I have a mix of cards in each machine doesn't make finding the sweet spot any easier.
 
collegeboy69us said:
my XFX 280 is currently hashing at 680kHash.... not great but not bad. not running overclocked i need to do more tweaking across the board.

The fact I have a mix of cards in each machine doesn't make finding the sweet spot any easier.
Click to expand...

I have three of them that run about 650 ish each but one is always lagging behind at about 600. The weird thing is that it varies between the second and third card.
 
draksia said:
How did your XFX's turn out, I have 3 of the DD versions that aren't very good and I am definitely interested in increasing their performance.
Click to expand...

The Stilts vram fix, newer scrypt kernel with a TC of 8193, and up core to 1055 mem at 1500 . Currently have 8 XFX 280x DD hashing away at 745khs each.
 
_r2h said:
The Stilts vram fix, newer scrypt kernel with a TC of 8193, and up core to 1055 mem at 1500 . Currently have 8 XFX 280x DD hashing away at 745khs each.
Click to expand...

I would be thrilled with that, I got to get them flashed, never flashed a video card before though.
 
It's been killing me that my XFX 7970 ran slower than my MSI 7950. The updated BIOS seems to help. So the 7970 went from 480 to 550. Over 700 is possible when I put in -g 2, but the system consistently crashes when the batch file with -g 2 is run.

Regardless, thank you for posting this. I've been looking for reasons for this behavior for two weeks now!


mkrohn said:
This thread was in the altcoin thread but got burried and it keeps coming up SO if you know what you're doing and are still getting crap performance from a 7970/280x then the problem is actually memory timings which in some cards its simply horrible.

There was also recent talk about RAM speed between 1250/1500 and this is SPECIFIC to these models. When RAM timings in the BIOS are set properly 1250/1500 will produce the same.

What you do is search the thread to see if he's already covered your model THEN if you don't come across it then you post your existing BIOS file.
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=12369.0

he then edits the BIOS for ya and if you can you donate some change to the guy. The first "crap 280x" I did instantly got over 700 when it was down in the 500 range before. I've been meaning to do the rest but just haven't had a chance to yet. I wasted too much time rearranging my rigs yesterday and trying to find a way to get more out of the other cards like those 7850/7870's that are suck down around 300 (still)
Click to expand...
 
rhansen5_99 said:
http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoinmining/comments/1va8g2/ann_sgminer_400_release/ceqvjwn

Have any of you had a chance to use sgminer? It looks like a new code path from cgminer went up about 10-20 khash with the 8192 bin so around 755 ish. Just thought I would pass it along.
Click to expand...

yeah I started using it with my 290 to avoid the constant blue screen. It does work nicely with the 280's but the custom bin I think is what makes the real difference. I found out about it when cgwatcher reported support for it.
 
Just flashed one of my xfx r9 280x's and it is now doing 730 without any tuning at all.

Got to get the other two flashed an see what it does.
 
draksia said:
Just flashed one of my xfx r9 280x's and it is now doing 730 without any tuning at all.

Got to get the other two flashed an see what it does.
Click to expand...

I had mixed results -- flashed my two reference 7970s cards in my mining basket, and they are now both rock solid at 770khash, amazed at the "free" boost.


My non reference sapphire 7970 and my XFX 280x are a different story, after the saga that is finding a modded bios file and getting atiwinflash to actually work via command line... my both of them are hovering right at 600khash. No crashes or any other crazy stuff.... honestly a bit tired of crawling through 80+ pages of people posting bios's

I will play with the two non reference boards next week probably, already got a pretty good boost, and while I hate leaving 200khash on the table somewhere, I got other housework I gotta do.

Very awesome find.
 
I went to the same bios thread and found one for the 7870 Myst cards. Was able to lower the clock to 925MHz AND ticked up from 420khash to rock solid 470kHash. Almost matches my best 270X cards :)
On the LTC HW comparison page my cards now beat the best 7870 and that one is running at 1139MHz. I'm sure my power use is lower than that one because I also lowered the volts to 1.100.
 
I put all three back in the linux crate and they are running a super consistent 690 each before they would jump all over the place.

I am pretty happy with the results so far.

I didn't do anything to my Asus since it is in my desktop and it has pretty good timings from the factory.
 
collegeboy69us said:
I had mixed results -- flashed my two reference 7970s cards in my mining basket, and they are now both rock solid at 770khash, amazed at the "free" boost.


My non reference sapphire 7970 and my XFX 280x are a different story, after the saga that is finding a modded bios file and getting atiwinflash to actually work via command line... my both of them are hovering right at 600khash. No crashes or any other crazy stuff.... honestly a bit tired of crawling through 80+ pages of people posting bios's

I will play with the two non reference boards next week probably, already got a pretty good boost, and while I hate leaving 200khash on the table somewhere, I got other housework I gotta do.

Very awesome find.
Click to expand...
dude give me the model numbers in this thread and I'll use some google magic called the site: command
 
mkrohn said:
dude give me the model numbers in this thread and I'll use some google magic called the site: command
Click to expand...

Can't tell if serious... or mocking.

I know I could search each page of the original thread we are talking about, however there are indeed useful tidbits o knowledge and tips/tricks buried in some of the pages, so I prefer to go through "manually"

That being said -- model numbers below

XFX R9-280X-TDFD

and

Sapphire 100351SR 7970 "Dual X"
 
collegeboy69us said:
Can't tell if serious... or mocking.

I know I could search each page of the original thread we are talking about, however there are indeed useful tidbits o knowledge and tips/tricks buried in some of the pages, so I prefer to go through "manually"

That being said -- model numbers below

XFX R9-280X-TDFD

and

Sapphire 100351SR 7970 "Dual X"
Click to expand...

I was reading the thread and apparently XFX and another company are known for using random different shit within the same model number.

The safest approach would be just post your bios'es and have The Stilt take a look at them.

I didn't and it turned out ok but I would be interested to know since I have a TDFD as well.
 
collegeboy69us said:
Can't tell if serious... or mocking.

I know I could search each page of the original thread we are talking about, however there are indeed useful tidbits o knowledge and tips/tricks buried in some of the pages, so I prefer to go through "manually"

That being said -- model numbers below

XFX R9-280X-TDFD

and

Sapphire 100351SR 7970 "Dual X"
Click to expand...

Instead of just giving you the links I'll teach you the magic trick. Paste this into google:
Code: 
site:litecointalk.org  XFX R9-280X-TDFD Poor hash rate

This part tells google to only search the one site
site:litecointalk.org

This part is the model number:
XFX R9-280X-TDFD

This part helps refine it to just the desired thread:
Poor hash rate

Some additional magic can be done using quotation marks to restrict say "Poor has rate" all together like that but I didn't need it when I was searching for my BIOS files
 
Core32 said:
I went to the same bios thread and found one for the 7870 Myst cards. Was able to lower the clock to 925MHz AND ticked up from 420khash to rock solid 470kHash. Almost matches my best 270X cards :)
On the LTC HW comparison page my cards now beat the best 7870 and that one is running at 1139MHz. I'm sure my power use is lower than that one because I also lowered the volts to 1.100.
Click to expand...

An update here: I had to revert back to my original BIOS with just the undervolt changes on these two Myst cards.
With Stilts modified BIOS, once actually mining, the cards ran great like listed above.
The issue was getting cgminer to start up at all. It would hang three or four times when restarted, at the first line of cgminer console output, and Ctrl-C was the only way to break out. The console would list a kernel version problem. I'm using Linux by the way.
Then when it did finally get past that stage, it would show no devices found.
I could then use the restart cgminer command from within cgminer and all was good.
Anyone else have a kernel issue or start up issue with his BIOS?
And are you pointing to a kernel path in your miner config file?
 
mkrohn said:
Instead of just giving you the links I'll teach you the magic trick. Paste this into google:
Code: 
site:litecointalk.org  XFX R9-280X-TDFD Poor hash rate

This part tells google to only search the one site
site:litecointalk.org

This part is the model number:
XFX R9-280X-TDFD

This part helps refine it to just the desired thread:
Poor hash rate

Some additional magic can be done using quotation marks to restrict say "Poor has rate" all together like that but I didn't need it when I was searching for my BIOS files
Click to expand...

most awesome -- thanks for the google-fu!
 
I've got the Diamond 280x and HIS 280x cards that mkrohn posted that both get 500-560 and a reference Sapphire 7970 doing 565, I just sold 2x XFX DD 7970's because they were around 500.

I thought I just had crap luck 'til ran across this, thanks for posting, I have a few other cards that could be helped also. The only star is a MSI TFIII 7950 that does 670 but seems a little fragile.

The 5850-5870=350-400 and 6950-6970 = 450-500 seem to run average and 2 under performing 7870's .

Thanks for posting have some hope now., other cards on the way , this is addicting
 
my 7870's seem to suck also. I might just return the last two I bought and just buy more 270x's even though the 7870 and 270x are supposed to be the same they're just frickin not. Gigabyte 270x hammer 450k while none of my 7870's even come close to 400k and I have like 4 different ones. I have some 7850's outperforming 7870's somehow
 
Got a Asus 290 and Powercolor 7950 coming in and a 6950 that's not being used, have to get the wood racks in basement modified for mining rigs.

I've been hearing good things about the 270/270x cards, have to catch the next deal on them
 
So, if you have a reference PCB 7970, can you flash any of these bioses as long as they match the RAM your card has? I have two cards mining (a sapphire and an xfx) and can't seem to get either one of them above 680 khash
 
have a visiontek 280x and I'm getting 695 consistently out of it running guiminer scrypt. This is with it undervolted and underclocked, can all be done within msi afterburner. 1038mv for voltage, 1010 core clock, 1466 memory.

All on guiminer's specific 280x defaults. Gotta say I'm pretty happy with it especially since this was by far the cheapest 280x I could find.
 
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