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Bitcoin Discussion Thread Part 2

17.5 hear at 1600 mhs. I been mining for about 2 months and have paid for all 3 of my 6950s and have about 200 worth of coins left not bad have one hell of a gamig rig
 
wolfofone said:
From what I've read, 5850 and 6950 are good price/performance cards. The 6970 does seem like it would be the best performing single GPU card thou b/c of the extra shaders and core clock vs the 6950.

EDIT: The 5830 cards also seem to be selling like hotcakes but i can't comment on how well they mine.
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The 5830s are nice. I get 250mhash with ram at 900 and gpu at 875. It's running at 71c. That's why people like them, they stay cool.
 
Evil Penguin said:
8.7 dollars a day.
Not sure if good. :p
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thats a lot of dbl cheeseburgers :cool:

from what i've experienced , i guess my cards were unstable (but not crashy-crashy unstable) at higher core clocks so a modest amount of my shares would be rejected (~11%), i dropped the clocks down and now i have around 0.09% rejected now. because a rejected share is a lost share, and that is detrimental to your true mhash! if a lot of your shares are rejected you might want to try dropping your clocks a bit (even at the sacrifice of raw client "mhash" readings)
 
Anybody got a good site for spending them? I've got like 3 of them in my wallet and growing1 :) I'd preferably like to buy a Carrabbas gift cards and/or save up more for computer hardware. Swapping to a 6990 would be sweet.

Josh
 
distortion69 said:
Anybody got a good site for spending them? I've got like 3 of them in my wallet and growing1 :) I'd preferably like to buy a Carrabbas gift cards and/or save up more for computer hardware. Swapping to a 6990 would be sweet.

Josh
Click to expand...

http://spendbitcoins.com/ has no fee giftcard conversions for amazon and newegg. Only other way I can think of is to trade them at Tradehill or mtgox.
 
Oh nice, spendbitcoins was updated with classifieds that's awesome. I love that site because it uses the previous 24 hour average value of bitcoins. So, if for any reason the market crashes you have a nice window of time to liquidate your coins without losing as much as you would if you had them tied to an exchange.
 
Anyone tried unlocking the shaders of a reference 6950 for purposes of mining? The extra shaders should def help performance even at 6950 stock core and mem clocks. On the other hand I remember reading about some people getting irreperable image artifacting b/c of something or other to do with the memory chips not being up to task, even after using the backup BIOS. That says no, it's not worth risking it as this card is still new but it would be a good excuse to test unlocking :p It would def. be better than overclocking that heck out of it in order to get comparable results, right? ;)
 
Yes unlocking the extra shaders is the main reason the 6950 is pretty popular for mining after the HD5K cards. And no, the ones that damaged the card from doing so were retards that flashed it using the 6970 BIOS instead of just unlocking the extra shaders. Flashing with the 6970 BIOS increased the clocks and voltage of the memory and the because the 6950 used memory rated for lower voltage and speed that was what caused the damage. Besides memory speed does not affect mining in ANY way, people actually downclock the memory to reduce heat and power consumption to lower their power bill.
 
Lorien said:
Yes unlocking the extra shaders is the main reason the 6950 is pretty popular for mining after the HD5K cards. And no, the ones that damaged the card from doing so were retards that flashed it using the 6970 BIOS instead of just unlocking the extra shaders. Flashing with the 6970 BIOS increased the clocks and voltage of the memory and the because the 6950 used memory rated for lower voltage and speed that was what caused the damage. Besides memory speed does not affect mining in ANY way, people actually downclock the memory to reduce heat and power consumption to lower their power bill.
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Ah, okay, any idea how much it actually helps the power bill? Surely it can't be much for my one 6950 (though it prolly is a noticeable difference w/ large farms). Since I'll also be gaming and am a bit lazy, I'll just try to keep memory at the stock speeds and overclock the core if anything. I have gotten my card to 1005mhz core but I've never really pushed the memory past 1300 as I was afraid of fucking those chips up if they in fact were not from a good bin :p Obviously I didn't keep it at that core--just for a single benchie. Unlocking the shaders and using stock 6950 speeds should be safe though I'd guess-- unless I'm really unlucky and those shaders are hardware-faulty. I may try later in the week once I've read up on it a bit more. Thanks for the info.
 
It can save anywhere from 30-50W at the wall depending on how much you downclock the memory. And yes, unlocking the shaders is the best way to go since mining is entirely dependent on the number of stream processors and their clock speed.
 
I'm having a problem downclocking the memory on my 6870s. I've used overdrive, msi afterburn, and trixx to no avail. I have a HIS brand and 4 XFX brand. Funny thing is one of my XFX cards will go down to 400 no problem and all the rest will stay at 1050 even after sliding the settings down to what I wanted it.

I've also tried flashing the HIS to a modified bios but ended up BSODing until I put the OEM back.
 
Lorien said:
It can save anywhere from 30-50W at the wall depending on how much you downclock the memory. And yes, unlocking the shaders is the best way to go since mining is entirely dependent on the number of stream processors and their clock speed.
Click to expand...

Hmm, I may also try that as well. I wish I had a kill-a-watt or similar to do some testing :). I've heard--and please correct me if i'm wrong-- that downclocking too much will cause some stability problems as the OS or w/e software does not like such low clocked memory. Is this true? (I dont remember where I read this but it was another forum a few weeks ago).
 
traderj said:
I'm having a problem downclocking the memory on my 6870s. I've used overdrive, msi afterburn, and trixx to no avail. I have a HIS brand and 4 XFX brand. Funny thing is one of my XFX cards will go down to 400 no problem and all the rest will stay at 1050 even after sliding the settings down to what I wanted it.

I've also tried flashing the HIS to a modified bios but ended up BSODing until I put the OEM back.
Click to expand...

There are several tricks. One is using afterburner to downclock by a small step, say 20Mhz, then you close the app and open it again (make sure unofficial overclocking or whatever it's called is enabled). Now the slider's range will have a lower bottom clock than when the app was previously open. Keep repeating that until you are satisfied and/or experience crashes/instability.

wolfofone said:
Hmm, I may also try that as well. I wish I had a kill-a-watt or similar to do some testing :). I've heard--and please correct me if i'm wrong-- that downclocking too much will cause some stability problems as the OS or w/e software does not like such low clocked memory. Is this true? (I dont remember where I read this but it was another forum a few weeks ago).
Click to expand...
Yup, of course that can happen. That's why you trial and error it just like you would do when overclocking.
 
Lorien said:
There are several tricks. One is using afterburner to downclock by a small step, say 20Mhz, then you close the app and open it again (make sure unofficial overclocking or whatever it's called is enabled). Now the slider's range will have a lower bottom clock than when the app was previously open. Keep repeating that until you are satisfied and/or experience crashed instability.
Click to expand...

No I get that. What I'm saying is that I can slide it down to say 400 but then it still reports that it's running at 1050 in the chart. I also see no heat decrease or reduction of power.
 
For being stock clocks, 403.6 Mhash/s is awesome for aggression 6

unlednms.png
 
traderj said:
No I get that. What I'm saying is that I can slide it down to say 400 but then it still reports that it's running at 1050 in the chart. I also see no heat decrease or reduction of power.
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Ohh, yeah that seems like it's a BIOS issue since it's ignoring what Afterburner wants it to do. I haven't tried underclocking myself so I wouldn't know how to solve it. However I do know AMD cards have 3 clock profiles, one for idle, one for video acceleration and one for 3d. If you underclock while the card is in desktop mode, the 3d clocks will still be the same, so you have to underclock WHILE the card is loaded.

Reality said:
For being stock clocks, 403.6 Mhash/s is awesome for aggression 6
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Yeah, that's very nice. I have to overclock my 6970s to 950Mhz core to reach 411MH/s. That's why 5870s are going for those crazy prices on ebay, they are the most efficient miners.
 
sure, using same instructions for each card (one's an MSI Eyefinity 6, the other is Sapphire Eyefinity 6, both reference)

-k phatk VECTORS AGGRESSION=7 FASTLOOP=false BFI_INT WORKSIZE=128

guess I had aggression at 7 instead of 6... I had it at 6 last night, getting 377 Mhash/s, I changed it to 7 this morning and it bumped up to 403.6
 
Ah, okay I'll play around with it then, I just wasn't sure if there was a bottom floor that I def. shouldn't cross like there is a ceiling in voltage that is discouraged when overclocking. :)

Wow, that's awesome, go 5870! What is the aggression rating? From what I could turn up on google it is similar to the -fxx affinity on the opencl miner?
 
Yup, but in the case of OpenCL miner a higher value for -f frees up more resources while a higher value for AGGRESSION in Phoenix consumes more resources.
 
Holy crap, here's a free 2-3% boost in hashing speed for anyone using Phoenix with either the phatk or poclbm kernels.

Find and edit the kernel.cl file with any text editor and replace this line: #define Ma(x, y, z) amd_bytealign((y), (x | z), (z & x)) with this line: #define Ma(x, y, z) amd_bytealign( (z^x), (y), (x) )
Stop and restart the miner once the change is done and make sure you use BFI_INT in your extra flags.
Source: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=22965.0 by bitless from bitcoin forums.

I went from ~411MH/s to this:

image1dpi.jpg


Enjoy!
 
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works for me, though i was getting 100% steady usage across both GPU's at 403.6 the old way, with the new modification, i'm getting fluctuation going from 400.6 up to 432.8 on each GPU.. definite improvement, but I liked seeing my static 403.6's :(
 
yeah if i change aggression either up or down from 7, my hashrate drops below 400
 
Wow nice, with the tweak I'm getting up to 415 mhash/sec on a modestly OC'd 6970 (+20 mhz so 900mhz core clock). HD5830 is up to 309 mhash!

862babe8bfeb549147e3f4d9a571777fe0daf3a1.jpg
 
Thanks for your posts, Reality and Lorien. Using your settings, I'm up from ~360 to ~430 on a 5870 clocked at 900 MHZ (on core and RAM, through CCC). I rarely read the official forums, so I appreciate you sharing the information here.
 
Reality said:
sure, using same instructions for each card (one's an MSI Eyefinity 6, the other is Sapphire Eyefinity 6, both reference)

-k phatk VECTORS AGGRESSION=7 FASTLOOP=false BFI_INT WORKSIZE=128

guess I had aggression at 7 instead of 6... I had it at 6 last night, getting 377 Mhash/s, I changed it to 7 this morning and it bumped up to 403.6
Click to expand...

wonder why I'm only getting 370 with a 5870 at 900/1250
 
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