Bitcoin Discussion Thread Part 2

USMCGrunt said:
First off...I hate you, lol.

Second, what version of AMD drivers are you using?

Then of course, there's the power issue, how are you powering all that.?
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Thanks for the tip on the drivers. I will try that when I get off work. Funny thing is though, it works just fine with one mining basket with 3 gpus using the 13.4 drivers (newest) and it works in any basket I switch that hard drive to. I installed the 13.4 drivers on each of the hard drives. Running the same latest version of reaper. When I tried cgminer, it produces 550 kH/sec for each of the 3 gpus and recognizes and mines on all 3 gpus, but insanely high HW error rates.

I will only have 20 gpus running in my house. 2 other coworkers, one built 2 rigs = 6gpus
and the other is crazy, let's call him Andy. He bought 45 gpus for himself.
We all own our own homes.

Right now, I only have 3 gpus in each mining basket. When I get the 1x to 16x adapters I will add the 4th card per basket.
So for my 4 mining baskets with 4gpus each, I'm going to put one basket per breaker and spread them around the house. For the remaining 2msi 7950's I have them in my comp, and put the xfx 7950 and powercolor 7870 Tahiti in my wife's comp.

Andy has a good challenge for power & cooling. He's keeping them all in a room in his basement (small room) and installing intake & exhaust ductwork to the outside. He has a good friend who's an electrician and is going to be tapping into a bunch of his breakers. He's going to try running them on 220v because of the higher psu efficiency.
his total amp draw will be 100a @ 110 equiv when he gets 15 rigs up and running, 3gpus each.
 
Omegas said:
If you don't mind me asking, did you get a discount when buying that much at once and if so how much per 7950 all said and done?
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We got the 7950s for $298.97 each including shipping from superbiiz.
But they shafted us on the game vouchers so far. They said they would be included, but didn't. So we need to contact our friend there who made this ~$20629 sale.
 
wow, investing in a GPU buildout with ASICs actually rolling off the assembly line?

good luck making your ROI
 
Please do tell, which ASICs mine LTC? None, from what I have seen.

The negative impact of asics is BTC gpu miners switching over.
From the trending, LTC difficulty will double by the end of may, reducing payout by 50%.

So I make 500 LTC in may, which effectively pays for the cost of hardware depreciation (30%) for a year. That's fine. It's a gamble I'm willing to take. I make enough money at my day job to take this risk.

June projection is 1150 difficulty by June 30, nets me 308 LTC in June. so 800 LTC in 2 months. Yeah, that pays for electricity and almost half of my investment. 50% return in 2 months. If LTC price keeps going up then it will continuously offset the difficulty increases. That's what I'm hoping.

I think of this as a fun project. Besides, it's friggin awesome hardware porn. Who else do you know ordering $21k in gpus?
 
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J Macker said:
Thanks for the tip on the drivers. I will try that when I get off work. Funny thing is though, it works just fine with one mining basket with 3 gpus using the 13.4 drivers (newest) and it works in any basket I switch that hard drive to. I installed the 13.4 drivers on each of the hard drives. Running the same latest version of reaper. When I tried cgminer, it produces 550 kH/sec for each of the 3 gpus and recognizes and mines on all 3 gpus, but insanely high HW error rates.

I will only have 20 gpus running in my house. 2 other coworkers, one built 2 rigs = 6gpus
and the other is crazy, let's call him Andy. He bought 45 gpus for himself.
We all own our own homes.

Right now, I only have 3 gpus in each mining basket. When I get the 1x to 16x adapters I will add the 4th card per basket.
So for my 4 mining baskets with 4gpus each, I'm going to put one basket per breaker and spread them around the house. For the remaining 2msi 7950's I have them in my comp, and put the xfx 7950 and powercolor 7870 Tahiti in my wife's comp.

Andy has a good challenge for power & cooling. He's keeping them all in a room in his basement (small room) and installing intake & exhaust ductwork to the outside. He has a good friend who's an electrician and is going to be tapping into a bunch of his breakers. He's going to try running them on 220v because of the higher psu efficiency.
his total amp draw will be 100a @ 110 equiv when he gets 15 rigs up and running, 3gpus each.
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Assumingly you have a pretty decent sized home with a section of basement that is unfinished, why not just run four new circuits and set them up in the basement where you get the natural cooling from being underground and it would be in an out of sight out of mind location that doesn't create a lot of noise. That's what I did (though only two systems right now), cost 50 bucks for all the materials (50ft 12-2 nomex, two 15 amp breakers, misc mounting hardware). Grab yourself a wireless bridge for internet connectivity and your set.

When I built my first mining rig, I had x4 7950s loaded onto a brand new HDD with a fresh install of Win7. Using Win7 fully patched and GUIMiner Scrypt as soon as I tried to start a mining session, system would BSOD with ATIKMPAG.sys. I would get it to successfully start mining with no BSOD maybe....1 in 50 times. I tried reverting back to older drivers, reinstall windows + reverting drivers, using fewer GPUs with new and older drivers and reinstalling + patching windows, swapping out memory modules, all to no avail. As a final last ditch, I deleted the partition, recreated a new one, installed Win7 and disabled updates, disabled power state changes, and installed 12.8 drivers and it worked. I then installed 13.1 drivers and it instantly BSOD. Reverted back to 12.8 and all is good with it, been running about 1-2 weeks straight without issue (headless actually, I just check hashrates on mining pool).

I've since setup a second rig with x3 7950s and on a different platform (one is intel, the other is AMD) and different memory, went straight to Win7 install without doing any updates (though didn't go in and disable power state changes) and used 12.8 and it all worked. Dropped 13.1 drivers onto it and it instantly BSODed.

My x3 6970s on the other hand work just fine with 13.1 drivers so its definitely an AMD/7950 hardware/software conflict.
 
my "basement" is only a half basement and it is finished. It's our family room.

In addition, I've spent a lot of time during the past 2 years remodeling upstairs and on the "To-Do" list is electrical work. Right now I've piggy-backed all the upstairs bedroom outlets onto the downstairs. So I have to keep the rigs spread out around the house until I have time to get the electrical finished. That's the beauty of having the setups in laundry baskets.

Plus, my breaker box is a mess from the previous homeowner. It's nearly full. So I need to figure out how to condense some of the outlets so I can run at least one new breaker to the basement. I also built a shop 3 years ago and plan on running power out to it. I will need at least 30a out there from my already full breaker box.

It's not fun, but it's doable to spread the comps out around the house.
 
whats your reaper config look like? I personally use cgminer for my 6870, but I'm been checking out reaper configs too.

BTW I hate you. I've been trying to get a 5850 running with my free electricity and you have a tower of GPUs. :mad: NOT FAIR. :p
 
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So I have 2 6970's *well one is a 6950 with 6970 clock/shaders* which would be better to mine btc or ltc?
 
J Macker said:
hard7950s.jpg


Here's our shipment. $21k in video cards. I shit you not.
Go big, or go home is our motto. 2 co-workers and I are building rigs.
I bought 18 of these bad boys and have an xfx 7950 and a powercolor 7870 Tahiti.
When I'm up and running, I expect to have 11000 kH/s at stock speeds. It will take some time to get them all tuned and oc'd. Hopefully I can get 13000 kH/s. Electricity for me is 0.068 kwh.

2 gpus in my comp, 2 in the wife's, and 16x in mining baskets is the plan. spread them around the house and open the windows.
Right now, I have 7100 kH/s with 13 gpus running@stock. basket1=3x gpus, basket2,3,4 = 2gpus each running. my comp=2, wifecomp=2
I've been having major issues getting 3x gpus running on these Biostar boards

I have some 1x to 16x adapters being delivered this week, which will help with troubleshooting and expanding to 4x gpus per basket. I have 4 laundry baskets with:
PCP&C 950w (83A @12v) (purchased for $120 each)
G1610 cpu (purchased for $44 each)
Biostar TZ77XE3 motherboards purchased for $100 each
3x msi 7950 (purchased for $300 each shipped)
3x pci-e 16x risers ($5 ea shipped approx from China). Hopefully they don't fry my boards.
8GB ram ($52)
old spare hard drive
Encore EN-UW1X45 wifi usb adapter ($10 ea)

The problem is, reaper will either crash or only run the 3rd gpu @ <10% capacity.
So right now I just have 3 gpus running on one biostar board, and a coworker the same.
If I move that hard drive with that working 3gpu hdd to another basket, it will mine 3gpus successfully. So I've isolated this being a software problem. in the reaper.conf, the device that fails or performs poorly is not consistent either. On one board, device 0 is the bad gpu, and on 2 others it's device 1.

We're using win7 currently, but will likely be switching to BAMT if we can't get this resolved.
For the person who fixes my problem in <48 hrs, 5 LTC your way. otherwise 3 LTC bounty for fixing this issue.
Click to expand...

Why did you spend so much on GPUs just as Butterfly Labs start shipping ASICs?
 
If a pool doesn't grant you shares on stales, does that mean your effectively reducing your hashing speed. Example, one of my cards has had 3880 accepted shares and 298 stales for a stale rate of 10%. If I have a hashrate on that card of 480, am I effectively mining at 432, a 10% decrease?

If that's the case im leaving coinotron...cause all my systems have a similar stale rate and everyone is at default clocks. A hashrate potential of 5200kh on LTC (x7 7950s @ 550 and x3 6970s @ 480) and coinotron rarely has me hitting that with more or less an average of 4400-4800.

I am also under the assumption that stratum pools should have a stale rate of around 1%, true or false?
 
I haven't mined with stratum and my experience is more on the BTC side but I've consistently been under 1% stales for almost a year now. 10% is really high.
 
USMCGrunt said:
If a pool doesn't grant you shares on stales, does that mean your effectively reducing your hashing speed. Example, one of my cards has had 3880 accepted shares and 298 stales for a stale rate of 10%. If I have a hashrate on that card of 480, am I effectively mining at 432, a 10% decrease?

If that's the case im leaving coinotron...cause all my systems have a similar stale rate and everyone is at default clocks. A hashrate potential of 5200kh on LTC (x7 7950s @ 550 and x3 6970s @ 480) and coinotron rarely has me hitting that with more or less an average of 4400-4800.

I am also under the assumption that stratum pools should have a stale rate of around 1%, true or false?
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That is true. I am using stratum with reapear and have consistenly 1% stales. yes, your effective has rate is minus stales and HW errors.

I would like to know what is wrong with cgminer on my systems and how it has effectively >95% HW error rate for a net efficiency <5%. cgminer will at least let me hash out 550kH/s on all 3 gpus in each system, but they're mostly errors.

No, the 12.8 drivers didn't work for me. I uninstalled, reinstalled about 10 times on one system including full removal of the app SDK. Now reaper won't even run on that system. I'm currently reinstalling win7 on it.
 
Data point: Running 2x 6970s + 6850 on 13.3 drivers using cgminer with notroll.in pool and have 0 stales.
 
Andy says he figured out how to get the 3 gpus working. It's all about the install sequence and win7 updates are needed. I'm trying it out now.
 
master noran said:
That is so awesome, what do you plan to use for connectivity? powerline?
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?? not sure what your question is. I stated I'm using wifi usb adapters. I've got 2 systems stable on the wifi for 4 hours now, hopefully it holds up. if not, I will run cat6 through my crawlspace to various locations.
 
J Macker said:
?? not sure what your question is. I stated I'm using wifi usb adapters. I've got 2 systems stable on the wifi for 4 hours now, hopefully it holds up. if not, I will run cat6 through my crawlspace to various locations.
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I've been using that wireless bridge I linked in my wall of text earlier in the thread without issue so I think you should be fine. While I haven't attempted to meter bandwidth usage, I imagine its pretty low.
 
J Macker said:
I would like to know what is wrong with cgminer on my systems and how it has effectively >95% HW error rate for a net efficiency <5%. cgminer will at least let me hash out 550kH/s on all 3 gpus in each system, but they're mostly errors.
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Did you run the setx command?

setx gpu_max_alloc_percent 100

That should fix your issue.
 
mtb2005 said:
Did you run the setx command?

setx gpu_max_alloc_percent 100

That should fix your issue.
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Yep, I just tried that. I set the intensity to 13 and shaders 8192 and that got rid of the hardware errors, but I'm still having the same problem where one gpu is only mining at ~50 kH/s. I'm going to reinstall win7 again when I get home to start from scratch again.
 
robble said:
you are still using notroll? wow.. I thought everyone ditched that robber.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92716.540
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While there's no question that the pool operator's actions weren't exactly the best solution to the problem, I do think it is rather eye opening how dumb people can be. All of the people complaining had ridiculous balances on that site. When will people realize that pools aren't banks? Coins aren't yours until they're in your wallet, and furthermore, you can't horde up 300 LTC and expect to be able to withdraw it all at once at any point in time. I don't let much more than 1 coin accumulate in my balance before I withdraw because of precisely that situation described in the thread.
 
Dogs said:
While there's no question that the pool operator's actions weren't exactly the best solution to the problem, I do think it is rather eye opening how dumb people can be. All of the people complaining had ridiculous balances on that site. When will people realize that pools aren't banks? Coins aren't yours until they're in your wallet, and furthermore, you can't horde up 300 LTC and expect to be able to withdraw it all at once at any point in time. I don't let much more than 1 coin accumulate in my balance before I withdraw because of precisely that situation described in the thread.
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He continues to do shady shit. Anyone who still uses the pool is foolish.
 
Dogs said:
While there's no question that the pool operator's actions weren't exactly the best solution to the problem, I do think it is rather eye opening how dumb people can be. All of the people complaining had ridiculous balances on that site. When will people realize that pools aren't banks? Coins aren't yours until they're in your wallet, and furthermore, you can't horde up 300 LTC and expect to be able to withdraw it all at once at any point in time. I don't let much more than 1 coin accumulate in my balance before I withdraw because of precisely that situation described in the thread.
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Exactly

robble said:
He continues to do shady shit. Anyone who still uses the pool is foolish.
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Like what?
 
Guys I need some help. :confused:

I'm trying to mine LTC with 2 different cards.

I'm using 5870 and 7850 in the same PC using windows 7.

I've got the 5870 working? How can I access the 7850? What settings do I have to use with CGminer?

Currently my 5870 is working like this as it's the first GPU in PCI-E slot.... -d 0 --thread-concurrency 7168 --shaders 1600 --intensity 18 --worksize 256 -g 1 --gpu-engine 850 --gpu-memclock 1200 --gpu-fan 80

When I set the GPU fan to 80 my 7850 and 5870 are also running 80% fan.

Any ideas?
 
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MrXROK said:
Guys I need some help. :confused:

I'm trying to mine LTC with 2 different cards.

I'm using 5870 and 7850 in the same PC using windows 7.

I've got the 5870 working? How can I access the 7850? What settings do I have to use with CGminer?

Currently my 5870 is working like this as it's the first GPU in PCI-E slot.... -d 0 --thread-concurrency 7168 --shaders 1600 --intensity 18 --worksize 256 -g 1 --gpu-engine 850 --gpu-memclock 1200 --gpu-fan 80

When I set the GPU fan to 80 my 7850 and 5870 are also running 80% fan.

Any ideas?
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I use GUIMiner but it should be as easy as pointing cgminer to the other card.... -d 1? I don't know, im too lazy to learn all the commands and syntax for the mining programs.
 
MrXROK said:
Guys I need some help. :confused:

I'm trying to mine LTC with 2 different cards.

I'm using 5870 and 7850 in the same PC using windows 7.

I've got the 5870 working? How can I access the 7850? What settings do I have to use with CGminer?

Currently my 5870 is working like this as it's the first GPU in PCI-E slot.... -d 0 --thread-concurrency 7168 --shaders 1600 --intensity 18 --worksize 256 -g 1 --gpu-engine 850 --gpu-memclock 1200 --gpu-fan 80

When I set the GPU fan to 80 my 7850 and 5870 are also running 80% fan.

Any ideas?
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Looks like you're using cgminer? I think USMCGrunt is right that you need to add a -d 1 for the second card then a list of commands for it.

However you might want to look into GUIminer-scrypt and see if that works better across different cards like that. I understand cgminer works better for 5xxx & 6xxx cards and GUIMiner better for 7xxx.
 
J Macker said:
The problem is, reaper will either crash or only run the 3rd gpu @ <10% capacity.
So right now I just have 3 gpus running on one biostar board, and a coworker the same.
If I move that hard drive with that working 3gpu hdd to another basket, it will mine 3gpus successfully. So I've isolated this being a software problem. in the reaper.conf, the device that fails or performs poorly is not consistent either. On one board, device 0 is the bad gpu, and on 2 others it's device 1.

We're using win7 currently, but will likely be switching to BAMT if we can't get this resolved.
For the person who fixes my problem in <48 hrs, 5 LTC your way. otherwise 3 LTC bounty for fixing this issue.
Click to expand...

So it is definitely a software problem. My coworker figured it out, but forgot to tell me which driver version he was using. Long story short, the proper sequence is:

install win7 without gpus (use integrated graphics only)
install mobo drivers, win7 updates, do a ton of restarts, plug in gpus, install Catalyst 13.1 (do NOT use 13.4, it caused me tons of headaches), then SDK and start mining.

My problem was that I left gpus plugged in when I installed win7. that just doesn't work.
 
robble said:
Go ahead and use that pool if you want to give the coins you mine to the operator..
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I am currently using the pool, and I will continue to use the pool, and at no point will I ever lose more than 1 LTC, because I am intelligent enough to understand where my coins do and don't belong, thus I am intelligent enough that I will never at any point keep more than 1 LTC in my account balance. If for some reason I come to find that some trivial fraction of a Litecoin has been stolen from me by the pool, I can live with eating the $1 I will have lost and simply move to a different pool.
 
Dogs said:
I am currently using the pool, and I will continue to use the pool, and at no point will I ever lose more than 1 LTC, because I am intelligent enough to understand where my coins do and don't belong, thus I am intelligent enough that I will never at any point keep more than 1 LTC in my account balance. If for some reason I come to find that some trivial fraction of a Litecoin has been stolen from me by the pool, I can live with eating the $1 I will have lost and simply move to a different pool.
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OR...you guys could jump ship and support an [H] member's pool at InvasionNetwork.com...low stale rate (1-1.5% for me over a 12 hour period so far) and low pool fee of 1.5%
 
USMCGrunt said:
OR...you guys could jump ship and support an [H] member's pool at InvasionNetwork.com...low stale rate (1-1.5% for me over a 12 hour period so far) and low pool fee of 1.5%
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Some of my miners are pretty slow, so share size is important to me. How big are the shares?
 
Dogs said:
Some of my miners are pretty slow, so share size is important to me. How big are the shares?
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Hmm....can't seem to find that information on their site or the two forums that have a dedicated thread (bitcointalk.org and litecoin.net). I imagine they're pretty small though as im burning through shares like fat kid through candy. When I initially started the miner software up I immediately took on 12 shares per card (7950s).
 
USMCGrunt said:
Hmm....can't seem to find that information on their site or the two forums that have a dedicated thread (bitcointalk.org and litecoin.net). I imagine they're pretty small though as im burning through shares like fat kid through candy. When I initially started the miner software up I immediately took on 12 shares per card (7950s).
Click to expand...

I just pointed a couple crappy CPU miners at that pool, and it looks like they're the same size as Notroll's smallest adaptive shares, so I might keep a few miners there.
 
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