MSI afterburner only supports 8 cards. Any overclocking software support more?

Archaea

Archaea

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Oct 19, 2004
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My mining rigs have 10 cards each. (8 Nvidia, 2 AMD) The eight card limitation to MSI Afterburner is a frustrating limitation. Has anyone found software to monitor/modify 8+ GPUs for the purposes of fine tuning each card? (Undervolting while overclocking)

Windows 10

I web searched this but couldn't find an answer.
 
cpuspeed said:
How long till ROI?
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ha. umm. I hope I actually hit ROI.

I learned/investigated mining a little late. In late June I built a highend PC specifically to sell on ebay as an experiment. I put a 1080TI in it. At that time a single 1080TI was making $8 + a day. That of course piqued my interest.
Now I have 8 1080TI and two RX580 in one machine
and 8 1060 6GB and two Vega 56 in another machine

and profits just slowly keep dropping.

My setup only make $25-$35 a day on average. Profits are pretty volatile. I spend between 1/4 and 1/3 of that gross on electricity. Full ROI is well over a year at current profit levels. But the silver lining is in less than one more month I've paid off most of my risk, and by that I mean I bought all my gear at deal prices - and say I lose 20% in resell value - I'll have that 20% covered in the next couple weeks - so from there it should gradually start becoming profitable - because the profits should grow significantly faster than the lose in resale value.

It's sort of the way everybody gets in this hobby. You fire up a card - realize it's profitable and start scrambling to add more cards. I know about 6 people that have started mining -- all of them are spinning up full rigs. I was late to the party - as far as the highest profits - but it's still profitable at this point -- i'm hoping profits shoot back up again. :)

I've got about $10K wrapped up in this venture. So far I've made about $1,800 in mining profits gross. I'm at a point now where I'm probably going to quit buying more gear and see how this unfolds.


I'll try the beta Afterburner tonight (i'm just using the production version) - but unless it specifically says it supports more than eight cards I wouldn't expect that change to be implemented.
 
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if you weren't using a beta for afterburner then you probably aren't using amd drivers with the block chain fix for polaris and vega either. it should be worth it for you. it was for me for my solo rx480.

I got in around the same time as you. Found your cyberpowerpc deal as a way to get more gpu cards. However, studying crypto for a bit and after doing some maths figured not worth the risk as I'd rather mine from a position of zero invested so nothing to lose but some electricity. So I sold the cyberpowerpc but kept one as an upgrade to my gaming pc. So I went from an intel G3258, 8GB DDR3 ram, 256GB SDD and rx480 to a Ryzen 1600x (OC to 4Ghz), 16GB DDR4 ram (3400mhz @cl14), 1TB SSD and the same rx480 for free plus more than $600 profit from selling the other cyberpower pc's and parts. I've also mined about $400 worth at today's prices. I just view mining as a means to upgrade my gaming pc.

as for prices. I don't think profits will shoot up like they did. Prices for BTC and ETH are not too far from all time highs, so they would have to beat all time highs by something like 10x to see those $10/day per gpu mining days again. I expect a bump for ETH when the hard fork update happens soon (hoping it breaks $400) and mining returns for it should increase ~20% more than now and be stable at that for a few months but thats about it for prices other than what shit happens from pure speculation or china manipulation.
 
cpuspeed said:
if you weren't using a beta for afterburner then you probably aren't using amd drivers with the block chain fix for polaris and vega either. it should be worth it for you. it was for me for my solo rx480.

I got in around the same time as you. Found your cyberpowerpc deal as a way to get more gpu cards. However, studying crypto for a bit and after doing some maths figured not worth the risk as I'd rather mine from a position of zero invested so nothing to lose but some electricity. So I sold the cyberpowerpc but kept one as an upgrade to my gaming pc. So I went from an intel G3258, 8GB DDR3 ram, 256GB SDD and rx480 to a Ryzen 1600x (OC to 4Ghz), 16GB DDR4 ram (3400mhz @cl14), 1TB SSD and the same rx480 for free plus more than $600 profit from selling the other cyberpower pc's and parts. I've also mined about $400 worth at today's prices. I just view mining as a means to upgrade my gaming pc.

as for prices. I don't think profits will shoot up like they did. Prices for BTC and ETH are not too far from all time highs, so they would have to beat all time highs by something like 10x to see those $10/day per gpu mining days again. I expect a bump for ETH when the hard fork update happens soon (hoping it breaks $400) and mining returns for it should increase ~20% more than now and be stable at that for a few months but thats about it for prices other than what shit happens from pure speculation or china manipulation.
Click to expand...
I've been using beta drivers as long as I've had the AMD cards. (a couple/three weeks for Vega and only this week for the RX580?)). Both Vega and my RX580 cards kinda stuck for mining as compared to equitable cost NVidia cards out of the gate. I'm running my Vega at -10% power use in wattman, 985 MHz memory, 1800min fan speed -- with block chain drivers in dual mining they MIGHT be hitting 30mhs -- but manytimes 25mhs with 1gh/s of decred or less per Vega. They've been stable but they are eating up over 200 watts of power and that's in the low power bios switch. That's quite a bit worse than my 1080TI. I've not explored bios mods yet with them, they've been stable - so I've just been letting them go.

The RX580 I've only been mining with a couple days and I actually turned them off last night because I was only getting about 20-23mh/s and they were using like 225 watts each. Which is a horrible ratio. My NVidia 1060 are doing that with about 80 watts. I'm in the process of looking for a bios update for the RX580, but it's hard to find one for my specific cards. At this point - I'd be happy just to sell the four AMD cards and only use the 8 NVidia for mining. The AMD are more trouble than their worth to this point.
 
It's easy to find bios for the RX580's, you just need to match the memory brand (hynix/micron/samsung). GPU-Z will tell you who made the memory on each card.

Like you I was getting 20-21 mhs on RX580, one bios flash and a restart later each card pulls 29.5mhs. On a six card rig it was a huge difference.

Mining has always pretty much dropped profit monthly, with the rare exception being when prices skyrocket and difficulty doesn't catch up as fast.
 
I get 30.67Mh/s ETH and 975Mh/s DCR or 94Mh/s LBC duel mining at ~100w (as reported by GPU via Afterburner), high temps of 60C with fans at 30%. Right now that gives $1.65/day via nicehash (duel mine ETH and LBC) before electricity cost. yes I have samsung memory (msi gaming x rx 480). yes I had to spend a few minutes with a bios mod. yes I had to tweak afterburner to lower power usage will not reducing mining hash rates. However, that is better return per watt than with any card you are getting. The rx480's were popular for mining for a reason.

You should be able to get similar with your rx 580s, they should be your best mining cards not the worst. Besides the bios memory mod, you need the blockchain fixed drivers. They are specific drivers and not the latest production or latest beta.

As for Vega, can't help you. Don't have, so don't know how to get the best from it. However I believe there are windows registry mods to undervolt it further to reduce power usage and overvolt memory to increase hash rates.

edit: again if you weren't already using a beta afterburner then you aren't using the right amd drivers as the latest stable version of afterburner (v 4.3) doesn't work with it, only 4.4 beta 14 and on do.
 
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I watched some videos -- specifically this one was the best for me because it was actually about the exact two RX580 cards I bought.
Yes, I have Hynix RAM.

Gigabyte Aorus Extreme.gif


I modified one of my RX580 bioses - copying the 1500 strap to the 16750, 1750, and 2000 via PBE.

stock bios
stock bios.JPG


moded bios trial. I didn't copy the 1500 strap to the 2250 because it wasn't suggested in the video or the comments. Am I supposed to?
moded bios.JPG



I'm kicking off the nicehash benchmarking app now. I'll try to compare the differences between the stock card and the modified one and see what the delta is.


This was from a comment in the Auros extreme video from the video author:
Cards are mining at exactly 30 MH/s, and all we did was copied the 1500 timing to the 1625/1750/2000 and set the following in Afterburner: -96 mV core voltage, 1150 MHz core clock, 2050 MHz vRAM clock.

If I could get 30MH/s at 100 or 120 watts - sure it'd be my best card in the rig. IF...


What specific mining drivers are you talking about I should try? I only see the one beta drover that dropped in August released officially from AMD???
 
http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-art...eta-for-Blockchain-Compute-Release-Notes.aspx

above should work for polaris and vega. (I use the one release before Aug 11, works for polaris only). I suggest uninstalling afterburner and then installing beta 19 after installing driver.

don't forget to run atikmdag patcher when you do the bios mod and install new drivers.

if you duel mine you need to figure out what dcr values to use and put the settings in nicehash.

for ETH and DCR my settings are:
-esm 0 -epsw x -asm 1 -etha 0 -estale 0 -ethi 10 -dcri 32

for ETH and LBC my settings are:
-esm 0 -epsw x -asm 1 -etha 0 -estale 0 -ethi 10 -dcri 33

just copy pasts into extra launch parameters in nichhash. you can play with dcri values by hitting "+" and "-". your's should be around mine.
 
Can you send me a screenshot of where to put those ETH and DCR settings? I don't see where those go in the nicehash client?

I moved my RX580 cards out of my mining rig and into my primary desktop rig to update the BIOS so I didn't have to take the 1080TI's offline for the time I'm figuring this all out. So for right now - I pulled my liquid cooled vega 64 and put the 2 RX580 in my gaming machine. This machine doesn't have mining drivers installed, but rather the newest production standard AMD catalyst driver. I'll have to swap the drivers out and play with this more tomorrow night using that miner driver you reference -- but my initial observation with the non mining driver and modified bios is still junk rates. 17MH/s + a dual mining pittance. - $1.88 for both RX580 cards combined = terrible. (not even talking about power conservation at this point).
 
from legacy nichash miner go to settings -> devices/algorithms -> select gpu -> select algorithm -> extra launch parameters box is lower right side.

nicehash.PNG


Just to show I'm not full of it or inspiration for what's possible.

nicehash2.PNG


edit: don't know why your rate is so low. bios mod looks fine, though you should copy the 1500 strap to all memory straps above it including the 2250. assuming you set afterburner as suggested 1150/2050 you should be good.

I think I was getting around 26 Mh/s in Aug before Amd released the blockchain drivers. Not sure if the dag issue has progress since then to give hash rates in the teens without the driver fix but maybe it has.
 
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I'm not using windows anymore. In that kind of price range you may want to really consider switching to linux and just separating nv/amd
 
well he has 16 nvidia and 4 amd gpus so only separable if using another rig. if using another rig to separate nv/amd would make using windows less of a headache too.
 
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