Cryptocoin Mining?

[Attic]

Wow, that's hillarious! Way to go newegg! 🙄

They were $439 on newegg up until yesterday, or perhaps even this morning. Newegg is taking advantage of the fact that it is the best and most reviewed 280x on their site...

Hard to blame them if folks will pony up the 499, but i'm gonna go ahead and blame them, this is ridiculous.

 

[nwo]

Hard to blame them if folks will pony up the 499, but i'm gonna go ahead and blame them, this is ridiculous.

I also noticed that they took out the Sapphire 280x Toxic edition from 280x search results. It used to be the most expensive 280x newegg carried as of yesterday @ $469.

edit: Oh and I forgot to mention that the MSI 280x gaming edition that was selling for $439 up until midday today also included a free 500GB Toshiba SATA 6 HDD... which actually made it the beast deal on newegg by far since you could easily sell the HDD for $40-50 and bring the price down to about $400.

 

[geokilla]

Define stock speeds. Are you saying something like 880/1250, or the stock 2D speeds of 500/150? I've seen issues on my cards where it won't ramp up to the 3D speeds, leaving the KH at 10-50. The solution seems to be a lower TC.

Stock = 925/1250. Overclocked = 1000/1500.

 

[Binky]

Restarting the computer doesn't fix this and I literally have ~30 Hash/s when this happens.

I have got a few crashes when I game at the overclocked yet undervolted settings.

I'm not understanding how you get 30KH at the stock speeds, but it sounds like your GPU is crashing and reverting to stock speeds. Assuming the 30KH is correct, try watching the monitor charts in afterburner, or the monitor in GPU-Z. Those should show the actual speed, which may be much lower than even the stock speed. If it really is running at 30KH, I would also lower the TC to the 21k range.

 

[SimianR]

Temperature and load and everything are the same as before. It's just that it crashes in game, but usually a quick restart of Windows would fix the mining problem. But not anymore. I tried reinstalling the AMD drivers just for the hell of it to see if it'll fix things. We'll see in a bit I guess?



My conf file is barebones so there's less chances of things crashing.

{
"pools" : [
    {
        "name" : "Catcoins - Coinium",
        "url" : "stratum+tcp://stratum.coinium.org:3336",
        "user" : "geokilla.1",
        "pass" : "1234",
        "pool-priority" : "1"
    },
    {
        "name" : "Dogecoin - Suchcoins",
        "url" : "stratum+tcp://us.suchcoins.com:3333",
        "user" : "geokilla.1",
        "pass" : "1234",
        "pool-priority" : "0"
    },
    {
        "name" : "Esportsmonies - Digipools",
        "url" : "stratum+tcp://198.53.169.220:4010",
        "user" : "geokilla.1",
        "pass" : "1234",
        "pool-priority" : "2"
    }
],
"scrypt" : true,
"gpu-threads" : "1",
"intensity" : "16",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"thread-concurrency" : "24000" 
}

Although you are assuming that cgminer will just leave your GPU settings alone if you don't define them, unfortunately it just uses an internal default setting and overrides any settings you have set in afterburner. I think the only setting it won't adjust is the GPU voltage. Try setting the gpu core and memory clocks in cgminer (and set them to whatever you have them set to in afterburner).

 

[geokilla]

I'm not understanding how you get 30KH at the stock speeds, but it sounds like your GPU is crashing and reverting to stock speeds. Assuming the 30KH is correct, try watching the monitor charts in afterburner, or the monitor in GPU-Z. Those should show the actual speed, which may be much lower than even the stock speed. If it really is running at 30KH, I would also lower the TC to the 21k range.

The monitor charts were showing the actual speed as 925/1500. Either way, a AMD driver reinstall seems to have fixed it for the time being. Will report back if there's a change. Lesson learned: When there are problems, reinstall drivers.

Edit: And it broke again. Running YouTube while mining at intensity 16, clock speeds dropped from 925/1500 to 825/1250. So I think the vBIOS is causing the speeds to drop Performance #3 to Performance #0, also known as UVD?

 

[thilanliyan]

^You're sure the GPU isn't crashing and resetting itself?

 

[Binky]

If it walks like a duck...!

 

[geokilla]

^You're sure the GPU isn't crashing and resetting itself?

If it was crashing and resetting, it would give me a black screen or driver crash notice. So yep, I'm sure.

I think I just have to mod the vBIOS to take away the 850/1250 clock speeds... And set it at 1000/1500 as default...

 

[Torn Mind]

Ah. Those are my exact risers.

Nope. They were definitely plugged in the correct way round. All the power connections had been double checked as well.

Hmm, what are the supposed benefits of using USB risers over "regular" risers? I mean, the USB cable is supposed to only handle voltages of 5V and data voltages.

 

[KingFatty]

Um, so is Litecoin dying?

The difficulty is just plummeting, nobody wants to mine it anymore.

I think it signals that finally, Dogecoin will be coin #2 and Litecoin will go away soon?

 

[Redinit]

Um, so is Litecoin dying?

The difficulty is just plummeting, nobody wants to mine it anymore.

I think it signals that finally, Dogecoin will be coin #2 and Litecoin will go away soon?

I think that's a little dramatic. Any currency fluctuates, crypto is no different. Even if Dodgecoin overtakes Litecoin, why would Litecoin go away?

I'm mining Litecoin exclusively for this reason, as it's going to go back up soon.

 

[nwo]

Um, so is Litecoin dying?

The difficulty is just plummeting, nobody wants to mine it anymore.

I think it signals that finally, Dogecoin will be coin #2 and Litecoin will go away soon?

Litecoin will bounce back up.

Difficulty is going down because it was insanely high and not very profitable at 3.2k+ and less than $20 per coin... There were just too many other coins that were way more profitable. People switched to mining others, and naturally the difficulty of mining LTC had to go down.

 

[UNhooked]

So Nwo I finally got that refurb to behave itself and now it's happily mining at 750 kh/s for two days now 🙂

 

[KingFatty]

Personally, I'm not sure I'd switch back to mining Litecoin, until it's more profitable than Dogecoin along with the fees of converting dogecoin into bitcoin.

The only way I can see that happening is if Dogecoin goes away, like if it was a fad, but now I think it's legitimately being used, by many people other than miners? Personally, if I want to use a coin, I don't see why I should use litecoin instead of bitcoin or dogecoin that already have legitimate uses besides mining it.

 

[Z15CAM]

I can see where there should be a world currency based beyond the Gold STD; however, at present the only advantage Cryptocoin Mining has is inflating GPU prices based on greedy false pretenses of Retailers inflating GPU prices.

 

[Torn Mind]

I can see where there should be a world currency based beyond the Gold STD; however, at present the only advantage Cryptocoin Mining has is inflating GPU prices based on greedy false pretenses from Retailers inflating prices of GPU's.

Low supply and high demand. Retailers couldn't keep the units in stock at MSRP prices, so they jacked up the prices to slow sales down and have some inventory of sorts.

 

[Mark R]

Hmm, what are the supposed benefits of using USB risers over "regular" risers? I mean, the USB cable is supposed to only handle voltages of 5V and data voltages.

A USB cable is a thin, flexible cable, with shielded twisted pair wiring.

Most risers just use cheap ribbon cable which is not properly impedance matched, etc. and therefore the PCI-e signals can be seriously degraded.

A USB 3.0 cable is ideally suited to PCI-e signals as the USB 3.0 specification is similar in a number of ways. No power is sent via the USB cable. Instead, the connector PCB has a hard drive connector/SATA connector on it for power, and a VRM for 5 and 3.3 V supplies.

I think I worked out what the problem was that incinerated my mobos. I was trying a dual PSU system, but had the riser card powered by the 2ndry power supply. I think it was trying to use the USB cable and signal pins as a ground return, and sizzled them out. The two PSUs did have ground connected together, but I guess they weren't tied together well enough.

I've retried and I was 3rd time lucky, by powering the riser from the primary PSU, and using the 2ndry PSU only for graphics auxillary 12V. This way the riser provides a solid ground and good reference for signal voltages. The GPU VRM is much better suited to absorb power fluctuations/ground bounce/etc. from the auxillary supply.

Pic of riser in operation

The other problem I noticed was that I had chosen a Haswell system, with Gigabyte Z78X-U3DH motherboards. This board absolutely will not accept more than 3 GPUs (and it turns out that I'm not the only one with this problem). It will also not accept a riser on the 4x PCI-e slot.

Putting a riser on the 4x PCI-e slot results in no boot. If you connect more than 3 GPUs, only 3 are recognised.

 

[geokilla]

Apparently there's a way to mine with a GPU without having to deal with the lag caused by mining? And this method doesn't involve DVI Dummy Plugs? I'm trying to understand what this post says. He is mining on multiple GPUs in one rig?

https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=11761.msg110850#msg110850

 

[nwo]

So Nwo I finally got that refurb to behave itself and now it's happily mining at 750 kh/s for two days now 🙂

😱

Please tell me how!

I hope you are talking about the refurb powercolor 7970 ()🙂

 

[JBT]

Apparently there's a way to mine with a GPU without having to deal with the lag caused by mining? And this method doesn't involve DVI Dummy Plugs? I'm trying to understand what this post says. He is mining on multiple GPUs in one rig?

https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=11761.msg110850#msg110850

Is that what he is saying? I read it as he is able to get more than 6 cards to mine out of a single box.

 

[compman25]

Apparently there's a way to mine with a GPU without having to deal with the lag caused by mining? And this method doesn't involve DVI Dummy Plugs? I'm trying to understand what this post says. He is mining on multiple GPUs in one rig?

https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=11761.msg110850#msg110850

I'm pretty new to mining so I may not be understanding what you're talking about, but I'm using both a 270x and 290 in the same computer. Only the 290 is hooked to monitors. Both cards are mining though. Is that not normal? I just popped the cards in and they worked.

 

[JBT]

It is normal, I'm ding the same thing with my 7870 and 7850's. I believe the issues arise with adding the 6th card.

 

[geokilla]

Well I'm trying to mine on the 7950 while use it at the same time without lag. Right now everything is still usable when I have intensity at 16. But when I try to watch videos, I have to turn it down to intensity 13. That's why if there's some other way to mine without having a video signal, please share. I only know of the DVI Dummy Plug trick then connecting my monitors to the Intel GPU instead.

 

[taserbro]

Well I'm trying to mine on the 7950 while use it at the same time without lag. Right now everything is still usable when I have intensity at 16. But when I try to watch videos, I have to turn it down to intensity 13. That's why if there's some other way to mine without having a video signal, please share. I only know of the DVI Dummy Plug trick then connecting my monitors to the Intel GPU instead.

Is it imperative to use GPU acceleration for your video playback?
I ran into exactly the same issue using media player classic to watch a video while mining and I just switched the decoder thingie back to windows default and it plays perfectly fine on a minuscule cpu load.