Ethereum GPU mining?

[DrMrLordX]

My Powercolor 390 is used, so there's no telling how much abuse it might have gotten. That's the risk you take buying used hardware.

 

[EightySix Four]

For those of you running 480's, there are some custom bioses out there that are worth the driver hacking hassle to get up and running. I moved from ~24MH/s/card to 28MH/s/card with minimal increase in temperatures and fan load. I don't measure power so I can't give you that info, but I know if I even touched the mem clocks before that everything overheated, so this is a big improvement for me.

How to:

• Boot windows
• Install latest driver
• Go to device manager, right click on your gpu, disable it.
• Download this modified atikmdag.sys
• Download this signing tool
• Reboot to safe mode
• Open the signing tool and sign the atikmdag.sys you downloaded
• Replace atikmdag.sys in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers
• Open admin cmd window and type "bcdedit /set TESTSIGNING on"
• Reboot
• Go to device manager, enable GPU again.

Flash this bios with this modified atiflash. It takes a while and your machine will be locked up. Let it sit and come back. I remote in and it took a solid ~10 minutes to get control over the machine again. I skipped the reboot into safe mode step above since I was remoting in and it worked fine, but YMMV.

I'm not responsible for what you do with your GPU, yadda yadda

 

[reb0rn]

Which miner and OS are you using for those results?

Genoil, win10 latest build, latest driver, memory at 2380mhz (samsung)
I don`t mine etherem just for testing, its dead coin and there are more profitable ones

 

[lienad216]

I'm new to mining, though I've wanted for quite some time to get into it. Is mining eth still profitable right now? Or perhaps other coin. I'm lined up to get a 390X for about $250 and was thinking I might try mining with it. Then I saw a 290 on sale for about $140 and thought I might pick it up if mining was still profitable. My electricity bill is at most 18c/kWh (it scales up depending on total kWh used), but I may not have to pay it at all, because parents. If mining is still profitable, I will have to choose a larger PSU, though I would rather undervolt and underclock the cards than OC since it is quite hot here.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I'm new to mining, though I've wanted for quite some time to get into it. Is mining eth still profitable right now? Or perhaps other coin. I'm lined up to get a 390X for about $250 and was thinking I might try mining with it. Then I saw a 290 on sale for about $140 and thought I might pick it up if mining was still profitable. My electricity bill is at most 18c/kWh (it scales up depending on total kWh used), but I may not have to pay it at all, because parents. If mining is still profitable, I will have to choose a larger PSU, though I would rather undervolt and underclock the cards than OC since it is quite hot here.

Get the 290, not the 390X. A decent 290 will perform about as well and obviously cost you $110 less.

As for larger PSU, if you can fit a ~150W power load into your system, don't bother with a larger one. You can undervolt a 290 if necessary.

As for profitability, well, that's gone down a good bit. Difficulty ramped up with Polaris. I would say 4-6 months to make the card pay for itself. We don't know how much longer we have Proof of Work anyway. There should be an announcement about that later this month.

 

[Madpacket]

For those of you running 480's, there are some custom bioses out there that are worth the driver hacking hassle to get up and running. I moved from ~24MH/s/card to 28MH/s/card with minimal increase in temperatures and fan load. I don't measure power so I can't give you that info, but I know if I even touched the mem clocks before that everything overheated, so this is a big improvement for me.

How to:

• Boot windows
• Install latest driver
• Go to device manager, right click on your gpu, disable it.
• Download this modified atikmdag.sys
• Download this signing tool
• Reboot to safe mode
• Open the signing tool and sign the atikmdag.sys you downloaded
• Replace atikmdag.sys in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers
• Open admin cmd window and type "bcded /set TESTSIGNING on"
• Reboot
• Go to device manager, enable GPU again.

Flash this bios with this modified atiflash. It takes a while and your machine will be locked up. Let it sit and come back. I remote in and it took a solid ~10 minutes to get control over the machine again. I skipped the reboot into safe mode step above since I was remoting in and it worked fine, but YMMV.

I'm not responsible for what you do with your GPU, yadda yadda

Thanks for the guide! I need to pick a guinea pig reference 480 and try this. Most of my cards manually tweaked with Wattman are hitting between 26.5 - 27Mh and pulling between 95 - 115W per card (depends on ASIC and default voltage).

If I can pull an extra 1 to 1.5Mh per card without hurting power efficiency I'll basically be adding another 480 card worth of Mh for nothing

Did you flash one card at a time?

What are your suspicions on thehe length of time it took to flash? 10 minutes is kind of scary...

I guess if you mess up the flash you can always reflash using another card to boot up the PC. Dual BIOS would have been nice on the reference cards.

 

[Madpacket]

I'm new to mining, though I've wanted for quite some time to get into it. Is mining eth still profitable right now? Or perhaps other coin. I'm lined up to get a 390X for about $250 and was thinking I might try mining with it. Then I saw a 290 on sale for about $140 and thought I might pick it up if mining was still profitable. My electricity bill is at most 18c/kWh (it scales up depending on total kWh used), but I may not have to pay it at all, because parents. If mining is still profitable, I will have to choose a larger PSU, though I would rather undervolt and underclock the cards than OC since it is quite hot here.

Given your energy prices I wouldn't recommend a big investment. If you can stand the noise the 290 (reference) cards can be undervolted a huge amount to save energy and at $140.00 it wouldn't be a bad investment for mining.

Although at 18c / KW I would recommend saving up a bit more for at least a 4GB 470 (or a 4GB 480 if within $10 - $20). Try to find a card with Samsung memory. I think the Sapphire 4GB Nitro cards may come with them.

Once you get your feet wet mining it can become an addiction pretty fast

 

[lienad216]

Oh darn. At this point I can't not get the 390X, which is sad. (If I skip on the buyer it will get back to me). That 290 got posted after the deal was settled, just my luck. At least this one is part of the family rig I'm building so the cost is subsidized. Actually part of the reason why I want to mine is to further subsidize the cost of the 390X. Then that 290 got posted and I wondered if I should commit a bit more.

Is that 150W the usual consumption for an undervolted 290? 4-6 months to recoup the 140$ puts the income at about 25-35$ per month.. is this before power costs?

Haha then it is good that I don't have too much money to throw at these stuff.

 

[DrMrLordX]

150W is normal for me. Some others claim to have done better with a target of ~25MH/s but I can't make that claim. It does often involve some BIOS hackery, not that such things are terribly difficult.

To put things in perspective, my mining at nanopool is as of right now producing ~.16 ETH per month per MH/s of hashrate. If you get the same yields, 25 MH/s from a single 290 is going to yield ~4 ETH per month, which at current prices amounts to $47.89/month before power. I'll leave it up to you to calculate how much you'll actually pay in power since I have no idea what is the efficiency of your PSU. If you were using my PSU (EVGA p2 750W), you'd burn ~$21.84 in power monthly, leading to a net profit/month of ~$26.05. It would take you 5.37 months to pay for the card with ETH, and it would require PoW to continue until February or so.

 

[lienad216]

Thanks a lot for the figures. I've looked around quite a bit at the internet with all their calculators and so on, but then I get conflicting numbers and badly presented results. This clears things up quite a bit.

 

[EightySix Four]

Thanks for the guide! I need to pick a guinea pig reference 480 and try this. Most of my cards manually tweaked with Wattman are hitting between 26.5 - 27Mh and pulling between 95 - 115W per card (depends on ASIC and default voltage).

If I can pull an extra 1 to 1.5Mh per card without hurting power efficiency I'll basically be adding another 480 card worth of Mh for nothing

Did you flash one card at a time?

What are your suspicions on thehe length of time it took to flash? 10 minutes is kind of scary...

I guess if you mess up the flash you can always reflash using another card to boot up the PC. Dual BIOS would have been nice on the reference cards.

Sorry for the delayed response - my cards are all reference so with the bios + some wattman tweaking I'd be surprised if you can't go even further. The creator of the BIOS is pulling out 31MH/s.

I flashed every card in the box except one and then rebooted to make sure everything was good, then flashed the last one.

I don't have any solid ideas about why the flash took so long other than that I was doing everything remotely and Windows probably didn't like it. RDP went black for an extended amount of time. It was definitely a bit of a pucker moment

 

[ElFenix]

Interesting. Is that what the miner is reporting, or is that what you're seeing from your pool of choice?

that's what the miner is reporting. pool is kinda everywhere, moving average reported up to 30MH/s. and the pool rate is affected by a tendency of the card to get stuck at lower speeds at times (hasn't happened since i updated the drivers to 16.9.x on saturday, though).

 

[DrMrLordX]

You may have to watch that card over a week or so and see what the pool reports as a running average, then. It's hard to go off of just what is reported by the miner these days.

 

[Madpacket]

Sorry for the delayed response - my cards are all reference so with the bios + some wattman tweaking I'd be surprised if you can't go even further. The creator of the BIOS is pulling out 31MH/s.

I flashed every card in the box except one and then rebooted to make sure everything was good, then flashed the last one.

I don't have any solid ideas about why the flash took so long other than that I was doing everything remotely and Windows probably didn't like it. RDP went black for an extended amount of time. It was definitely a bit of a pucker moment

No worries. Brave man, flashing GPU's over RDP

29 - 31Mh is hard to ignore, these 480's are proving better than I thought. I'll definitely test this out.

 

[Jose Castillo]

Hi guys im new here but i need some advice from you:

im building right now my 1st mining rig with:

Gigabyte AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gbps USB 3.0 ATX AM3+ Socket DDR3 1600 Motherboards (GA-970A-DS3P)

AMD FX 4-Core Black Edition FX-4300, FD4300WMHKBOX

and 4 of ASUS ROG STRIX Radeon Rx 470 4GB OC Edition AMD Graphics Card with DP 1.4 HDMI 2.0 (STRIX-RX470-O4G-GAMING)

using this raiser: Electop PCI E Express 1X to 16X Riser Card USB 3.0 Extender Cable with Power

I connected only 1 card on the 1st sata string, now ill connect the 2nd card on a separate sata string, but im reading that i shouldnt connect more than 1 card on each separate sata string, what do you recommend? now im worried!

 

[DrMrLordX]

With Polaris cards, they draw a fair amount of juice through the socket. So if you're using a powered riser then you should expect some load on those SATA power cables. So yeah, don't try to get multiple risers sharing the same SATA power cable if you can avoid it.

 

[lienad216]

noob question: why are risers used? I keep seeing them but I don't quite understand what they're for. Is it just so that you can have the GPU elsewhere in better cooling? Or does this have to do with PCIe lanes available and so on?

 

[n0x1ous]

noob question: why are risers used? I keep seeing them but I don't quite understand what they're for. Is it just so that you can have the GPU elsewhere in better cooling? Or does this have to do with PCIe lanes available and so on?

Cooling and that you can't fit 4-6 double slot cards next to each other on most motherboards. Its a win-win

 

[EightySix Four]

No worries. Brave man, flashing GPU's over RDP

29 - 31Mh is hard to ignore, these 480's are proving better than I thought. I'll definitely test this out.

Brave, stupid, often the same thing.

With Polaris cards, they draw a fair amount of juice through the socket. So if you're using a powered riser then you should expect some load on those SATA power cables. So yeah, don't try to get multiple risers sharing the same SATA power cable if you can avoid it.

I was under the impression that was fixed in the driver updates?

 

[Jose Castillo]

is it? im worried to be honest, i hadnt try to start mining yet just for that!

 

[n0x1ous]

is it? im worried to be honest, i hadnt try to start mining yet just for that!

They did fix the issue where the slot was drawing more than 75w back with 16.7.1 or 16.7.2 I believe. There is now also a power efficiency toggle for 480's to push the slot power use even lower but its still close to the max spec if I remember corretly.

Depending on how many cards you are going to run and your PSU it may not matter. I run an EVGA 1300 G2 with has 4 separate SATA power line cables to the PSU each of which has multiple connectors and I'm running a six card 480 rig so some have to be doubled up. I have not had any issues so far. All my cards are running 1100/2200 @ 975mv @ stock power limit and I do NOT have the power efficiency toggle set because I was uncertain if it would interfere with my undervolt settings. FWIW

 

[Jose Castillo]

Brave, stupid, often the same thing.



I was under the impression that was fixed in the driver updates?

They did fix the issue where the slot was drawing more than 75w back with 16.7.1 or 16.7.2 I believe. There is now also a power efficiency toggle for 480's to push the slot power use even lower but its still close to the max spec if I remember corretly.

Depending on how many cards you are going to run and your PSU it may not matter. I run an EVGA 1300 G2 with has 4 separate SATA power line cables to the PSU each of which has multiple connectors and I'm running a six card 480 rig so some have to be doubled up. I have not had any issues so far. All my cards are running 1100/2200 @ 975mv @ stock power limit and I do NOT have the power efficiency toggle set because I was uncertain if it would interfere with my undervolt settings. FWIW

I understand, i plan to use 4 asus 470 rx on a 1000 watts evga GW

So you suggest me to not worry right? only if i plug 1 car per cable strig? the psu have only 3 sata cable string output, and 1 molex, so i will use 1 output per card + 1 card on the molex, it should work ok right?

Now im reading about undervolting the cards, what app do you use?

Thanks man!

 

[n0x1ous]

I understand, i plan to use 4 asus 470 rx on a 1000 watts evga GW

So you suggest me to not worry right? only if i plug 1 car per cable strig? the psu have only 3 sata cable string output, and 1 molex, so i will use 1 output per card + 1 card on the molex, it should work ok right?

Now im reading about undervolting the cards, what app do you use?

Thanks man!

you should be fine with just the 3 SATA power cables and double up one of them. Use wattman in radeon settings driver to undervolt. I've heard not to use direct molex on the riser cards as they dont deliver enough voltage

 

[Jose Castillo]

you should be fine with just the 3 SATA power cables and double up one of them. Use wattman in radeon settings driver to undervolt. I've heard not to use direct molex on the riser cards as they dont deliver enough voltage

will do that, thanks, how much show i lower the voltage? any advise?

 

[n0x1ous]

will do that, thanks, how much show i lower the voltage? any advise?

Every card is different so have a look at what the default top bin voltage is and then start backing down and testing for stability. the 480s are all around 1.1v default so you should probably be able to shave off at least 100mv