Mining ethereum – problem with R9 Nano cards – card is underperforming badly

[anodirium]

First of all my setup:

Win 7 64
Asrock B85 anniversary
INTEL Core i3-4170 Processor
Intel ssd 320 series
8 gb – 2 x Crucial 4 GB DDR3 PC3-12800
PSU Thermaltake 1275W
USB risers 16x – 1x
Mining ethereum rig

And here is the problem:
My initial setup was 6 4Gb < PCI-E > DDR5 ASUS STRIX-R7370-DC2OC-4GD5-GAMING (RTL) DualDVI+HDMI+DP < RADEON R7 370 > and they worked perfectly, without any overclocking just factory presets they gave on average 12,3 Mh each (measured over 2 weeks). Each of those r7 370 has 1024 processors.

Now I decided to build another rig but more powerful. I chose R9 Nano, because of low power consumption, high amount of processors 4096, and moreover the price is cheaper as calculated per single processor. The card itself (R9 Nano) is 3 times more expensive then r7 370. So I thoughts, with 4 times the processors it should be hashing about 12*4=48 +/- Mh, so that should justify the cost + lower power consumption.
I bought 1 MSI card for test, plug it in and its total disaster, because without any overclocking it gives on average 20-24 Mh.
I tried overclocking it, it gives slight boost obviously, but not much. I tried changing every possible parameter I can reach and still can&#8217;t figure out what&#8217;s the problem. In theory, for this kind of mathematics (ethereum calculations I mean), it does not matter if its x1 or x16, so key factor at play should be GPU clock and number of cores. Its same clock as r7 370, but 4 times the cores, so why is it only giving me half the production?

Guys please help, if anyone had experience with this thing. What can I do actually fully utilize full card potential. Or otherwise maybe there is some reasoning why it will not give 4 times production vs r7 370? I can appreciate that relationship does not have to be linear here, i.e. more cores more Mh, but given that I at least expected to get 30 Mh +/-.
Advice, help, point in some direction where to research will be greatly appreciated!

 

[Elixer]

https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/sapphire/radeon-r9-nano-ethereum-mining/
IIRC, it should be around 28.5Mh/s or so on a O/C'ed Nano.
What drivers you using?
What Nano card is it exactly?
What is the Core clock & Memory Clock of the Nano that you got?

 

[anodirium]

Specs for the card:

MSI Radeon R9 NANO 4G
part number 912-V803-861

I'm running standard factory setting not OCed at 1000 GPU clock, 500 MHz memory. Its standard reference card, hardwise should be same from all manufactureres.

Drivers were downloaded from AMD site as package, then i did not install whole package, and pluged in drivers manually.

Driver provider: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Driver date: 3/21/2016
Driver version: 16.150.2211.0

When I'm running standard ethminer protocol on pool number vary, some stats 14.4, 19.2, 14.4 etc, which is super low.

If I run test command on ethminer "ethminer -G -M"

it gives me the following results -

min - 0
mean - 12
max - 18

which is also somehow vrey low

I did see references on the net, that OCed card can make up to 30, and I managed to achieve this - I OC GPU to 1050, memory to 550, and increase voltage on Saaphire TRIXX by 18+, the problem here is that I don't if that OC is sustainable.

However all that being said, I don't think that there is something wrong with the card per se. The card itself was intended to be and is positioned on the market as COMPACT power horse for small factor towers, which makes sense. What we are doing here is very different, I know that there 4000 cores in it, and logic tells me, it should give 4 times performance specifically in ethereum mining application vs R7 370 which gives aprox 12 Mh.

So the questions here are as follows:

1) There is something which I fundamentally do not understand about architecture of that particular card. And that factor prevents unlocking that percieved capacity

2) OR there is indeed some way to trick the card to unlock its "full" potential in terms of ethereum mining algo and nothing else. Intention is not to play games or do some variety of versatile tasks, but rather for that particular mathematics on it. And hardware specifications tell me, this card should be perfectly capable of production 12*4 ~40-50 Mh (or at least 30 Mh in non-OC mode). But definently not this kind of numbers.

I know this is very tricky question I putting forward, but if someone with experience could address, I would super greatly appreciate it

 

[SimianR]

You're using USB riser cables right? When your testing the card is it the only card in the system? Could the card be throttling? Not sure if you have it in a really hot environment. You could also try downloading the 15.12 dll's and putting them in the miner folder, as I've heard that was the best performance, driver wise. You can google for the zip file. I would try watching the clock speed with afterburner or even just the AMD crimson control panel while your mining to see how low the clockspeed is going.

Also try running the miner with these command line options -cl-local-work 256 --cl-global-work 8192 (maybe try this first before anything else)

that seems to give me a few more MH's on my 290, but does force the card to work that much harder.