Powercolor 7970 BIOS

[nwo]

I purchased a Refurbished PowerColor AX7970 3GBD5-M2DHV2 Radeon HD 7970 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Video Card. I've heard others have gotten really good results when they flashed their 7970 BIOS and I am looking to do the same.

So far, I have the card up and running on default voltage, +20% powertune with 960MHz core and 1600MHz VRAM speed which peaks at about 650kH/s for LTC mining.

Looking to flash my BIOS to get better results, but I don't want to brick my card in the process or choose a wrong BIOS.

So if anyone has good advice, please let me have it ^_^

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Does this model have the dual BIOS switch? If so, it's damn near impossible to brick it since you'll always have a working backup.

 

[nwo]

Does this model have the dual BIOS switch? If so, it's damn near impossible to brick it since you'll always have a working backup.

Good point.

I will have to take a closer look at the card once I get home to see if it has the dual BIOS switch.

 

[n0x1ous]

Good point.

I will have to take a closer look at the card once I get home to see if it has the dual BIOS switch.

they have the switch. its a bone stock reference card

 

[nwo]

they have the switch. its a bone stock reference card

Sweet. Thanks for saving me the trouble of powering off my PC, removing this monstrosity of a card from my case, and busting out a magnifying glass :thumbsup:

Now, onto the BIOS suggestions!

 

[Zstream]

I purchased a Refurbished PowerColor AX7970 3GBD5-M2DHV2 Radeon HD 7970 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Video Card. I've heard others have gotten really good results when they flashed their 7970 BIOS and I am looking to do the same.

So far, I have the card up and running on default voltage, +20% powertune with 960MHz core and 1600MHz VRAM speed which peaks at about 650kH/s for LTC mining.

Looking to flash my BIOS to get better results, but I don't want to brick my card in the process or choose a wrong BIOS.

So if anyone has good advice, please let me have it ^_^

How did you get 650? Mine is getting around 590 with 1125 core and 1500 mhz. Can you post the config for cgminer?

 

[nwo]

How did you get 650? Mine is getting around 590 with 1125 core and 1500 mhz. Can you post the config for cgminer?

I can post once I get home. I had to edit my bat file with a few lines in order to get my hashrates up even at lower intensity! I will also give you the link to the excellent guide I used specifically for 7970 LTC mining. Only part the guide was missing is the BIOS flash which is my last step

7970s specifically, and likely most other Radeons as well, perform best with a GPU:VRAM ration of 0.6:1. So, if the highest you were able to OC your VRAM is 1500MHz, you should reduce your GPU clock speed to 900MHz.

I was able to push my memory to 1650 stable in increments of 25, but once I took it to 1675 it crashed. So I stepped back a bit and settled for 1600 because I would rather get 10 hashes less than have to wait an entire day to come back home and restart mining after a GPU crash because I would be losing ~1MH/s.

 

[n0x1ous]

Sweet. Thanks for saving me the trouble of powering off my PC, removing this monstrosity of a card from my case, and busting out a magnifying glass :thumbsup:

Now, onto the BIOS suggestions!

No prob - I know because Ive had mine in and out of my case today trying to diagnose why it was only running x8. I tried all the power saving off features, reseated etc etc.

Eventually swapped positions of my 2 7970's and the x8 stayed with the powercolor so must be some issue with the card. Trying to decide if I should bother with RMA since x8 is fine for mining which is mostly what I am using it for, but it bugs my OCD.....

 

[lavaheadache]

How did you get 650? Mine is getting around 590 with 1125 core and 1500 mhz. Can you post the config for cgminer?

I get 588 with 960/1575.

You may be running your card higher than need be to get the same result you are getting. I tried higher too but the gain was so small

 

[nwo]

Here is my bat file which I promised earlier:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
pause
G:\Downloads\guiminer-scrypt_win32_binaries_v0.04\cgminer\cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://world.wemineltc.com:3334 -u nwo75200.1 -p 1010 --intensity 13 -g 2 --thread-concurrency 8192 --lookup-gap 2 --gpu-powertune 20

I manually adjust powertune, fan speed, and clock speeds.

Oh and I almost forgot the guide:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=191912.0

 

[geokilla]

Here is my bat file which I promised earlier:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
pause
G: \Downloads\guiminer-scrypt_win32_binaries_v0.04\cgminer\cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://world.wemineltc.com:3334 -u nwo75200.1 -p 1010 --intensity 13 -g 2 --thread-concurrency 8192 --lookup-gap 2 --gpu-powertune 20

Oh and I almost forgot the guide:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=191912.0

Do we need the pause? Right now my .bat file is as follows:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
Downloads\Litecoin\cgminer-3.7.2-windows\cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://world.wemineltc.com:3335 -u geokilla.1 -p 1234 -I 16 -g 1 --thread-concurrency 8192 --lookup-gap 2 -w 256

 

[nwo]

Nah, I don't really think the pause matters. I just got it as a random suggestion from someone on wemineltc chat and figured I'd use it.

By the way, I came home today to find that my 7970 crashed

I took it down to 945/1575 now with 20% powertune and I am getting 630-640kH/s with the stock BIOS and so far (about an hour) I have 0 HW. Gotta love that 0.6 ratio

I also just noticed I am running cgminer version 3.1.0

 

[holden j caufield]

it's also important to look at accepted shares no? I have an old 6950 flashed to 6970 shaders and it only gets 490 khash but the amount of shares accepted is only slight worse than my 7950 and I started them both within seconds of each other. Then I tried to mine on my mom's old desktop with some crap 7700 oem card. It gets 170 khash but 1 share accepted in 10 hours. Shares accepted is more valuable than khash, I would aim for that and avoid some configs that get more stale shares (is stale shares just variance or some what dependant on config?)

 

[nwo]

it's also important to look at accepted shares no?

Not sure, it would make sense that way. But I really would like to know a definite answer to the accepted shares topic. Also whether difficulty has anything to do with the # of accepted shares/period of time as well as hashrate.

 

[Zstream]

Nah, I don't really think the pause matters. I just got it as a random suggestion from someone on wemineltc chat and figured I'd use it.

By the way, I came home today to find that my 7970 crashed

I took it down to 945/1575 now with 20% powertune and I am getting 630-640kH/s with the stock BIOS and so far (about an hour) I have 0 HW. Gotta love that 0.6 ratio

I also just noticed I am running cgminer version 3.1.0

Strange, everything is the same except for my cgminer version 3.7.0.... lol

 

[nwo]

Strange, everything is the same except for my cgminer version 3.7.0.... lol

Lower your core speed. 1125 is way too high for only 1500 VRAM speed. Have you tried to see how far your VRAM can OC? That is what is going to boost your hashrate the most on a 7970.

 

[KingFatty]

Lower your core speed. 1125 is way too high for only 1500 VRAM speed. Have you tried to see how far your VRAM can OC? That is what is going to boost your hashrate the most on a 7970.

Any idea whether this also would apply to a 7950? It just seems counterintuitive to me that lowering your core speed would increase hash rate?

 

[nwo]

Any idea whether this also would apply to a 7950? It just seems counterintuitive to me that lowering your core speed would increase hash rate?

I am not sure the same exact ratio applies to the 7950. However, I would still try lowering your core clock speed 10MHz at a time, until you find the sweet spot ratio of GPU:VRAM clock speed for your particular card. I know it is extremely counterintuitive, but it seems like only CPU overclocking yields a linear hashrate increase.

Each card is different, my 7870s get lower hashrates even after a slight increase to the VRAM clock speeds while pushing VRAM to the limits on 7970s, and adjusting GPU clock speed accordingly, is definitely the way to go.