Quote from: bathrobehero on September 07, 2015, 11:04:02 AM

Quote from: chrysophylax on September 07, 2015, 09:23:12 AM

i think its time to step up to a 980ti and have a look at how this thing works .. is it better? ... and im not asking about the hashrate Tongue

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#crysx

Looking at the BIOS of that card it has an absolute maximum of 366W power consumption limit if I'm reading it correctly which aligns perfectly with a techpowerup review.
Of course that's with some crazy synthetic test like FurMark and the usual peak consumption is about 300W. But even that is a lot.

I think these bigger cards are all about scaling; they get somewhat inefficient hash per watt at full speed but get pretty great if you decrease the power target like I found with the 970 a while back (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1091755.msg11636995#msg11636995).
With downvolting it could be much more significant but I haven't tried it. So on one hand low profit margins warrants efficiency with lower power target but then the initial card price is too much but from another point of view if the profit margins were to increase in the future pushing the cards to hash as fast as they can would be more profitable. Also, different prices; in my case with the prices I'm presented with it doesn't worth it for me to go for anything above 970s.

Quote from: chrysophylax on September 07, 2015, 09:23:12 AM

Quote from: pallas on September 07, 2015, 09:08:27 AM

I agree: I was just saying that there is no difference, power related, when using a 16x slot or a 1x one.
About broken fans, I assume it's because they are not supposed to work at >40C for months :-D
The plastic parts will deform, even just fractions of millimeters, enough to stop rotate. Seen tens of times ;-)

100% correct ...

it seems those 'windforce' setups are the worst of the culprits ...

i would pay an extra few dollars for cards that just run ... whether they bring out these things in hardened plastic or thin metal / allow to dissipate heat properly ...

i think its time to step up to a 980ti and have a look at how this thing works .. is it better? ... and im not asking about the hashrate Tongue

...

#crysx

As much as I love Gigabyte OC cards I hate their cheap plastic toy quality fans especially on the 780 Ti's.
They don't deform in my case and they are pretty good at cooling but damn they slow down and get noisy in a few months.
Cleaning and oiling them every few months is making them as good as new... but only for a while. I don't have the same problem with any other fans.

Regarding ribbon risers, I only had terrible experience with them and I personally would never use them again - of course that just might have been a bad batch or something.
And I love that I can put my cards fairly far from each other with USB risers, keeping everything nice and breezy with DIY wooden crates. And if you buy powered USB risers in bulk they're not much more than ribbon risers.

About PCI-E splitters, someone said a while back that it would most likely require modding the BIOS to be able to handle it which is not very promising but one can dream.
While I'm at dreaming... imagine if we could connect cards with simple USB ports without PCI-E. Shocked

i agree with the fan garbage that gigabyte put on the cards ... the quality of the card is good - but the fans are just rubbish ... and they REFUSE to accept them for warranty returns unless you return them to the place of purchase ... some of mine were purchased privately and NOT form a shop - what then? ... their response was - return them to your place of purchase ... dumbasses ...

ribbon risers - i think we had the same batch Wink

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pcie splitters exist and work well in a 'few' card scenario ... you can only use more than 8 gpus with heavy modiing ...

there is a company in the USA that manufactures external gpu 'boxed' that are specialized in for mining - and connect using a usb connection with an internal board to split / multiply the number of pcie slots ... when i asked the question ( like one would of any solicitation ) 'how much' ? ... they promptly answered - 'as many as the bios allows, which in some cases is up to 12 - like the supermicro hpc server boards' ... so their external box can be daisy chained to allow for 16+ gpus - but unless you have a $900.00AUD supermicro hpc server board ( thats WITHOUT cpus and ran - which are also specialized AND expensive ) you cant run more than about 8 ( without heavy modding ) ...

as for the wooden crates ... ummm ...

Wink

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#crysx