Other general issues observed:

• Driver performance generally sucks, even with Patcher 1.4.6
• One system keeps reverting to a driver version from April 2017, even after a clean install of 17.11.1

Why are you running 17.11.1?

The first thing I would do is switch to the blockchain driver, it was made for mining and helps a little.  Never had a problem with afterburner.