r9 290/390 give 29-30 mh/s while mining on Ubuntu. For a serious increase in performance, you have to use Ubuntu version no higher than 16.04 (with new Ubuntu kernels these cards have poor compatibility). You have to install driver version 17.40 and AMD SDK kit. Switching to Linux-like OS gives additional 10 mh/s (50%). There is a guide how to do it (in Russian):
https://www.cryptoprofi.info/?p=3313. Ubuntu will be useful for mining on all old cards including R9 280, 290, 295 and 390.
I will give Ubuntu a try for these old cards. But how about rx 470 / rx 570? Will they also have higher hash rates with Ubuntu?
not just linux, it's the AMDGPU-Pro driver improving things. I was testing an old HD 7850, gets 10-13MH/s on windows and FGLRX on linux, but AMDGPU-Pro on SMOS got me 17-17.7MH/s. HiveOS just refused to use the 7850. SMOS and HiveOS both got me about 27-30MH/s for an R9 290, but only 19-20MH/s on windows. My RX cards were the same on linux distros in general. The RX Cards were the same on linux and windows with compute mode enabled*. linux was doing the same thing as the compute-mode by default, I believe AMDGPU-Pro is basically defaulting to compute-mode behavior for all GCN cards while windows only uses that behavior on GCN3 and up.
It depends what coin you are mining on Daggerhash.
You said you got 7850 running at 13MH/s, since every 7850 has max 2GB of ram you most likely are mining some extremely low DAG coin like Expanse.
So with DAG #0, an R9 280X can mine at 27MH/s and an R9 290 can mine at 31MH/s. I know because it was there when ETH had low DAG numbers.
However you can't mine ETH with an R9 290 at 30MH/s anymore, because sometime last year when the DAG increased the speed slowed down and you get like 15MH/s or less with the R9 290. With the Pitcairns or Tahiti's you can't even mine ETH.
You can mine those other coins but their profitability is way low. And ETH profitability is not that great either. So no point in using those GPUs. Just sell to gamers instead and get a cheap RX 470.
One of my R9 290s is mining ETC at 29.8 right now, on SMOS. 1040 core, 1250 memory. My other is doing 28.2 at 977mhz core 1250 memory (these are the cards stock settings from factory). edit: I do have ref set to 40 on both, but I don't believe it makes a difference with how much bandwidth they just naturally have, so have it set Just Because.
The 7850 was mining Callisto on SMOS at 17MH/s before it got just a little too big to fit even on linux, the 13MH/s I managed on windows was with a wildly OC'd core and memory with callisto. Expanse was about the same as callisto, Ubiq did better with its smaller DAG (I think its ethash is also a slight modification over normal?? Still don't know for sure). On ubiq I still got 17 on linux, but was able to pull 18MH/s on windows with a high OC.
Hmm, I did not know this.
So basically the Hawaii slowdown with the DAG is not related to the GPU architecture but to the operating system and drivers being used.
Thanks for telling me this, I might dust them off and power them up again if I can get close to 28MH/s. Really surprised nobody has mentioned this before on the Claymore thread. Tons of people complaining why their 290/390 is slowing down and nobody could figure out the issue. Most just eBay'd or Craiglisted their R9 290 and got an RX 470 instead.
If ETH can get back above the $300 area again then with the huge power hog that the R9 290 is, it still might be a little profitable. The Reference design is rock-solid built and very stable at any temps.