Thanks Cassey.
I have my monitor plugged into the on-board (motherboard) VGA port. I am anticipating that any Word, Excel, Web browsing I do uses the on-baord (Intel) graphics chip and not the Radeon GPU.
I don't play games. This isn't a gaming machine. It will be used for my work (a lot of web & SQL coding - mainly in multiple virtual machines).
I am using the Radeon 6970 purely for GPU mining. It'll run 24x7 so I don't want to run the GPU too hot (I'm aiming to keep it below 80C but at the moment I'm only getting 220 Kh/s when below 80C).
I am still playing around with various combinations of intensity, threads, shaders etc. I wish there was just 1 doc that explained all the params in a simple language. For example, starting with a very simply command line (no params - but what are the defaults used??). Then slowly building the command line to improve performance (ie. what is the most important singula param to tweak first? intensity? Then 2nd param? Thread count? I don't know). At the moment I see too many params and I'm just confused as to which ones I need to tweak first. Yes, I could spend a whole day tweaking and recording params and the effect after 15 mins, but geeze, there's gotta be a better way!
What are the 3 sets of numbers in bfgminer? I've never been able to work this out and can't seem to find any screen shots etc in any of Luke's docs.
Ignore that third number until things stabilize a bit (like its run for at least 10-20 minutes). What I was more focused on is the 0.04 MHash (40 KHash) shorter term numbers that are displayed. That is a bit low, but possible with an "-I 9" setting. Try it about "-I 15" and see how it does. Inch it up one-by-one until you either see a hardware error (very bad) or performance becomes unacceptable.
On the side: Please don't be thinking about playing graphics games while mining - the two are NOT compatible. Shut down mining when you are going to do so. However you should be able to find a setting where basic web browsing, excel, powerpoint, etc. will work fine.
Cassey