Quote from: miless2111s on March 19, 2014, 09:33:56 AM

DM
Thanks for sharing your settings and experience - I've got a couple of questions (please forgive me if they're silly due to my newness to all this!):
1) I am using xubuntu and cgminer 3.7.2 - can I use this xi with this?
2) Given that the "power" of the graphics card is used for mining does the fact that you can play movies etc mean that you're missing out on some of the spare "power" for mining and hence there is more hash/effective work that your setup could be doing? I'm using "power" as I don't know what to talk about in terms of watts, hash to mean "processing power!

1. You need sgminer for that. I'm not a linux expert, called for help a friend that installed sgminer 4.1.0 on the rigs, didn't look all that complicated, but what do I know

xi is based on shaders on the card, and there are odd times that it actually has the same value as I - for example on 280x/7950 I13 is perfect as it is hitting right on the shader count.

2. Yeah that is the theory - you should be using ever bit of speed on the card to get to work. The practice, however, differs. The programming on these cards is quite complex and often what seems logical results in illogical results, not sure if it is because of the way code is written, or optimizations, you can have the card working to the booth and still don't produce as fast results as a setting that is much more relaxed and can have the card with power to spare, including allowing you to watch movies (hashrate drops some 5-8% when watching movies tho). I totally agree that the aim should be best results for given clock/temp/consumption, so what I try to optimize is to find the most relaxed settings that give me the same/better efficiency than the commonly used ones. For example 280x the commonly used one is good enough, not the case with 7950, and to a degree - 290

I heard another explanation about intensity - it is internally how much processes are running, so upping it results in taking on many tasks, but every single one is completed slower - not that much of a problem with slow coins, but on fast blocks using higher intensity you are not giving it a chance to complete and submit the job, so the general advice on shitcoin mining is to find a low intensity that does the job good enough.