Quote from: phzi on March 28, 2014, 06:38:41 PM

Quote from: Thirtybird on March 28, 2014, 05:41:05 PM

Quote from: phzi on March 28, 2014, 04:02:52 PM

The "more RAM is needed" thing is pure unfounded bullshit.

If someone is only interested in mining scrypt or vertcoin (At its current N factor), I will say you are correct. Vertoin's N factor will eventually change (at the same pace as glaciers move - across land)

On other coins, that increment their N factor regularly, some are up to N=14. If you get more than 2 cards that run 4GB each, you'll want to have 8 GB system ram. The miner software has to allocate the scrypt buffer in system memory to start, and allocating a 3.5 GB buffer for 3, 4, or 6 cards just doesn't fit into 4 GB of RAM.

I just fired up 5x R9 290 cards at N=12,13, and 14, with 4GB of system memory for several minutes at each N. Seemed to compile/load the kernel and hash fine. This might not be the case on windows, mind you - I run a custom gentoo install on all my rigs.

What thread concurrency were you running? It's absolutely possible to fire up a miner at any value of N with 1-2GB per thread, but if your cards have 4GB of ram on each of them and you are firing them up using only 1GB on each, then it's really not a great test. I'd be happy to create a command line for you that replicates how I run my 4x4GB card system. I couldn't even fire up a single thread allocating 3.5GB memory per card when I had 4 GB system ram. Let me know if you want to test it out.