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No the 580s are for gaming, folding, video work and daily use.
Nonetheless, I doubt mining is even profitable, for the electricity cost of leaving them on.
Hmm.
One 580 is giving me atm, 150MH/sec
Let's say 300w draw for card. That's 7.2 KWH/day or 216 KWH per month x $0.10 here or $21.60 a month.
If one 5970 generates roughly BTC 0.48 a day for ~720MH/sec, let's just divide by 5, so that'd be roughly BTC 0.096 a day x 30 days (keeping it simple here) = BTC 2.88 per month. 2.88 x (we'll say $5) = $14.40
...
DARN IT.
To be honest I'd sell the card and go AMD if their drivers
Re: Drivers... True. You'd think it's just plug-and-play and usually it is. I think I was just aggrivated moreso by the fact that two of my cards are indeed unstable pieces of crap and are going to RMA-land rather than the drivers themselves being horrid (though I've had much better luck with Nvidia FWIW).
True - was thinking the same with regards to Kepler. I mean, I could sell one of the cards now and maybe buy one more 5970 but A. I don't know what the 7990 will do yet. B. how much it'd cost. and C. Kepler may very well beat or at least make Nvidia slightly more efficient to do mining with.
It's moot atm as right now I have roughly an equal # of cards to rigs needed (albeit not the proper cooling for every system). To move more offsite I'd need another rig. At least I know power and cooling there though is not an issue. Dissapating 2+ KW just fine so far.
True - was thinking the same with regards to Kepler. I mean, I could sell one of the cards now and maybe buy one more 5970 but A. I don't know what the 7990 will do yet. B. how much it'd cost. and C. Kepler may very well beat or at least make Nvidia slightly more efficient to do mining with.
It's moot atm as right now I have roughly an equal # of cards to rigs needed (albeit not the proper cooling for every system). To move more offsite I'd need another rig. At least I know power and cooling there though is not an issue. Dissapating 2+ KW just fine so far.
I hope you don't live somewhere where earthquakes are common!
Those can't all be mining...right? That's quite a stack!
I have to played with flags to find a good balance between hashrate and desktop lag.
my flags are: -aggression=4 -gpugrid=480 -gputhreads=960
You can set aggresion higher, I think default is 6.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Hardware_Comparison
my flags are: -aggression=4 -gpugrid=480 -gputhreads=960
You can set aggresion higher, I think default is 6.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Hardware_Comparison
Is this for Nvidia cards only or for AMD?
In that chart you can see flags for all cards.
There's one for 2x GTX 580s so messed with that. Originally used an old thread suggesting a 580 profile and it had worked just fine giving me ~130-140MH/sec.
Original was: -gpu=0 (used -gpu=1 for my other 580 to make it work) poclbm VECTORS
New is: -gpu=0 -gpugrid=128 -gputhreads=1024
Now up to ~155MH/sec. Cool
Why not linux
Never used Linux before. Yes, paid for my Windows licenses, sorry. Rather not try to crack 7 and again it's the case of legitly using these systems for business purposes other than mining potentially that I want to look out for.
Of course if you use them for gaming occasionally, then Windows might make sense. Dual booting is also a possibility.
Oh, fair enough
. True. Could game on them or dual boot perhaps. Thanks for the suggestions.Love your photos, The-Real-Link. What kind of camera do you have? Clearly no cell phone pics for you!
Thanks very much
Canon 5D Mark II + some L lenses. Not rich - just carefully appropriate what limited funds I do have toward things that sadly, tend to cost a lot of money haha.
No I do do wedding photography though so that does help pay for the toys.
Thanks for the comment on the red glow too. Before I swapped my push/pulls to H80s, I had lots of red glowing there (the AIO waterblocks do make me slightly miffed that I lose the aesthetics though).
Here's how it used to be:
Ok experimented with affinity. Oddly enough it does not change the hashrate of AMD cards. It did however, drop my Nvidia's from 130MH or so to 6MH when I set affinity to one core. No idea why.
Not skimping on the PSU for sure as you said. No you're right that cheapest is not the best. I feel I've just been as efficient for MH/$ that I could be. Of course I could be more efficient as well. Thanks.
Not skimping on the PSU for sure as you said. No you're right that cheapest is not the best. I feel I've just been as efficient for MH/$ that I could be. Of course I could be more efficient as well. Thanks.
@ The-Real-Link
I can somewhat understand why someone would want to use cases.. while it costs money and increases temps, it definitely improves Feng Shui and makes moving things around a bit easier. But why on earth would you equip every machine with a keyboard and monitor? And a HDD?
Even if you are new to linux, you really want to check out BAMT:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28967.0
I can somewhat understand why someone would want to use cases.. while it costs money and increases temps, it definitely improves Feng Shui and makes moving things around a bit easier. But why on earth would you equip every machine with a keyboard and monitor? And a HDD?
Even if you are new to linux, you really want to check out BAMT:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28967.0
Heard BAMT is pretty neat so may look into that. Even though all the systems are together now, you have to keep in mind I built one at a time and I couldn't guarantee they'd be near each other in the early stages so I'd have to monitor each one on it's own and to set up the OS and such. Again, complete rigs that could be used for things outside of mining. Guess I'm also a bit of a tidy person...not neat freak - just tidy
. The monitors aren't super expensive though so no biggie. Maybe in the future if I do more rigs I'll have just the systems but again if they're used in different places at once or by anyone outside of us techies here, they'd probaby like a monitor IMO.Ok experimented with affinity. Oddly enough it does not change the hashrate of AMD cards. It did however, drop my Nvidia's from 130MH or so to 6MH when I set affinity to one core. No idea why.
Not skimping on the PSU for sure as you said. No you're right that cheapest is not the best. I feel I've just been as efficient for MH/$ that I could be. Of course I could be more efficient as well. Thanks.
Are you using cudaminer with your 580?Not skimping on the PSU for sure as you said. No you're right that cheapest is not the best. I feel I've just been as efficient for MH/$ that I could be. Of course I could be more efficient as well. Thanks.
I have a 570 mining with cudaminer (GUIminer) at 125 MH/s downclocked to 732 MHz. It's an OCd version @ 810 MHz (stock clock) reaches 140 MH/s.
The directory shows: guiminer\miners\puddinpop\rpcminer-cuda.exe so I presume that's what you mean, yeah. Currently this second at 132 MH/sec @ 825 core.
Why not linux
Never used Linux before. Yes, paid for my Windows licenses, sorry. Rather not try to crack 7 and again it's the case of legitly using these systems for business purposes other than mining potentially that I want to look out for.
Israfel System:
More of the same, except red ^_^
Time to do my duty to lend to the laughter of this thread. At this point I'm running out of places (and to a lesser extent, power) to put these around at home. Thus:
Thanks Dog Crate!
At this point after extended discussions, it was considered best for me to move the operation off-site.
Systems are now at a climate controlled facility with power-use included with the rent
Power was a dedicated 20A (which these systems easily made the breaker angry)... so I had them install another 20. Electrician was AWESOME though and gave me 2-20s! The room is now wired for 60A so I have room to expand if the coolling keeps up.
Temps of all systems are generally mid-to-upper-60s at 70-75% fan.
More of the same, except red ^_^
Time to do my duty to lend to the laughter of this thread. At this point I'm running out of places (and to a lesser extent, power) to put these around at home. Thus:
Thanks Dog Crate!At this point after extended discussions, it was considered best for me to move the operation off-site.
Systems are now at a climate controlled facility with power-use included with the rent
Power was a dedicated 20A (which these systems easily made the breaker angry)... so I had them install another 20. Electrician was AWESOME though and gave me 2-20s! The room is now wired for 60A so I have room to expand if the coolling keeps up.
Temps of all systems are generally mid-to-upper-60s at 70-75% fan.
I have to played with flags to find a good balance between hashrate and desktop lag.
my flags are: -aggression=4 -gpugrid=480 -gputhreads=960
You can set aggresion higher, I think default is 6.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Hardware_Comparison
my flags are: -aggression=4 -gpugrid=480 -gputhreads=960
You can set aggresion higher, I think default is 6.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_Hardware_Comparison
Is this for Nvidia cards only or for AMD?
Ramiel Part 2!
Nope, had to fix this problem. Thankfully my favorite etailer had a solution on sale for the time. Yay for twin 5970s!
5970s *do* clear the cages in a 500R, albeit barely.
After a lot of testing and burning in, I found clocks where the cards and temps would be to my liking. Any higher core and the stock voltage was not enough. I also did various tests with my KAW and Overvolt to see how high the cards could go. Found out though that even though they could get to 900+core, the heat and fans simply was too high and the system went from ~700 watts to 1,000. Enough of a power increase that with efficiency factored in, I could not push the PSU any higher I think. Obviously they were backed down to what the image below shows and it's been running great since.
Finally as can be seen, I ripped out the drive cages to help the airflow. It's dropped temps by a couple degrees overall. The HDD has foam sticky pads on the bottom to keep it proped off the case floor.
--------------
Thanks for letting me share my building experience and what I'd hope is a pretty clean (IMO) mining rig. It may not be the most efficient in terms of price but I'm happy with the challenge it presented and feel the investment will pay back eventually. Currently getting ~1.5GH/sec with it. The only heads up is that with pets and so much case airflow, that the system would need practically a blow-out every week for the dust it'd gather.
Nope, had to fix this problem. Thankfully my favorite etailer had a solution on sale for the time. Yay for twin 5970s!
5970s *do* clear the cages in a 500R, albeit barely.
After a lot of testing and burning in, I found clocks where the cards and temps would be to my liking. Any higher core and the stock voltage was not enough. I also did various tests with my KAW and Overvolt to see how high the cards could go. Found out though that even though they could get to 900+core, the heat and fans simply was too high and the system went from ~700 watts to 1,000. Enough of a power increase that with efficiency factored in, I could not push the PSU any higher I think. Obviously they were backed down to what the image below shows and it's been running great since.
Finally as can be seen, I ripped out the drive cages to help the airflow. It's dropped temps by a couple degrees overall. The HDD has foam sticky pads on the bottom to keep it proped off the case floor.
--------------
Thanks for letting me share my building experience and what I'd hope is a pretty clean (IMO) mining rig. It may not be the most efficient in terms of price but I'm happy with the challenge it presented and feel the investment will pay back eventually. Currently getting ~1.5GH/sec with it. The only heads up is that with pets and so much case airflow, that the system would need practically a blow-out every week for the dust it'd gather.
Sachiel System
Primary changes are the following:
Lepa G900 to Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1200w (thought was to do tri-card systems).
Gigabyte UD7 (bought UD3's on accident but it'll now work out for the better I've learned).
HDDs > Intel 40GB SSDs. Really, the price now is almost the same with HDDs being at increased prices with the flooding.
RAM 2x 4GB Corsair > 2x2GB Kingston generics. Don't really need 8GB for mining.
AMD Quad Core Athlon IIs (the 3 core was at 100% so thought quad would help. Guess it's just a bug though).
Windows 7 Home x64
Just a heads up again that the UD3 for whatever reason has *no* additional PCIe power requirement. I asked Gigabyte techs about this concern and they said the board is Rev. 1.1 and has enough power delivery built in to where this is not necessary. Thus, no conflict with the 500R panels.
This rig has 2 5970s total - just never shot it again once it was all together. Hashing is the same as the other.
Primary changes are the following:
Lepa G900 to Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1200w (thought was to do tri-card systems).
Gigabyte UD7 (bought UD3's on accident but it'll now work out for the better I've learned).
HDDs > Intel 40GB SSDs. Really, the price now is almost the same with HDDs being at increased prices with the flooding.
RAM 2x 4GB Corsair > 2x2GB Kingston generics. Don't really need 8GB for mining.
AMD Quad Core Athlon IIs (the 3 core was at 100% so thought quad would help. Guess it's just a bug though).
Windows 7 Home x64
Just a heads up again that the UD3 for whatever reason has *no* additional PCIe power requirement. I asked Gigabyte techs about this concern and they said the board is Rev. 1.1 and has enough power delivery built in to where this is not necessary. Thus, no conflict with the 500R panels.
This rig has 2 5970s total - just never shot it again once it was all together. Hashing is the same as the other.
Ah gotcha. Thanks for the suggestions. Again guess I'm just used to complete systems, I'm afraid.
The extra hardware (not counting the palty discount on RAM and not factoring in HDD) for all the monitors, CPUs, KB/mice, and CPU coolers only amounts to about $420 over the baseline as-low-as-you-can-go-on-Newegg prices - at this rate, the price of one 5970. Well, again, as low as *I* wanted to go on prices. Now, aside from the fact that at the moment, the only system that has a UD7 that could take a 3rd 5970 in it, I was debating on having to swap the LEPA G900 for one of the 1,200w units (looking at about 700w load for the system and 2 cards already so a third would put that wattage very close to, if not over, the limit).
Now CPU-wise ok I might be $120 over from getting cheapo single cores. When I bought an X3 and saw that the two cards pegged it to 100%, I wasn't sure if it was just a bug compared to the CPU being powerful enough to keep the cards fed. I think now it is rather the former and if a single core is really good enough to mine with then that's good to know. But why spend 66% of the cost of a quad CPU on something that would suck for pretty much every other task except mining? Can't BOINC on a single, nor render or anything for any decent efficiency. Maybe my thought is just flawed but then again I thought I was building pretty "cheap" compared to previous systems I've had. This thread still has shown me that no, you can go cheaper (much cheaper). Oh well, live and learn.
Again these were originally intended to run at home where I could barely keep temps at decent levels (IMO, mid-70s and below) with two cards, let alone 3. Now that they're in a cooler location I could probably spend a bit of time to swap things out if I had to. I have all 5970s working away at the moment though so until I can do more builds or get more cards, I might be losing 200MH due to temps overall at the moment (ideal VS current setup).
The extra hardware (not counting the palty discount on RAM and not factoring in HDD) for all the monitors, CPUs, KB/mice, and CPU coolers only amounts to about $420 over the baseline as-low-as-you-can-go-on-Newegg prices - at this rate, the price of one 5970. Well, again, as low as *I* wanted to go on prices. Now, aside from the fact that at the moment, the only system that has a UD7 that could take a 3rd 5970 in it, I was debating on having to swap the LEPA G900 for one of the 1,200w units (looking at about 700w load for the system and 2 cards already so a third would put that wattage very close to, if not over, the limit).
Now CPU-wise ok I might be $120 over from getting cheapo single cores. When I bought an X3 and saw that the two cards pegged it to 100%, I wasn't sure if it was just a bug compared to the CPU being powerful enough to keep the cards fed. I think now it is rather the former and if a single core is really good enough to mine with then that's good to know. But why spend 66% of the cost of a quad CPU on something that would suck for pretty much every other task except mining? Can't BOINC on a single, nor render or anything for any decent efficiency. Maybe my thought is just flawed but then again I thought I was building pretty "cheap" compared to previous systems I've had. This thread still has shown me that no, you can go cheaper (much cheaper)
. Oh well, live and learn.Again these were originally intended to run at home where I could barely keep temps at decent levels (IMO, mid-70s and below) with two cards, let alone 3. Now that they're in a cooler location I could probably spend a bit of time to swap things out if I had to. I have all 5970s working away at the moment though so until I can do more builds or get more cards, I might be losing 200MH due to temps overall at the moment (ideal VS current setup).
Now CPU-wise ok I might be $120 over from getting cheapo single cores. When I bought an X3 and saw that the two cards pegged it to 100%, I wasn't sure if it was just a bug compared to the CPU being powerful enough to keep the cards fed. I think now it is rather the former and if a single core is really good enough to mine with then that's good to know.
CPU usage bug depends from cards, drivers and system you're using, if you are using linux you will probably be able to avoid this bug but if windows is a must then in the task manager you can change cpu affinity for your miner and make it run only on one core so CPU usage falls to 50% (assuming no other cpu resource consuming apps are not running in the background).
On 12.1 drivers with 2.6 sdk I noticed lower hashrates when miner was using 100% of core0 on Q9300 @ 1.8GHz. Only when I let it use all 4 cores would it return back to 'normal' speed.
No such issue on previous drivers (11.5, 2.3 sdk)
Ahh, thanks. Right now I have affinity turned off for all cards on all systems and none are using the CPU at all. I don't think it's actively affecting my hashrates though - I'm right in line where I'm pretty sure I should be. I mean, sure I could experiment and see if it improves things for sure but I'm not seeing anything detrimental at the moment (just 100% utliization).
Edit, oh global affinity via task manager, not GUIminer? Got it. Will try that.
Ok I'll post now that things are completed here. Time to go down the rabbit hole - sorry for the photo spam on the post btw .
So, mining?! Sure! "Let's go!" I said. Had some funds set aside I knew I could put into this. The plan, like any, was brilliant! Now, on the other hand, I'm not quite geeky enough to do headless Linux miners or crate+cardboard machine setups so alas, for me a case, Windows, and GUIminer will have to do. Not quite as cost-effective but it's what I know I could do. Since I'm an Evangelion fan, I wanted to compliment my main rig with others (miners) named after angels so thought it'd be fun at any rate.
-------------------------
Ramiel Build:
Thought I'd start things off right with a 4-way card system (since my main GPUs have always been Nvidia). Budget allowed for a quad setup of 6770s being efficient.
Parts:
AMD Athlon X3
ASUS generic DVD Burner
A WD Raptor 150GB I had as a backup drive that I could wipe and use.
Hyper 212 Cooler
2x4GB Corsair Vegeance RAM
4x HIS 6770s
Corsair 500R Black (best mid tower I could find with side fans for cooling and enough expansion slots at a good price with good quality build).
LEPA G900 PSU
2x 140mm Aerocool Shark Blue Fans
6x 120mm Aerocool Shark Blue Fans
1x 120mm black (leftover) Corsair fan
1x 200mm Cooler Master Side Fan
Cyberpower 900w UPS Backup
Acer 18.5" LCD (just a basic budget monitor)
Cheapo Pixxo KB/Mouse Combo
Rosewill USB wireless adapter
Windows 7 Pro x64
Mistake #1
Had an ASUS Sabertooth that didn't accept 3 cards. It was a good board but only after trying the layout, I realized it didn't work... Whoops. Replaced with a Gigabyte UD7.
Everything was progressing well
But then...
Mistake #2
Seeing as how I've not worked with this case before (and board), Gigabyte puts their supplimentary power connector at an odd right angle to the mainboard (and on a board as large as the UD7, it literally is a quarter inch from the 500R's case slant). Just a heads up that if you use this combo, the connector CAN NOT be connected without cutting the case.
4 hours later (I have limited tools available, alas, and that case steel powdercoat was surprisingly very tough to punch through).
After a few warm-up tests though, the singular side fan was swapped to the two 140mm fans for more air flow.
Mistake #3
TEMPS. OH MY THE TEMPS!
I don't have screenshots or photos of them but the midde cards simply could not keep up at 100% fan - these simple cards at only ~110w I thought wouldn't dump that much heat but no... upper 80s C was normal. Time to revise things again.
Good news now is that the temps are under control, the cards have airflow and things are stable. Sliders are maxed in AB (though with the OC boost they seem to crash past 1,000mhz pretty quick). But really, for a system costing far above $1k now, I can't be happy with only 600MH now can I?
Post below for part 2 so as to not spam with one large entry...
. So, mining?! Sure! "Let's go!" I said. Had some funds set aside I knew I could put into this. The plan, like any, was brilliant! Now, on the other hand, I'm not quite geeky enough to do headless Linux miners or crate+cardboard machine setups so alas, for me a case, Windows, and GUIminer will have to do. Not quite as cost-effective but it's what I know I could do. Since I'm an Evangelion fan, I wanted to compliment my main rig with others (miners) named after angels so thought it'd be fun at any rate.
-------------------------
Ramiel Build:
Thought I'd start things off right with a 4-way card system (since my main GPUs have always been Nvidia). Budget allowed for a quad setup of 6770s being efficient.
Parts:
AMD Athlon X3
ASUS generic DVD Burner
A WD Raptor 150GB I had as a backup drive that I could wipe and use.
Hyper 212 Cooler
2x4GB Corsair Vegeance RAM
4x HIS 6770s
Corsair 500R Black (best mid tower I could find with side fans for cooling and enough expansion slots at a good price with good quality build).
LEPA G900 PSU
2x 140mm Aerocool Shark Blue Fans
6x 120mm Aerocool Shark Blue Fans
1x 120mm black (leftover) Corsair fan
1x 200mm Cooler Master Side Fan
Cyberpower 900w UPS Backup
Acer 18.5" LCD (just a basic budget monitor)
Cheapo Pixxo KB/Mouse Combo
Rosewill USB wireless adapter
Windows 7 Pro x64
Mistake #1
Had an ASUS Sabertooth that didn't accept 3 cards. It was a good board but only after trying the layout, I realized it didn't work... Whoops. Replaced with a Gigabyte UD7.
Everything was progressing well
But then...
Mistake #2
Seeing as how I've not worked with this case before (and board), Gigabyte puts their supplimentary power connector at an odd right angle to the mainboard (and on a board as large as the UD7, it literally is a quarter inch from the 500R's case slant). Just a heads up that if you use this combo, the connector CAN NOT be connected without cutting the case.
4 hours later (I have limited tools available, alas, and that case steel powdercoat was surprisingly very tough to punch through).
After a few warm-up tests though, the singular side fan was swapped to the two 140mm fans for more air flow.
Mistake #3
TEMPS. OH MY THE TEMPS!
I don't have screenshots or photos of them but the midde cards simply could not keep up at 100% fan - these simple cards at only ~110w I thought wouldn't dump that much heat but no... upper 80s C was normal. Time to revise things again.
Good news now is that the temps are under control, the cards have airflow and things are stable. Sliders are maxed in AB (though with the OC boost they seem to crash past 1,000mhz pretty quick). But really, for a system costing far above $1k now, I can't be happy with only 600MH now can I?
Post below for part 2 so as to not spam with one large entry...
... Lots of Images ...
So that looks really clean, but I'm curious as to why you even bothered with cases? Seems like they just trap heat and get in the way when you want to do any maintenance.
Thanks. You know I'll be honest. Thought running a system without a case would A. be more at risk for issues with exposed parts. B. Thought that cooling the cards would be less efficient since fans would have to be placed / tied on / etc. to force air-cool the cards. C. Don't really have any place that I'd consder safe at home where I could leave bare components run without issues. D. Again, pets and stuff. E. I guess it kinda scared me really. I mean I can see otherwise that plenty of people have done it in this thread without issue but I've not tried it. F. I also run a computer business so these rigs can be donated / repurposed / etc. should mining tank. I'm sure the average person would buy a clean system but it could be parted-out if necessary.
In terms of maintenence, there really isn't any now (finally). Uptime so far is upwards of 10 days at a time barring Windows updates (haven't had a single BSOD with all 3 systems at all). Temps and systems are rock solid and are remotely managed. At the CC facility, they gather what, a fifth or sixth of the dust as fast as at home? Probably could let them run for 2 months there before even a single cleaning.