It turns out the offer I received was a scam.  I'm still in the market to buy your 4gb cards.

-TBT

Fellow miners, even with sneaky methods of extending the mining life of 4GB cards the end of an era is upon us.

You've got the cards and they're essentially fancy paperweights now.  I want them.  Let's make a deal.

Bulk deals greatly preferred but if you're easy to work with I'm happy to make smaller purchases.  Exact price will be determined by card model and condition but in general I'm offering $90 per 4GB card.  While I'm happy to purchase from anywhere in the world shipping will be to Hawaii and that will be a significant expense for any purchases outside the US.  I'm unconcerned with what bios they're currently running as long as they are running.

Escrow from a trusted member of the forum community is required for all transactions with anyone I haven't done business with before.  Feel free to PM me or post any questions/offers.

-TBT

Meaning the hashrate did not throttle when the card was plugged into a monitor?  If so that would be pretty conclusive that rdluffy was on the right track.  Using the dummy plugs in your cards that he suggest (or leaving the plugged into monitors) would solve the problem but in my opinion it would be better to find the low-power mode that is causing the cards to throttle and turn it off.  If by "The cards work fine when plugged into a monitor." you mean they produce a proper display but the hashrate continues to throttle you can rule out low-power "sleep" modes as your culprit.

When diagnosing problems like this it's a good idea to remember the cardinal rule of computers:  Computers do exactly what you tell them to, not what you want them to.  Somehow you've told your miner that it should be throttling down the cards.  Maybe you did it explicitly through a setting you chose; more likely you did it implicitly through the software you've installed.  Try flashing back to stock bios, using Win10, etc...Once you find a configuration that works see if you can reproduce your problem.  That will tell you how to fix the problem in your desired configuration.

Checking for memory errors is always a good idea and would explain the drop in hashrate but not the corresponding drop in power consumption.  Did you check the bios settings you changed as I suggested earlier?  If you set the max temp. to 66 it would do exactly what you are seeing.  It would also be an easy mistake to make if you thought you were adjusting fan settings.

The simplest explanation would be temperatures.  Check the max temp. you set in the bios as well.  If the card temperatures get to the limits you set you'll get thermal throttling.

I see the point being made.  I thought it might be possible to avoid the cards needing to talk to each other by sharing access to pointers.  The hashing could be done on two cards in parallel using the same pointers to working memory.  I'm not familiar with what is loaded into the GPUs themselves though and what the system RAM is used for.

Actually pulling this off is far beyond my technical capabilities but I was thinking it might be possible to use two 4GB cards working in tandem to simulate an 8GB card.  If it's reasonable to split the DAG into two parts each half could be loaded into a separate card.  Both cards could begin hashing together, passing control of the function back and forth between them as elements are selected from the portion of the DAG loaded in the other card.  As I said, the technical details of how Ethash works are outside my understanding, but as current mining software seems to lean heavily on pagefiles  and does use system RAM could a pool of pointers be shared between two cards allowing them to work together like this?

I understand this would half the overall hashrate, perhaps even worse due to increased overhead, but I think it's safe to say those of us with a lot of 4GB cards would prefer that to having a bunch of paperweights.

If my suggestion is completely absurd feel free to flame and carry on with your life.  My only request is that your insults are creative or clever   

-TBT

I bought four of the low-end model Octominer built from their very first pre-order batch around 2 years ago now I believe.  They've all been working great for me but perhaps I simply got lucky as I've heard similar complaints as the OP's from others that purchased on a larger scale.  I only connected two of the 6-pin connections to the motherboard which is what they list as the minimum.  Perhaps that limited the power the board was delivering to the pci-e slots, maybe I really did just get lucky on my four boards.  All I know is that if they had fit in the server chassis I had built I would have bought at least 100 more.

Bottom line is I would rather deal with finicky motherboards (which I didn't even experience.  They were plug and play for me) that I know will work once setup as opposed to 8x miserable risers that even after I finally get connected properly will eventually die in unpredictable ways giving seriously cryptic errors.

-TBT

At the end of your batch file add this line:

This line will make your batch file pause until you hit a key so you can see what is going on.  Your problem is likely that you're getting an error of some sort and the batch file is closing immediately (probably due to the fact that with administrative rights the commands are executed from a different path.  See the picture for what I mean.  If this is your problem just use an absolute path instead of a relative path.)

I've already been in contact with him via PMs.  He's not far from me and I'm likely taking a trip out to buy his cables in person.  If you'd like it'd be no trouble for me to inspect whatever you intend to buy from him while I'm there Bill.  Should still use escrow and such but at least you'd know the hardware actually exists   

Here's the little-known bottom line, direct from Microsoft via https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12373/windows-update-faq.  If you use any of the built in Windows tools to "stop" auto-updates they will eventually fail.



In addition, even if you have used gpedit, forcibly stopped the process, tricked it into thinking you're on a metered connection, etc...MS will still silently push what they deem to be critical updates onto your computer using some vehicle other than the standard update process.  I haven't been able to figure out exactly how yet.  These mini-updates have never caused me problems with my mining, however they occasionally cause the usual windows boot partition to become non-bootable (presumably because of some of the other steps I've taken to neuter windows updates) until I manually select the windows partition from bios and it finishes the ninja update.  I'm assuming these are patching major vulnerabilities they've discovered (which would explain why they're never mentioned) so I doubt I would stop them even if I figured out how...but it would be nice to have the choice.

When they were first released I bought 5x ASUS ROG Strix 570s.  Of the 10 fans only one is still spinning.  Could be a fluke in the production run as they have sequential serial numbers but if I had to bet it would certainly be on cheap fans not designed for continuous operation.

I have a lot of things you'd might want in my thread here:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5118559.msg50080912#msg50080912
I'm not Canadian but I'm just across the border in WA so much closer than most of your moose brothers  .  If your machine is just going to be an 8 card miner I can assure you (as I'm sure any experienced miner will verify) that a celeron with 4gb of ram doesn't even get half utilized while mining.  The core usage sits around 30% and less than 2gb of ram gets used.  In that case I can rebuild the 8 card miner I originally pulled the MSI Z170A Gaming M7 in my thread with a g3930, 4gb of ram (I can always put in 8gb if you'd prefer) and the m.2 -> pci-e adapter.  Alternatively, I could sell you 8gb of DDR3 and an i3 (I don't remember which but I know I have an LGA 1150 i3 around here somewhere) leaving you to find an appropriate motherboard (I don't have any LGA 1150 mobos with 8 slots left).  Let me know if any of this interests you.

-TBT

Based on the specs of the OP's computer it looks like that's a gaming rig.  He's got cheap electricity so the 1060 will mine at a profit even if he just uses nicehash instead of learning to do the mining himself.  Seems to me that mining while he's not using the computer is just free money.  I really don't see a reason not to mine.  Everybody gets so focused on building mining farms and scaling up but the OP's scenario is what blockchain tech was designed for.  After he mines with his gaming rig for a while he'll have all the information he needs to decide for himself if it's a good idea to build dedicated mining rigs.

I have 5x EVGA 1600w T2 Titaniums for $129 each + shipping in my thread.  They come with all original cables and still have 8 years left on the warranties.

The richest 1% of the world owns over 50% of the world's wealth.  There's no reason to believe the distribution would be any different for cryptocurrencies, particularly since owning over 50% of a PoS cryptocurrency would mean non-stop, no-cost 51% attacks.  Allowing the control of a network to become so centralized defeats the entire purpose of blockchain tech and would likely cause it to implode.

Here's an article backing my 1% claim, it's a few years old but if you google the topic you'll find tons of corroboration.  https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/14/richest-1-percent-now-own-half-the-worlds-wealth.html

New items added.  Different PSUs to be added soon.

I have a 1080 Sea Hawk X (the closed loop hybrid model) for sale in my thread for $400.  If you need a better PSU I also have EVGA 1600w titaniums for $129.  Check the thread for details and pictures or contact me if interested.

Prices lowered.  Availability updated.  Tell your friends.

Is that the voice of experience I hear AM?  lol!  I guess you make a good point though.  I'll just stick to mining

-TBT