Hi,
thank you for the great job - I built a similar rig. Some info:
1. I have gigabyte 4g oc 1050 ti cards with micron memory. They can reach 15.7-15.8 on ether.
2. Also have evga ssc 1050 ti cards with samsung memory. They are very stable at +1000 memory, but they do a bit less, around 15.5-15.6 mh/s
3. Gigabyte cards are hot, evga cards much cooler - evga has good quality cooler. But cards vary - some of them tend to be hotter then the other from the same brach.
4. Windows is still painful when you want something unusual like mining... (windows 10)
5. You can give high/realtime priority to miner process, doing this will increase the mh/s rate. But, windows may become irresponsive using realtime, so stay at high, or above average. The more priority given to etherminer the higher the mh/s rate is.
6. Install video cards one-by-one, wait for all the flickering each time, then check if card is recognized. Then restart and then shutdown, and put in the next card.
7. You need msi afterburner for tuning - I disabled low level io driver, polling rate to 2000 ms.
8. You might need system explorer if you want to set permanent priority, and have a better overlook of the system.
9. Disable unnecessary windows services, like Search. The main idea is not having anything crunching in the background. Crunching means lower mh/s rate.
10. Try to keep video cards as cool as possible - a cheap box ventilator will do at 15w. I dont suggest to install small pc ventilators - at the price of one good 12cm pc ventillator you can get one big box ventilator.
11. Interestingly - lowering gpu frequency below 0 increases power consumption and increasing gpu frequency can lower power consumption.
12. I think magnetic interference can be an issue with pci-e risers. Watch for separating usb, power and sata cables, check for loose connections . Bad quality risers can give a pain, makes you thinking of faulty video cards.
13. Do not use windows power saving mode, or balanced mode, use high performance power settings. Check if pci express "link state power management" is set to "off".
14. Typical windows 10 gpu overclocking failure: one or more gpu show near 0 mh/s, windows 10 unresponsive, msi afterburner eats up processor.
15. You might want to disable windows defender, or configure to whitelist your miners directory.
16. It is suggested to use 16 Gbyte virtual memory with windows 10. With 8 gpu the VM size of Claymore is 18.5 Gbyte, so you should set an even bigger vm size.
17. There is room for improvement: for example increasing intensity to 16 for nvidia cards adds a bit to your mh/s speed (claymore: -ethi 16)
18. Most of these cards does not have proper ram cooling (or any ram cooling at all), although high ram speed is key to more mh/s.
19. Its important to keep distance between cards, they heat each other up.
20. Dont forget to set minimal fan at least 50% and dinamically rising with temperature. Vram (and VRM) needs cooling even if the gpu is not working hard (and this is the case with eth).
21. "Cu_ki failed kx failed" type failure of Claymore: something is interfering with the program to communicate with gpus. Not enough cpu power due to power management, windows defender, other programs or services and can be a loose connector as well. And way too much overclock for vram. Or maybe wrong driver, try to up (or down)grade the driver.
22. Keep distance between sata power cables, otherwise they might heat each other up. Warm sata power cables can be the cause of sudden freezes of windows.
23. Get the cheapest available old pc with at least pci-e 2 ports and an old cheap gpu (nvidia nvs versions will do) and test all your risers before using them on your rig.
24. After optimizing your cards to the best mh/s speed take a look at claymore statistics and also try to optimize for max. shares/time.
25. Dont put your best card to the first slot. Maintaining video output takes away processing power, bette use motherboard graphics for video output.
26. "Got incorrect share" troubleshooting - first try to change the riser.
27. Try to find the most stable driver for your cards, saves you lot of debugging time. Best to stay with Claymore's preferred driver.
Some measurments:
8 1050 ti: with maximum overclock reaching 126 mh/s (under proper cooling conditions) with Claymore 9.7.1, but using at 123.5 mh/s because of stability issues. 455w power consumption.