Thanks for the advice guys. For now I've temporarily fixed the problem by (finally) installing MSI Afterburner and reducing the memory clock to 600Mhz and keeping the fans running at only 74% (it stop-starts at 75%). Temperature seems to be stable at 75C, and the fans run smoothly now. I'll look into replacing them one day

Failing after only 4 months of use? That couldn't be... Even older cards would be able to stand up to a lot more use than that... right?

Hi guys,

I came home to find that my ati 6950 1gb is making funny noises. The fan seems to be stopping and starting every 2 seconds, like it's struggling to stay switched on or something. When it's mining and making this noise, the Mhashes/s looks to still be stable, with normal accepts and rejects. Everything appears normal except for the sound it's making. My card is only 4 months old, with all settings still stock. What could be the problem?

I have been mining with it almost 24/7 for the past 3 months or so at around aggression=8 and haven't gotten any problems so far. It almost sounds like it's dying on me. The card still works fine on graphics intensive games and doesn't make the stop-start noise when I'm playing.

Anyone able to shed some light on this? Have I busted my card already?

Just nitpicking here, but there's a typo on the submissions page.

"To receive your free butcoin please fill out the following form in its entirety."

Looks like a great site!

Total win. Got me good.

Hmm... seem to be getting 4-5mh/s less for the latest release. This is on my stock 6950 with nothing unlocked using


Also tried VECTORS VECTORS2 with no difference. I reverted back to the July kernel release for now.

Any luck on finding the thieves or getting anything back?

And you show remarkable restraint. I would've posted the offending IPs the moment I saw this happen to me.

A tiddly-widdly-bit!

Posted under same username as here. Address in sig

Sent you a PM with some screenshot links

Does phoenix miner allow the use of the -f flag? I'd like to try setting it to -f2. I tried to chuck it into my batch file earlier but it doesn't seem to like it.

Bit of good news in the end. After shutdown and rested it for a couple hours, everything seems to be back in working order.

That little incident had me pretty worried there for a while. Many thanks to those who helped troubleshoot!

I'd go to a bitcoin-accepted cafe, and show off by opting to pay via bitcoin instead of cash.

Then I'd realize I just wasted 5 minutes to pay via btc as opposed to 5 seconds via cash...

No by all means ask away. All the better to troubleshoot.

I'm not actually sitting in front of my pc at the moment, so i'll do some gpu intensive testing when I get home.

Wasn't running any driver, software or kernel updates of any sort. I just left it to mine away while I went off to work. Yes I'm using windows. I DID notice a whole lot of error alert sounds when I remote desktopped in the first time to see why my miner stopped. The error messages were definitely regarding my video card, from what I could see before they disappeared.

My PSU is 650W so there should be adequate power. Never had any issues with it before.

I've shut down my PC for now. Temperature was never really an issue as it was always a stable 73-76 degrees C, so I don't think my card overheated or anything.

Hmm.. why didn't I think of that...
Will try running a graphics intense game, and failing that I'll see how I go on a different PC.

Many thanks!

Tried fiddling around with some other miners. It appears that they're not actually detecting any GPUs in my PC whenever the miner loads up. What would be the cause of this? Would it be because my card just fried? It looks to still be working fine in my device manager.

You mean my miner? I'm actually using the Phoenix miner, but I do use the -k poclbm lines in my batch file. Phoenix miner is the latest version (1.50)

My batch file is basically:

phoenix -u -v http://usrname:password@miner:8332/ -k poclbm DEVICE=0 VECTORS BFI_INT FASTLOOP AGGRESSION=8

Was just mining normally with Phoenix miner and all of a sudden I'm getting tonnes of errors about getting stale jobs or something (can't remember). So I shut down my miner and fire it up again.

Now it's giving me the error message "Fatal kernel error: Failed to apply BFI_INT patch to kernel! Is BFI_INT support on this hardware?"

I made absolutely no changes, have done nothing to the miner recently, and all of a sudden I'm getting this message? I updated my card drivers ages ago so I have no idea what's wrong.

Somebody save me!

I had that problem with my old gtx260. However once I swapped it with my new ATI 6950, the problem went away. It seems like it's an issue with the card itself and not any settings. I had to restart my PC whenever it froze before.

I've recently been looking at the hash speeds of other pools, and now I'm a bit confused as to how one goes about actually choosing a pool. This is my current scenario:

Pool A: Less people, lower overall pool speeds. Blocks can take anywhere from 30min to 24hours (zomg..) to be solved, but on average it seems like it's 1 block every 5-7 hours. At my hash rate I get around 0.07btc per solved block.

Pool B: More people, massively higher pool speeds. Blocks are solved frequently, taking at most about 2hrs, but on average it seems to be less than an hour. At my hash rate I get only 0.007btc per block.

I get much higher rewards per block for mining in pool A, but it's disheartening to sometimes be stuck with a 12hour+ block. Blocks are solved a loooot faster in pool B, but over a 24 hour period or so, it seems I earn less in total than pool A.

Which one should I stick with?