yes those are lego...and duplo...It's a holdover until I get some time to build the wood frame.  Two 6970's at ~360MH/s on stock voltage and one 5830 at 270MH/s, also on stock voltage...all running on linuxcoin.  Using the GPU fans @ 50% they all hover around 73C in my basement drawing 720 watts.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/06/29/1535216/a-cashless-high-value-anonymous-currency-how

not the usual acrid response to the mention of Bitcoin in the comments...which is interesting...tho complete FUD about Bitcoin being hacked (as usual)

Received the two 5970's from scifimike12 today - packed well, prompt shipping, mining well, zero issues.  A trustworthy seller - no escrow needed/used, highly recommended.

would you take 1BTC for the dual PSU adapter delivered in the US?  Is this a cablesaurus adapter or home-made?

this is my FAIL - my private pool is being DDOSed...and it was also my backup pool - very short sighted on my part.

added a real backup pool and all is working fine (not sure about rejects yet)

yes


[2012-06-15 15:03:26] Pool 0 slow/down or URL or credentials invalid
[2012-06-15 15:03:26] Unable to get work from pool 0 http://gpumax.com:8332

double checked credentials - still no love

A real stand-up guy...just wish I got there first!

will this work with p2pool software (longpoll timing problem)?  This is still a problem with the BFL singles from what I've read.

Thank you both, this small-pea-sized blob method worked perfectly.  My fans are able to run a lot slower and keep the <72 temps.  Time to do the rest of them.

out of curiosity, which GPU (as reported by cgminer) is the first/lowest in descending order?  The GPU closest to the DVI plugs or the fan?

You are correct, it is...there were suggestions of one grain of rice and of several (in the corners).  I chose the latter and it looks like I'll open it up again and redo it.  I can just thin out what's there, no need to clean and re-apply, correct?

so I re-greased the 5970 using the method above. I didn't see jonnyj's post as I did use the 1.0mm pads on the VMRs (chips circled above not the RAM).  It all seemed to fit well with the 1.0mm pads (what do I know, it's my first rebuild). 

I took a picture half way through and am now thinking I used too much grease because the fan is maintaining 4200RPM to keep >73C on stock clocks, worse than my other two 5970s (~3400RPM).  I spread it thin and used the "grain of rice" recommendation I've read here.  Am I looking at doing this over again this weekend?

And I did clean up the left GPU, I wasn't *that* sloppy

I messed that up, I have 5870's in that rig and read those voltages instead (which are 1.163).  The 5970's are all set to 1.050.  Good eye

angry chimp indeed...thx for the tip D&T, just ordered from frozencpu:

Phobya Thermal Pad XT 120mm x 20mm x 0.5mm - 7W/mk (V-Regs, RAM, Ramplex, Koolance, MIPs, Innovatek) (19099)
Phobya Thermal Pad XT 120mm x 20mm x 1.0mm - 7W/mk (V-Regs, RAM, Ramplex, Koolance, MIPs, Innovatek) (19100)

I figure I'll use both thicknesses at some point as I split my remaining cards open and re-grease prior to the summer months.

Looks like I've got some time to polish up the GPUs  waiting for the USPS - thx rjk

I googled around and searched this forum for thermal pad recommendations and found this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54617.msg702129#msg702129

Phobya Thermal Pads in .5mm and 1mm.  Seems like I might need the 1mm if I'm not replacing the memory pads (square pads?).  Any recommendations or things to avoid?

Thanks guys, I figured as much.  When you say replace the pads do you mean the torn ones only (circled, etc) or all of the large-ish squares also?  The square/large pads seem ok visually.

As for sourcing the pads, do you recommend anything in particular?  Newegg (my toystore of choice) only returns this CPU thermal pad (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835230030).

Also the TIM that I removed was quite thick (1mm+) compared to what I've read here.  Is that typically what you see when regreasing a factory/refurb?  

One of my reference 5970's had been running hot with high fans to keep >72C so I decided to try my hand at replacing the (factory?) thermal grease with some of the good stuff recommended on many posts here.  After unscrewing all screws I could find and trying to understand how to get the cooler off, a little pressure and pop, they split rather suddenly leaving me with this:



The gray stuff was thick (at least 1mm) and messy, spilling well over the edges of the actual GPU chips themselves.  The cooler had some residue also:



I went about cleaning it with the 2 part arctic dissolve and clean solutions starting with part 1 to get the old junk up:



messy, took a lot of paper towels/coffee filters and time.  Finally got it looking like:



There is still a bit of residue on the around the resistors near the GPUs, but I'll get them when I apply part 2 of the cleaning product.  The cooler now looks like:



I'm concerned about the condition of the thermal pads.  I drew 2nd-grader circles around the two I'm really concerned about.  Are these salvageable?  

It's late here so I'll finish this tomorrow.  Any help greatly appreciated.

Two of them are in the same rig with two 5870s running at 950/300/1.05V for ~437MH each  - total with a 1250W PS pull 1KW +/- 10W.  The whole rig crunches ~2367MH/s which makes for nice round math @ 2.36MH/W

3x5970

all configured the same, MH/s is +/- 2% between all three

bamt 0.5
cgminer 2.3.1f
clocks/mem 835/300
vddc 1.050 (not 1.163 as I previously mistakenly posted)
temps: 68-72C
MH/s 758

I just watched the video on the newegg link above and was surprised at the "grain of rice" application of the thermal paste.  I've been reading that "less is more" when applying this stuff in other posts here, but had not seen how little the "less" reference is.  I'm assuming that a GPU application is the same as the CPU application in the video above?  I've got a 5970 that is requiring close to 100% fan to keep at 72C and think I will see what this could do to drop the temps/fans to be more in line with the other two cards that I have.

+1 this would be ideal for this product.  Right-size for all (serious) budgets.  They don't need to be hot-plug and would allow for mixed generations of FPGA boards in the future.  Of course this means more R&D into the "chassis" which would mean we won't see if for some time...