CGMiner - Bit Coin Mining software & AMD HD7870's

[Ben Rogers]

Hi there,

I run Bit Coin Mining software, namely CG miner or GUI Miner and have just bought a XFX HD7870 2GB card. This card shows artifacts when running the bit coin software. I have checked my voltages and the 3.3 and 5v rails are spot on pretty much and the 12v rail is at 11.90 (under load) so it is nothing to do with the PSU - this was my first thought.

I have tried upwards of 5 sets of drivers to no avail. I have tried under clocking the card, still artifacts on the desktop with CGMiner running.

CGMiner runs at about 98 or 99% of GPU use so it is very very demanding and probably more demanding than playing new games but I may be wrong on this I am just guessing. I say this because I can not work out why my new card (MSI HD7870 2GB dual fan) does exactly the same thing. I even tried Crossfire just to test it and it did the same thing.

This PC works flawlessly with my very old HiS IceQ4 Turbo HD4850. I have tried Molex to PCI-E 6 pin adapters also, as well as the two PCI-E connectors from the 650W Coolermaster VX PSU.

I am quite frankly at a loss here and am wondering if anyone else runs a bit coin miner on a fairly decent card and gets artifacts, mainly on the task bar, flicking darker than the colour it is and sometimes with a line through it. Same with both cards. What are the chances of both cards being faulty as I find this extemely unlikely and the guy at Ebuyer said that very few XFX 7870's get returned so they will find the same as me but not sure whether they will determine the card as faulty or CGminer and other BTC miner software as too demanding for a lot of cards to handle!!!

Please help as a flickering task bar is very annoying and it puts me off with online games.

Ben

[flearider]

hmm if it is artifacts due to the card ..try running some benchmarks on the card futermark and the like .. see if you get artifacts off them ..could be a batch of cards with poor paste on them ..
"other BTC miner software as too demanding for a lot of cards to handle" it's a program and as such any card should be able to use it ..

[jigger]

It seems like its a hardware problem specific to the cards if they both show the same faults in various situations and everything else in the system is know to be good. What model cards are you using?

[Ben Rogers]

Hi,

I know that it isn't the software as the card should be able to handle whatever the software throws at it, don't know why I even wrote that, desperation to find a cause probably.

Anyhow, I have got the problem sorted - sorry for taking so long to reply back - I simple forgot about this thread.

The first card (which I thought was faulty) was an XFX HD7870 2GB - I RMA'd it to the company and they also found it faulty - I told them to run GUI Miner and CG miner at different times to see if the problem shows up for them and I think they did as they found it faulty and I got a full refund, including postage so I am happy.

I bought an MSI HD7870 2GB which uses the Picairn chip and is a bit slower than the XFX card as that had the Taihiti chip (was getting 440MH/s with the XFX) and I get 385 stock with the MSI and 420 Overclocked to 1167 core with intensity of 11 and 418MH/s average with intensity flag set to -9 which allows me to use youtube and stuff generally without the computer lagging very much. 11 makes youtube lag and is too much but I set it to this at night.

Going to go back on track. I bought the MSI card the day I tested my card with over 5 sets of drivers and thought myself that it had to be faulty, I even tried underclocking the RAM on it to no avail. The MSI card is a compromise; it was cheaper by 10 or 15 quid but has dual 80 mm fans so is very quiet - the XFX was very noisy when under full GPU load due to it's one 80mm fan. I am pleased enough with the performance of the MSI card and have thoughts of buying another to run in Crossfire but this would mean upgrading my 650W GX Coolermaster PSU as I tried Crossfire when I had the two cards here and the 12v rail went down to 11.62 under full GPU load and not even full CPU load - I *might* get away with it if I put my CPU back from 4400Mhz and 1.35v to stock of 1.25v and 3300MHz (i5 2500k) so it uses less power but I think a 650W with three HDDs and crossfire with my system and 5 120mm fans is right at the limit of the PSU.

It has 55A on the 12V rail mind you so it is a very good quality unit but I feel it may even be dangerous to run a PSU right to it's limits so would probably buy a decent 750W PSU such as a Corsair, Enermax or another Coolermaster.

I never bothered running futuremark programs in the end as I didn't get round to it - I downloaded the latest 3dmark mind you. I actually reckon the faulty card would have ran that flawlessly as the problem seemed to only be with mining software - namely guiminer and cgminer, the latter of which I still use due to it's flexibility and it being slightly faster than GUI miner with my card.