AMD R9 290x or GTX 970...

M

malekbaba

New member
I am a bit confused. Want to buy a new card but can not decide which one to start with... I would like to mine X11 algos.... and also others if find them funny and good... Please help me
 
If you take the hash rate of lets say 9000 kilohashes/second for the R9 290X and divide it by the price of say $300 , you will get a ratio of hashes per dollar, the higher the number the better value the card is. So in this case 9000/300=30.
Try this for a few cards, and select the highest one from the results for pure speed. Other thing to consider is electricity usage, by taking the hash speed and dividing it by power used, you can also work out hashes per watt of electricity(look on the spec of the card and wikipedia hardware mining page etc)

Incorporating both speed and electricity use gives:

quality of card = (hash speed) / (price * power in watts)

work out 3 or 4 by hand and select the highest result for best value card and lowest electricity usage.
 
Sub-Ether said:
If you take the hash rate of lets say 9000 kilohashes/second for the R9 290X and divide it by the price of say $300 , you will get a ratio of hashes per dollar, the higher the number the better value the card is. So in this case 9000/300=30.
Try this for a few cards, and select the highest one from the results for pure speed. Other thing to consider is electricity usage, by taking the hash speed and dividing it by power used, you can also work out hashes per watt of electricity(look on the spec of the card and wikipedia hardware mining page etc)

Incorporating both speed and electricity use gives:

quality of card = (hash speed) / (price * power in watts)

work out 3 or 4 by hand and select the highest result for best value card and lowest electricity usage.
Click to expand...

nice explanation.. however hard to accomplish without the actual cards :)

I would go with the amd card. 290x is a monster.
 
However, remember that if you decide to stop mining down the road the cost of the ASIC has to be factored into the ROI... At least with a GPU I can repurpose it into a gaming or business use PC!

Take it from one who has invested a lot into ASIC machines...
 
Sub-Ether said:
If you take the hash rate of lets say 9000 kilohashes/second for the R9 290X and divide it by the price of say $300 , you will get a ratio of hashes per dollar, the higher the number the better value the card is. So in this case 9000/300=30.
Try this for a few cards, and select the highest one from the results for pure speed. Other thing to consider is electricity usage, by taking the hash speed and dividing it by power used, you can also work out hashes per watt of electricity(look on the spec of the card and wikipedia hardware mining page etc)

Incorporating both speed and electricity use gives:

quality of card = (hash speed) / (price * power in watts)

work out 3 or 4 by hand and select the highest result for best value card and lowest electricity usage.
Click to expand...

If you really want to mine via GPU (and have to pay for electicity) the single MOST important number is kH/s per Watt, everything else is just personal preference.
And this more or less excludes AMD GPUs.

It just doesn't make sense to mine when you pay the equivalent of 1.5 DRK per DRK mined :wink:
 
To answer the original question, my mining rate for an AMD R9 290 X tri OC = 7.6 megahash using catalyst drivers 14.7 RC 3 and multi-miner sgminer-5.0-pre-release-2014-07-20-win32 with Wolf0's bins pasted in and renamed in mining folder (btw catalyst 14.7 RC1 gave a reduced speed =6.6 megahash and 14.9 was unstable with an old 6950 on same motherboard).
Sgminer pre-release version is recommended over the later sgminer 5.0 versions as it is more stable in my opinion.
 
Sub, can I run the sgminer-5.0-pre-release-2014-07-20-win32 on a win64 bit system? I'll have to try a 290x card, I think I had just ordered a 280x, and it will be here any day dang...
 
ok, figured it out, thanks man, running at about 40-50% higher since switching over to wolf0s bins, i think total was 45Mh/s and also renamed the wolf bins to the correct card, thanks again!
 
It even seems to run cooler, this statement is not based on fact, but I remember I was heating the whole house up with 2 rigs, now not bad. However, wattage draw seems about the same..??
 
tuppydog said:
It even seems to run cooler, this statement is not based on fact, but I remember I was heating the whole house up with 2 rigs, now not bad. However, wattage draw seems about the same..??
Click to expand...
Once you've figured out what the maximum hash speeds are, try dropping your settings to reduce heat. down intensity a notch, GPU voltages and GPU core clock slowly, working out the best settings before crashing or low hash values occur.
 
I could never get any of the 5.x sigminers to work with drk,and on win7. Has your rig ever worked, and if so, what is your motherboard? Do you have the following in the executable at the top:
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1

Also you may want to do a complete driver cleanout AMD has a great program called AMDcleanup Utility. I'd start there, then reinstall drivers. Then try to run sgminer again. Sorry, I know, I spent hours and hours trying to get it to work with X11, and some of them just don't work. It seems like the older sgminers (4x) or wolf0s x-11 sgminer 4.1.0g work faster, hope this helps....
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Sub-Ether said:
Once you've figured out what the maximum hash speeds are, try dropping your settings to reduce heat. down intensity a notch, GPU voltages and GPU core clock slowly, working out the best settings before crashing or low hash values occur.
Click to expand...
I will try this, I did crash a few times, I learned quickly that higher intensity is not always better, also, I learned not to overclock too much either, this is the fun part, tinkering !!
 
the 290s will work on win7. I was getting about 8Mh each card underclocked. (4 card rig) with wolf's bins.
 
this is for sgminer:
http://www.reddit.com/r/DRKCoin/comments/2o1yoz/rewritten_x11_binaries/

run your miner without the bins in place first.. then rename wolf bin to the name your miner created.

Code: 
{
"pools" : [
    {
        "url" : "127.0.0.1:9991",
        "user" : "user",
        "pass" : "pass"
    }
    ],
"intensity" : "18",
"gpu-engine" : "1000",
"gpu-memclock" : "1450",
"shaders"    : "2048",
"kernel" : "x11mod",
"xxxshaders"    : "1792",
"xintensity" : "64",
"worksize" : "64",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"xxxxthread-concurrency" : "8192",
"gpu-threads" : "2",
"xxxgpu-fan":      "30-85",
"api-listen" : true,
"api-network" : true,
"api-port" : "5028",
"api-allow" : "W:0/0",
"auto-fan" : true
}
 
this is for sgminer:
http://www.reddit.com/r/DRKCoin/comments/2o1yoz/rewritten_x11_binaries/

run your miner without the bins in place first.. then rename wolf bin to the name your miner created.

some of the stuff in this conf is left-over from olden days and is not used... but this is a copy and paste of mine.
Code: 
{
"pools" : [
    {
        "url" : "127.0.0.1:9991",
        "user" : "user",
        "pass" : "pass"
    }
    ],
"intensity" : "18",
"gpu-engine" : "1000",
"gpu-memclock" : "1450",
"shaders"    : "2048",
"kernel" : "x11mod",
"xxxshaders"    : "1792",
"xintensity" : "64",
"worksize" : "64",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"xxxxthread-concurrency" : "8192",
"gpu-threads" : "2",
"xxxgpu-fan":      "30-85",
"api-listen" : true,
"api-network" : true,
"api-port" : "5028",
"api-allow" : "W:0/0",
"auto-fan" : true
}
 
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