A feathercoin/litecoin mining guide suited for multi-gpu platforms
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Hello dear friends,
Although I am mining for fun/learning, I really could not resist those four-7970-on-one-motherboard rigs that others build, so I bought a 5970. 8)
Aside from my 5850 which has been working just well, this new card required a challenging setup to be up and running completely. I am just posting my little findings here, because I have seen many people having problem regarding their multi-gpu setup. Interestingly all of their questions have already been answered in README files inside pieces of software!
First, I should say that my OS is Linux, so I don’t have any ideas how to translate these commands in Windows. If you are a hardcore miner, I would definitely recommend Linux to you. Don’t be afraid. You will absolutely love its stability.
If you own a single card setup, everything must go fine. However, when it comes to multi-gpu setups, a lot of issues might appear. Some of corresponding issues are as follow:
- Cgminer does not detect all of your gpus. You will get “ADL found less devices than opencl!”. It won’t show the running temperature and you will always be worried.
- Your gpus are detected but cgminer does not use them effectively. You get lots of fluctuation in hashrate and your gpu load barely reaches 99%.
- Cgminer detects all your gpus, but uses only one of them.
- One of your cards is acting accordingly to the other cards.
- Everything seems OK, but cgminer gives hardware errors like Nonce errors.
- You will become sensitive to special values of thread-concurrency. For example, higher values will just lock up your computer.
- One of your cpu cores will run at 100% usage and it will bottleneck your gpus.
Believe it or not, I had all of those problems!
[s]The solution barely depends on the version of Catalyst driver. At least for me it does not depend on that.[/s] I would like to amend this. The choice of drivers does affect your performance. The best driver for me has been 12.8 drivers. 13.x versions produce a Cpu bug which leads the the last problem I listed. Specially, the newest ati driver makes a blank cgminer with false hashrates. Thus, the best driver remains 12.8 and it will compile on kernels 3.5 and backward. So if you have a newer kernel, either find a patch for ati-drivers 12.8 or downgrade to 3.5.
To get a rock, solid hashrate on all of your gpus to the maximum capacity, consider the followings in order:
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After installing the driver and the needed software, remove and backup your old xorg.conf:
mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak
This step is important. -
Then, run the following command:
aticonfig --adapter=all -f --initial
This step is important too. Don’t miss it.
Restart your X. -
What ever script you are going to make and use, don’t forget to start your script with these commands, in order, of course:
export DISPLAY=:0
export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100
export GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1 -
Get the other settings for cgminer from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117221.0
On my 5970, without any overclocking and using default clocks at 725/1000 I get a solid hashrate of 683.5 kh/s.
Have a nice time mining. With very mild overclocking to 745/1000, I get a solid 704 kh/s hashrate. -
Aticonfig -f,
Ive used the same line without F and no problem, what does f do? -
to my knowledge it creates/writes the xorg.conf file
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[quote name=“svennand” post=“22744” timestamp=“1374571551”]
Aticonfig -f,
Ive used the same line without F and no problem, what does f do?
[/quote]-f, --force
Only valid with ‘initial’ option. Force aticonfig to generate default
Monitor, Device, and Screen sections even if the original configuration
file has invalid settings in these sections.The first step of doing mv completely renames the xorg.conf file. I just add -f option for more security pad.
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Lol of course. -f almost allways means force.
why didnt i think of that (been tired the last couple of days, my forum posting is late at night after long hours of working… ::))one small tip btw, if you have some weird issues with the cards after upgrading to different version (6xxx series to 7xxx series and so on).
delete all the xorg.conf files before running the aticonfig --adapter=all --inital you will then get a fresh xorg.conf configured regarding the newest hardware you have.
I had real problems when i had cards of many different models that i moved around in different rigs. if i used aticonfig --lsa the temp readout and such would fail and cgminer never found all the cards. This was eliminated by deleting rm /etc/x11/somethingsomething/xorg.conf* and recreate xorg.conf -
[quote name=“svennand” post=“23115” timestamp=“1374785286”]
one small tip btw, if you have some weird issues with the cards after upgrading to different version (6xxx series to 7xxx series and so on).
delete all the xorg.conf files before running the aticonfig --adapter=all --inital you will then get a fresh xorg.conf configured regarding the newest hardware you have.
I had real problems when i had cards of many different models that i moved around in different rigs. if i used aticonfig --lsa the temp readout and such would fail and cgminer never found all the cards. This was eliminated by deleting rm /etc/x11/somethingsomething/xorg.conf* and recreate xorg.conf
[/quote]Yes. Actually, the first step that I listed should already do this, unless the user reads xorg configuration data from another place. It renames the xorg.conf so that a new files has to be created. Thanks for emphasizing on this, anyway.
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[quote name=“ketetefid” post=“23227” timestamp=“1374863171”]
[quote author=svennand link=topic=2914.msg23115#msg23115 date=1374785286]
one small tip btw, if you have some weird issues with the cards after upgrading to different version (6xxx series to 7xxx series and so on).
delete all the xorg.conf files before running the aticonfig --adapter=all --inital you will then get a fresh xorg.conf configured regarding the newest hardware you have.
I had real problems when i had cards of many different models that i moved around in different rigs. if i used aticonfig --lsa the temp readout and such would fail and cgminer never found all the cards. This was eliminated by deleting rm /etc/x11/somethingsomething/xorg.conf* and recreate xorg.conf
[/quote]Yes. Actually, the first step that I listed should already do this, unless the user reads xorg configuration data from another place. It renames the xorg.conf so that a new files has to be created. Thanks for emphasizing on this, anyway.
[/quote]Ah reread you post, yes you did. i know aticonfig takes auto backup so in my fast read trough i though it was that you meant…
