Source
r/EtherMining•
pmarascal

Minimal Improvement After vBios Edits?

Last night I finally took some maintenance time for my rig, editing the vBios of two of my AMD cards while I tidied up some things. For reference, the rig is 2x 1070, a 480, and a 570 mixed together.

CardStock vBiosModded vBios
Nitro+ 480 4GB (Samsung)21.7 Eth - 788 Sia25.5 Eth - 620 Sia
MSI Gaming 570 4GB (Hynix)19.6 Eth - 715 Sia22.5 Eth / 580 Sia

So here you can see a 'nice' improvement, but this was actually just from tweaking the dual intensities.. So I'm kind of confused as to what the heck I did wrong. I can see my new memory timings in GPU-Z and the other changes as well, so I know the vBios went through ok. You'll see I did lower the Watts allowed, so it's technically an 'improvement' but I first flashed/tested without changing power/watts and it didn't change hashrates.

This is what I changed in the vBios. Since my rig is mixed and headless, I can't adjust AMD cards in software tools so thats why fan/power limit was messed with here.

  • Memory Timings after research for specific memory brands
  • Lowered Total Watts allowed (down 15 watts)
  • Undervolted Memory by 25
  • Memory clock to 1950
  • Fan and temp curves

Edit: Or are these now the new 'normal' since the DAG size issues?

Posted Aug 10, 2017, 8:47 PM UTC

15
sojun80•

Well your still a little off of the 28mh/s goal but...

When you modify the bios, you are only working to improve the memory timings which provides better results with eth mining. Sia mining is more cpu focused.

You didn't mention your OC settings. It's all about getting the memory up as high as possible too.

1
pmarascalOP•

I can't OC with software when running normally (headless and mixed so AMD can't be altered unless it's plugged to a display). So I lowered Core Clock slightly (-50 or so) and bumped Memory Clock to 1950 inside the vBios.

I didn't want to try and push memory much further since it's through the vBios with limited AMD feedback running mixed like this. I guess I saw a small bump, but the dual mining was throwing off my expectations I think, will test only ETH next time I take the miner down for a bit.

1
P00P135•

When you dual mine you can't undervolt and lower watts too much as the GPU becomes power hungry. To get a better example of before and after you need to just mine Eth.

1
pmarascalOP•

Yea I think this is my solution then, I guess doing my test comparisons while dual mining was throwing off my expectations. I'll test ETH only for giggles next time I take the rig down.

While testing, I was wondering about the best way to tell if I starved the card. I feel like I should know this answer during regular unvolting testing while gaming awhile back, but is there a combo of graphs where I should look for blips up/down during mining that would signify me starving the card? Mem clocks stayed even, but during dual mining Core clock always seems to jump around so I can't tell there.

1
P00P135•

Just turn off dual mining and you should get 27-28Mh/s on the the AMD cards if you BIOS modded correctly. Now you just have to set the proper -dcri to get a good balance of Eth/Sia.

1