Teach this MORON to mine (may drift a bit)

[Silver_Pharaoh]

Installing from high speed USB to an SSD. Takes the edge off the pain...

I'll stick with the 270 for now. Once that is set and stable, I'll get some info about the 68xx from you and see how far I get on my own. That will be the test of how much I understand.

Good idea.

Also I call "unfair" on that USB -> SSD Windows install. I had to use DVD's and (yuck) SATA II in college.

 

[xsuperbgx]

Cryptoslax has a vertminer already built in. They just added modules for heavy and skein too. If you still have that cryptoslax install, all you need to do is change the config and click to start.

 

[Vic Velcro]

Yeah, I hear ya. Almost like having to do DOS 3.30 and then Windows 2.0 to an RLL drive on a 386SX board with 1 MEG of RAM. A day of your life you will never get back...

Anyhow, Win 7 is done, drivers in, updates downloaded and installed. Vertminer unpacked and sitting on the Desktop.

What's next?

[edit to add]

I have the CryptoSlax from 2 weeks ago. Not sure if that included skein and heavy. It does have a vertminer. The CryptoSlax site won't connect right now, so I can't get an update.

I have Windows ready to go. Or we can try the CryptoSlax USB. I'm leaning toward Windows with the vertminer from the link you gave me a few minutes ago. I can get the most recent CryptoSlax when the site is up and then try that on my own later.

 

[Silver_Pharaoh]

Yeah, I hear ya. Almost like having to do DOS 3.30 and then Windows 2.0 to an RLL drive on a 386SX board with 1 MEG of RAM. A day of your life you will never get back...

Anyhow, Win 7 is done, drivers in, updates downloaded and installed. Vertminer unpacked and sitting on the Desktop.

What's next?

[edit to add]

I have the CryptoSlax from 2 weeks ago. Not sure if that included skein and heavy. It does have a vertminer. The CryptoSlax site won't connect right now, so I can't get an update.

I have Windows ready to go. Or we can try the CryptoSlax USB. I'm leaning toward Windows with the vertminer from the link you gave me a few minutes ago. I can get the most recent CryptoSlax when the site is up and then try that on my own later.

CryptoSlax would probably be better for dedicated mining rigs actually, I just have no experience in it...

Ok, so basically we need a vertcoin pool now. I use vtcweb.poolz.net Good pool, operator is friendly haven't had any issues other than my account being messed up, bu the operator helped me fix it quickly.

Sign up there, then click the "My workers" link on the left side. Make a username and if you want, a password (I just leave it as is).

Let us know how it goes.

 

[Vic Velcro]

Kool. Signed up for pool, created worker, downloaded wallet software, put wallet address in account details, set donation amount.

 

[Silver_Pharaoh]

Kool. Signed up for pool, created worker, downloaded wallet software, put wallet address in account details, set donation amount.

Ok, so go into the folder where you extracted "vertminer 0.5.2", then make a blank text file.

Put this in it:

setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
color 02
vertminer -o stratum+tcp://vtc.poolz.net:3333 -u Silver_Pharaoh.001 -p password -d 1 --thread-concurrency 16000 -I 17 -w 256 -g 1

The pink stuff is where you put your worker username and password.

Then just rename the text file to something that ends is .bat
Run it, and it should start mining vertcoin

 

[Vic Velcro]

Did that. Double clicked the .bat file, started to load it in cmd window, then shut itself. I double checked the contents of the .bat

What is the -d 1?
Is the -I 17 supposed to maybe be -i 17?
What is color 02 for? Could that be my problem?

 

[Silver_Pharaoh]

Did that. Double clicked the .bat file, started to load it in cmd window, then shut itself. I double checked the contents of the .bat

What is the -d 1?
Is the -I 17 supposed to maybe be -i 17?
What is color 02 for? Could that be my problem?

My bad!

Remove the -d 1
That tells the miner to use the 2nd card, but you only have 1

I run 2 cards, so I forgot to remove that.

 

[Vic Velcro]

No problem. At least I now know one of the settings for using 2 cards...

Removed the -d 1

Running the .bat now works and is currently getting acquainted with the pool server. I notice that I:12 is shown near the top info. I expected I:17, so I will try to manually change it on-the-fly.

Changing manually to I 17 really lags the mouse, but took my hash rate from 8KH/s to 13KH/s. That seems crazy low compared to the 500KH/s I get from cgminer scrypt in CryptoSlax.

I'm not getting HW errors yet. WU:9.3/m at 53.0C temp.

Oh, I never mentioned it, but I reflashed my own BIOS using an edit by VBE7. The only change was undervolt and set fan slope to give higher RPM at lower temps. The RAM in the 270 is Elpida.

 

[Silver_Pharaoh]

No problem. At least I now know one of the settings for using 2 cards...

Removed the -d 1

Running the .bat now works and is currently getting acquainted with the pool server. I notice that I:12 is shown near the top info. I expected I:17, so I will try to manually change it on-the-fly.

Changing manually to I 17 really lags the mouse, but took my hash rate from 8KH/s to 13KH/s. That seems crazy low compared to the 500KH/s I get from cgminer scrypt in CryptoSlax.

I'm not getting HW errors yet. WU:9.3/m at 53.0C temp.

Oh, I never mentioned it, but I reflashed my own BIOS using an edit by VBE7. The only change was undervolt and set fan slope to give higher RPM at lower temps. The RAM in the 270 is Elpida.

Hmmmmmmm

I get 220 Kh on my 270x. Vertcoin is ~ 1/2 regular scrypt hashrate so you should get at least 200 Kh.

What are your clocks on the 270?

 

[Vic Velcro]

Is vertcoin a scrypt or a scrypt-n algo?

My GPU is engine 1050 mem 1450 powertune 0 and I have 1280 shaders (not sure if 16000 threadcon matches the shaders properly)

So, I booted into CryptoSlax and tried from there. I used a .conf file with threadcon dropped to 15232 (the one I use for cgminer).

I was getting reject errors until I deleted "scrypt" : true from the conf. With out the scrypt line, I get error saying /dev/spi something or other is not available. It indicates that I am getting 1002KH/s in 'nix which is about 500 times faster than Win7 was doing.

I have absolutely no idea what is going on.

 

[Silver_Pharaoh]

Is vertcoin a scrypt or a scrypt-n algo?

My GPU is engine 1050 mem 1450 powertune 0 and I have 1280 shaders (not sure if 16000 threadcon matches the shaders properly)

So, I booted into CryptoSlax and tried from there. I used a .conf file with threadcon dropped to 15232 (the one I use for cgminer).

I was getting reject errors until I deleted "scrypt" : true from the conf. With out the scrypt line, I get error saying /dev/spi something or other is not available. It indicates that I am getting 1002KH/s in 'nix which is about 500 times faster than Win7 was doing.

I have absolutely no idea what is going on.

Vertcoin is n-factor.

1002Kh is defiantly not right sounding, but I can't help there. I have not used CryptoSlax....

The 16000 concurrency does not line up with the shaders, but it works and lets me run high intensity values.

I run my 270x at 1180 Mhz core 1500 Mhz Memory.

Set the memory to 1500 Mhz and see what happens. 1500 is a sweet spot in 270x's I've noticed.

 

[Vic Velcro]

I'm already pushing the engine above the 975 max and the mem above the 1400 max. mem 1500 shoots my temp from 64C immediately up to 79C. 2 seconds after that, my screen looks like somebody inside it vomited toward me, then the entire system instantly quits. No freezing. It's like somebody yanked the power cord right out of the UPS socket.

[edit to add]
Link to the web page for my card

 

[xsuperbgx]

did you use the vertminer to start that? are you using the command line or did you click through the menus at the bottom left?

 

[Vic Velcro]

I started with a fresh Win7, fresh system drivers, fresh video driver, and all current Win updates. Then downloaded the miner directly from the main vertcoin site. Created a batch file and was getting single digit hashes (not Kilo hashes).

Switched over to CryptoSlax, made a .conf file for vertminer equivalent to the .bat file used in Win. Was getting high Kilo Hash numbers but everything was rejected. Took one line out of the .conf and was getting just over 1 Mega Hash, but erroring with the statement that "/dev/spi(something)" was not found.

I have no menus in vertminer. Do you mean start vertminer from the lower lefthand button in CryptoSlax? If so, yes, that is how I started the program. I also tried from the command line in a terminal window from the vertminer directory with the proper flags pointing to the .conf file.

 

[xsuperbgx]

ok, in cryptoslax there is the configuration option in the cryptomining menu. select the one for vertminer and it brings up the conf file. Did you completely overwrite that or just change the existing server info and gpu related stuff? You should just edit in your pool info and specific setting for your gpu, but leave the rest. Different algos take different settings, so don't copy your scrypt setting to scrypt-n. here is a vert example:

{
"pools" : [
        {
                "url" : "stratum+tcp://stratum.ecurie.io:3333",
                "user" : "workername",
                "pass" : "x"
        }
],

"failover-only" : true,
"no-submit-stale" : true,
"api-listen" : true,
"api-port" : "4028",
"api-allow" : "W:0/0",
"api-mcast" : true,
"api-mcast-port" : "4028",
"log" : "1",
"nscrypt" : true,
"vectors" : "1",
"auto-fan" : true,
"gpu-threads" : "1",
"gpu-engine" : "1000",
"gpu-fan" : "70-100",
"gpu-memclock" : "1500",
"gpu-powertune" : "20",
"intensity" : "20",
"temp-target" : "70",
"temp-overheat" : "95",
"temp-cutoff" : "96",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"thread-concurrency" : "8193"
}

 

[Vic Velcro]

Mine looks like this:

{
"pools" : [
{
"url" : "stratum+tcp://vtc.poolz.net:3333",
"user" : "my workername",
"pass" : "x"
}
],

"failover-only" : true,
"no-submit-stale" : true,
"api-listen" : true,
"api-port" : "4028",
"api-allow" : "W:0/0",
"api-mcast" : true,
"api-mcast-port" : "4028",
"log" : "1",
"gpu-threads" : "1",
"gpu-engine" : "1050",
"gpu-memclock" : "1450",
"intensity" : "20",
"thread-concurrency" : "15232" (tried with lower numbers, no differece)
(have tried taking out thread-concurrency and using)
"shaders" : "1280" (instead)
}


It is missing the following:
"nscrypt" : true,
"vectors" : "1",
"gpu-powertune" : "20",
"lookup-gap" : "2", (default lookup gap is already 2, so no need for it)

I deliberately do NOT have the following:
(I have my own fan profile hard written to my card BIOS)

"auto-fan" : true,
"temp-target" : "70",
"temp-overheat" : "95",
"temp-cutoff" : "96",
"gpu-fan" : "70-100",

 

[xsuperbgx]

the nscrypt true is the one that is likely causing your problems. powertune is for 7000 series cards and above

 

[Silver_Pharaoh]

Mine looks like this:

{
"pools" : [
{
"url" : "stratum+tcp://vtc.poolz.net:3333",
"user" : "my workername",
"pass" : "x"
}
],

"failover-only" : true,
"no-submit-stale" : true,
"api-listen" : true,
"api-port" : "4028",
"api-allow" : "W:0/0",
"api-mcast" : true,
"api-mcast-port" : "4028",
"log" : "1",
"gpu-threads" : "1",
"gpu-engine" : "1050",
"gpu-memclock" : "1450",
"intensity" : "20",
"thread-concurrency" : "15232" (tried with lower numbers, no differece)
(have tried taking out thread-concurrency and using)
"shaders" : "1280" (instead)
}


It is missing the following:
"nscrypt" : true,
"vectors" : "1",
"gpu-powertune" : "20",
"lookup-gap" : "2", (default lookup gap is already 2, so no need for it)

I deliberately do NOT have the following:
(I have my own fan profile hard written to my card BIOS)

"auto-fan" : true,
"temp-target" : "70",
"temp-overheat" : "95",
"temp-cutoff" : "96",
"gpu-fan" : "70-100",

Add the nscrypt part and the powertune one as well.

Hopefully that will get you over single digit Kh.

 

[Vic Velcro]

Based on the missing elements noted above:

I inserted :
"nscrypt" : true,
"gpu-powertune" : "20",
"thread-concurrency" : "15232",

I removed:
"shaders" : "1280"

It burped and hiccup'd for a minute, then pool 0 requested work restart.
Everything is now being accepted and the pool is detecting new blocks.

HW is at 6. It climbs by 1 every minute or two. The top left (1s) is fluctuating from 100Kh/s to 412Kh/s. WU:220.8 and temp is 69C.

This is progress.