Adventures in Mining | Volume 2

in #mining7 years ago (edited)

So if you've read Volume 1, (https://steemit.com/mining/@crachau/adventures-in-mining-1) you know I've acquired my first mining focused GPU, an XFX RX 480 8GB, and added it to my existing MSI GTX 960 2 GB card.

I've been testing out various pools and methods, as well as attempting to optimize my card.

I'd like to share the results with you, and perhaps get some feedback as to what could be done to improve the XFX card!

The initial pool and currency I was mining was Monero on monerohash.com, and here's the results so far:

monerohash.com results

So a little over $7 based on the current price of Monero at the time of this post. Not bad, especially considering it hasn't been running 24/7 since I set it up, as I've been testing and playing with things.

We have experienced a slight pullback in Monero price in the last 24 hrs, but I'm not too concerned, as I view the concept and execution of Monero to be solid, so I'm OK holding for a bit if we do experience a more prolonged pullback

The other pool I've been experimenting with is NiceHash.com:

I really like the concept of NiceHash:

  • Has a central interface for the miners that runs all GPUs and CPUs
  • Auto selects the most profitable algorithm per device
  • Pays out in Bitcoin!

Challenge is I've experienced some significant instability with it, and I believe is has to do with the DaggerHashimoto algorithm... I've toned down the hashrate slightly, and as of this writing, I've got 2 solid hours of uptime, so I'm hoping that solves it!

Now here's where I need a little help! I've read flashing the BIOS on the XFX RX 480 should significantly improve my hashrate, particular on Ether mining on DaggerHashimoto. I've been highly unsuccessful however!

First off, when I backup the BIOS off the board, it's 256k in size whereas most BIOSes I've downloaded are 512k in size, and I'm not sure why that is. Note, both the main and backup BIOS on the board are 256k. As a result ATIFlash won't load most preconfigured tweaked and optimized BIOSes other people have made...

When I use the command line interface to force it to flash it, Windows defaults back into somewhat of a driver display safe mode, and OpenCL isn't available on the card.

I've attempted to modify the BIOS myself, but no combo of moving the 1500, 1625, 1750 or 2000 timings around all the card to boot properly...

Here are the BIOSes directly off my card from ATIFlash: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bwwa-PMXoO8-TGVneS1iZ0tJY0E

Since I'm getting about 24 MH/s on the card now, and I've read multiple reports of people getting 28-30 MH/s, figuring this out changes the profitability of the card quite significantly!

Here's the info from GPU-Z in case that would be helpful:

Let me know in the comments what pools you're using, what your thoughts might be on flashing the card, and any other tips and tricks you have to maximizing the profit on your rig!

Happy Mining!

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