Hello Ethereum Community,
Before I talk about my experience with these particular cards, I would like to thank you all for providing guidance and feedback that helped me understand ETH Mining, BIOS mods...etc. Special thanks to Boysie for doing a lot of testing and providing his Low Power and V2 bioses for Red Devil 8GB cards.
So as I mentioned before, I recently got into mining Ethereum and put together my first RIG. I had some misfortune with my first AS ROCK H81 PRO BTC mobo that I had to ship back. After receiving the other one, I hooked it up and started testing the cards.
As the title says i had a misfortune that all 6 cards I ordered (4 from NewEgg and 2 from Amazon) had Samsung memory which from what i understand is the worst kind for OC and good MH/s rate.
But moving on with the AMD driver hack to disable BIOS sig check and patch, finally did Boysie's Low Powered BIOS mod on all the cards and started mining.
Then I saw enormous mining speed fluctuations in 3 out of 6 cards. While 3 of them were firmly on 29 MH/s, 3 of them were going down to 20 MH/s...
For the longest time I couldn't figure it out and then someone mentioned HWInfo to check the GPU Memory errors...so I got the utility and checked. Lo and behold 3 of those cards had memory errors in the billions.
Then i started to play with Memory speed and since Low Powered BIOS puts the Mem speed at 2080 I lowered it to 2040 and things started looking up. After few hours of mining, memory errors started increasing again so I flashed the cards back to original BIOS.
I would like to add that I also tried Boysie's V2 bios but each and every card that I tried it on, BSOD'ed the rig. None of the cards were able to run Claymore miner on 30-31 MH/s which was what Boysie said his V2 BIOS would do.
I then took his V2 BIOS and modified it to reduce Mem speed from 2220 to 2100 and all 3 cards started working albeit with increased power draw and about the same speed of 29 MH/s which is the same as Low Powered BIOS.
Grand finale after a day or so of mining is that one of the 3 cards that I had issues with originally completely died and couldn't boot into windows.
After repeated failed attempts to flash it back to original bios from USB FreeDOS boot disk, i finally managed to boot into Windows and use AtiWinFlash to flash it back to it's original bios.
I have come to find that these particular PowerColor cards with Model number (AXRX 480 8GBD5-3DH/OC) and that have Samsung memory are, extremely flaky and cannot be OC'ed and run sable even with Low Power BIOS mod from Boysie.
I also learned that this also card comes in Version 2 which is a bit more expensive, so I wander if maybe memory is different/better on V2?
Thank you all and hopefully this experience will give you some useful information if you happen to have these same cards and are experiencing some of the same issues I have had.
Before I talk about my experience with these particular cards, I would like to thank you all for providing guidance and feedback that helped me understand ETH Mining, BIOS mods...etc. Special thanks to Boysie for doing a lot of testing and providing his Low Power and V2 bioses for Red Devil 8GB cards.
So as I mentioned before, I recently got into mining Ethereum and put together my first RIG. I had some misfortune with my first AS ROCK H81 PRO BTC mobo that I had to ship back. After receiving the other one, I hooked it up and started testing the cards.
As the title says i had a misfortune that all 6 cards I ordered (4 from NewEgg and 2 from Amazon) had Samsung memory which from what i understand is the worst kind for OC and good MH/s rate.
But moving on with the AMD driver hack to disable BIOS sig check and patch, finally did Boysie's Low Powered BIOS mod on all the cards and started mining.
Then I saw enormous mining speed fluctuations in 3 out of 6 cards. While 3 of them were firmly on 29 MH/s, 3 of them were going down to 20 MH/s...
For the longest time I couldn't figure it out and then someone mentioned HWInfo to check the GPU Memory errors...so I got the utility and checked. Lo and behold 3 of those cards had memory errors in the billions.
Then i started to play with Memory speed and since Low Powered BIOS puts the Mem speed at 2080 I lowered it to 2040 and things started looking up. After few hours of mining, memory errors started increasing again so I flashed the cards back to original BIOS.
I would like to add that I also tried Boysie's V2 bios but each and every card that I tried it on, BSOD'ed the rig. None of the cards were able to run Claymore miner on 30-31 MH/s which was what Boysie said his V2 BIOS would do.
I then took his V2 BIOS and modified it to reduce Mem speed from 2220 to 2100 and all 3 cards started working albeit with increased power draw and about the same speed of 29 MH/s which is the same as Low Powered BIOS.
Grand finale after a day or so of mining is that one of the 3 cards that I had issues with originally completely died and couldn't boot into windows.
After repeated failed attempts to flash it back to original bios from USB FreeDOS boot disk, i finally managed to boot into Windows and use AtiWinFlash to flash it back to it's original bios.
I have come to find that these particular PowerColor cards with Model number (AXRX 480 8GBD5-3DH/OC) and that have Samsung memory are, extremely flaky and cannot be OC'ed and run sable even with Low Power BIOS mod from Boysie.
I also learned that this also card comes in Version 2 which is a bit more expensive, so I wander if maybe memory is different/better on V2?
Thank you all and hopefully this experience will give you some useful information if you happen to have these same cards and are experiencing some of the same issues I have had.