I saw this RX 570 linked at my home forum. A 570 for $100 at Amazon. It's not in stock and may take 1-3mo but I can wait. Not like I need another GPU. Might have to upgrade to 20a Circuits, ha.
That's a great leap with the mining BIOS !! That information triggered me to try if my card without a BIOS switch would be able to get even near those completion times. To add to the challenge... this is a Windows host, so I got a bad feeling it wouldn't be possible, at least if running any kind of 'eco' settings.
Long story short... yeah, NO, it wasn't possible with 'eco' settings. I tried a few power limiting / memory overclocking settings, but run times (2x) clearly kept going over 20 minutes.
That's not surprising because there is more going on in the BIOS than what you can see or adjust with common clocking and power utilities. Here is the pstate tables for my XFX RX 570 with the BIOS switch in the gaming position, followed by the tables when the switch is in the mining position (SCLK is shader(core) clock, MCLK is memory clock, index numbers are states):
So even if you used AMD's WattMan or MSI Afterburner to match the pstates for mining, you wouldn't match the computing speed and power efficiency of XFX's mining BIOS. From perusing cryptocurrency mining blogs, I'm guessing that's because that particular mining BIOS also adjusts memory timings. Cryptominers frequently tweak memory timings in GPU BIOSs. It seems somewhat straightforward to do in Windows systems, but I don't know how to put together all the necessary steps to pull if off safely in a Linux system (which is probably just as well, LOL).
Ideas are not fixed, nor should they be; we live in model-dependent reality.
My walk to the AMD side has today taken a stumble, but it has nothing to do with AMD.
As Gary suggested, I got to work on selling my surplus to requirements Pascal-generation graphics cards. Rather to my surprise, a 1050 2Gb which cost me $120 brought $80 on eBay. I'm pretty sure my fractional recovery of the original price for the remaining Pascals will be less, perhaps a lot less in some cases, although the 2080 looks likely to yield quite a bit.
Meanwhile, Amazon lowered their price for the XFX branded RX 570 that served me well for three weeks to $150, so there is a new one delivered yesterday, waiting to be swapped into my remaining Nvidia powered PC, replacing a 1060 3Gb and 1050.
But... This morning after I powered it down to put a power meter in place, the machine failed to wake up. Functionally I have a dead PC. Just in case someone has bright ideas, I'll give details:
On hitting the power button:
1. PC consumes power 70 to 110 watts, seemingly normal
2. the disk activity light is pretty active, in a non-random pattern, but after minutes of time goes quiescent.
3. no beep is heard (I customarily attach a $2 "speaker" to the motherboard speaker pins, and think I did on this one, but am not certain).
4. Not only no pixels on the monitor but no indication from the monitor that it has sensed anything at all.
5. If I attempt blind log-on (on the theory this is a monitor problem only), I do not detect disk and power activity suggesting it noticed.
Maybe my monitor suddenly died.
Maybe something on the motherboard died.
Maybe the CPU died (which is the thing actually driving the monitor, as I have it attached to the I/O panel DVI port, not to one of the graphics cards).
Just to make life extra joyful, this PC seems a poor candidate for a simple motherboard+CPU implant.
1. I employed a small SSD plus a large hard drive as the boot drive, using Intel RST method.
2. The Windows 10 on the machine is the "free upgrade" from Windows 7 originally installed.
If I can't somehow revive the machine, I think my most likely path forward it to build a new machine, with a new case (the old one is under-fanned, and lacks generous graphics card length capacity, and has already served over ten years, holding at least two and maybe three builds), new motherboard, new CPU, new RAM, and probably a new SSD boot drive using an M.2 connection, with a new Windows 10 installation. Once up, I'd expect to connect my existing hard drives from the current machine and find data still there, but face an extensive effort to get back the use of applications previously installed.
Any words of wisdom or things to try before I give up and start serious shopping would be welcome.
FWIW: I have been squeezing my RX 570 as much as possible to minimize fan noise while obtaining reasonable output.
This is an "ASRock Phantom Gaming D Radeon RX 570", and I use the ASRock Phantom utility to set the values, while using GPU-Z to measure them. It is supported by an i7-4771 (two cores free) running Win7 64-bit, Radeon 18.9.3 drivers.
To keep the fan noise inaudible, the fan speed needs to be below about 25%, which means a power limit of 100 watts.
Also, to prevent invalid errors, I keep the minimum GPU voltage from falling below 1.000 volts during the active GPU portion of the run (it may fall below that during the CPU portion).
These values work for me in my mid-tower ATX case:
GPU Clock: 1248 MHz
GPU Voltage: 1.020 volts
(Also, the Power Limit is set to -10%, but that should not be limiting with these values.)
This results in an average power of 97.8 watts, a GPU temperature of 74.0 C, and a fan speed of 21%.
I am getting times of about 12 minutes 20 seconds with the current work units (a little longer than the old ones).
Maybe the CPU died (which is the thing actually driving the monitor, as I have it attached to the I/O panel DVI port, not to one of the graphics cards).
Any words of wisdom or things to try before I give up and start serious shopping would be welcome.
How about the obvious(!?), try to connect the monitor to the GPU directly.
I had wondered whether that was worth a try. I got pixels first try and watched the recovery process as the RST stuff complained about an improper shutdown. Then I saw the Windows logo, then a couple of diagnostic Windows indicators I've never seen.
But Windows finds nothing to fix, and after not many seconds the Windows progress circle goes away, and not longe after that the monitor shows no input.
So it is dead, but at least I can get to the UEFI. I've shut down RST.
It looks pretty sick, but at least I have something to look at.
I'll probably spend some more time poking around here and there (maybe try pulling out one, then the other RAM stick just in case I get lucky that way). My guess is I'm on my way to building my tenth machine, with not much left from this one save the power supply, optical drive, and hard drives. Oh... and the RX 570 intended for it which never got out of the box.
This morning after I powered it down to put a power meter in place, the machine failed to wake up.
You don't mention anything about removing cards so my assumption is that all you did before restarting was add the power meter. Since machines that have run uninterrupted for a long time can sometimes object to being disturbed, here are some things I would check first. (I'll use the term 'BIOS' for whatever firmware system you may have).
Disk activity for the time you mentioned suggests the machine has booted, at least partially, so that would suggest most stuff is working. The first thing to try would be to 'borrow' a monitor from a second machine to see if you can get any display on that. The size/resolution doesn't matter - you just want to see pixels.
If still nothing, does ctrl-alt-del create any new disk activity. If you can get any response to that, it would suggest motherboard/CPU are functional.
After trying the above, and if you think the monitor is OK, try attaching it to the primary graphics card and reset the machine. If you see the normal keyboard lights flash, try hitting the key to enter the BIOS. Depending on settings there, the normal behaviour is to show the BIOS output on the monitor attached to the primary external GPU. If you think you have got into the BIOS but still no display, try changing to a second monitor.
If still nothing, it's time to get serious. You should take the opportunity to remove as much as possible so you can give the machine a good clean. You should unplug/replug major cables to check for good contact and unseat/reseat RAM modules and plug-in cards to 'work' the contacts. You can also carefully use an eraser to 'clean' any tarnish from gold plated contact pins on RAM sticks and GPU cards. Brush/blow every bit of dust you can. When clean, reassemble and try again.
If it still doesn't work, you need to see if you can identify a single component that is responsible. Remove both GPUs and any other components not necessary for entering the BIOS. Obviously you need a motherboard, a CPU, a PSU and a single stick of RAM. With a minimalist setup, can you get a display on a monitor - any monitor?
I'll leave it at that for the moment until you report back on progress. Normally, the first thing I change tends to be the PSU but I haven't suggested that because I don't expect you would have a known good one just laying around :-).
Good luck with the trouble-shooting. Most likely you will be able to resolve the problem.
EDIT: Sorry, I hadn't seen Holmis' response or your subsequent answer. I was just trying to get something down as quickly as possible.
I had wondered whether that was worth a try. I got pixels first try and watched the recovery process as the RST stuff complained about an improper shutdown. Then I saw the Windows logo, then a couple of diagnostic Windows indicators I've never seen.
But Windows finds nothing to fix, and after not many seconds the Windows progress circle goes away, and not longe after that the monitor shows no input.
So it is dead, but at least I can get to the UEFI. I've shut down RST.
It looks pretty sick, but at least I have something to look at.
I'll probably spend some more time poking around here and there (maybe try pulling out one, then the other RAM stick just in case I get lucky that way). My guess is I'm on my way to building my tenth machine, with not much left from this one save the power supply, optical drive, and hard drives. Oh... and the RX 570 intended for it which never got out of the box.
Well if you can see Windows logo I'd guess the the CPU/motherboard/etc hardware is OK and its limited to software or the disk. Maybe fixmbr/check disk can be done then a windows repair via a Windows CD/DVD/USB stick.
Oh... and the RX 570 intended for it which never got out of the box.
Sorry for your down time. Hope you get that new card crunching soon. When you do, don't forget to flip the dual BIOS switch to the mining position. As far as I know, XFX are the only 570 cards that offer that golden opportunity for faster tasks and lower power with a pre-loaded mining BIOS.
$150 is a good price for a new card. I'm in the market for two XFX 570s and have been perusing eBay, but will now check out Uncle Jeff's place.
Ideas are not fixed, nor should they be; we live in model-dependent reality.
If it still doesn't work, you need to see if you can identify a single component that is responsible. Remove both GPUs and any other components not necessary for entering the BIOS. Obviously you need a motherboard, a CPU, a PSU and a single stick of RAM. With a minimalist setup, can you get a display on a monitor - any monitor?
While I agree with you and another responder that the fact it can put BIOS pixels and the Windows logo on the screen when attached to a graphics card means a great deal has to be working, I also think that failure to display any pixels when connected to the motherboard graphics DVI connector is very troubling. I think somewhere on the motherboard proper, or the CPU or RAM plugged into it, something has failed.
So I'm inclined to leap forward to the stripped down minimalist machine "proof of life" check. I might change the details, but my general intent it so open up the case and remove all cards, disconnect all drives (both from power and from the motherboard, and pull one of the two RAM sticks out if they are not too badly obstructed by the CPU HSF. Then I'll hook up the same monitor which is currently able to show BIOS when attached to the 1050 card to the motherboard port it has been living on for the past couple of years, power up, and hope to see BIOS. If no joy, I'll pull out that RAM stick and put the other RAM stick into the other primary RAM slot, and try again.
If I can't see BIOS at that point, I'm inclined to write off the motherboard, CPU, and RAM and make my shopping list for components for a new build. I run a three PC household, and happily this one is not my own primary daily use machine, nor is it my wife's, but it is the primary fallback machine for both of us, host to the drive that gets backups from most of the other machines, host to our scanner, our color printer, my PDF mongering software, and other stuff. It is not just a mule to support a graphics card running Einstein, so my personal tradeoff in hours spent debugging, and probability of future failure concerns differs from some other participants.
For me, the big bad thing about building a new machine is the time it will take to configure software. That always takes me far longer than choosing components, putting the machine together, and getting it up and running.
If I do build a new machine, I'll have my second try at a real SSD boot drive. My first try was years ago, when SSD was expensive, and I learned the hard way that 80 Gbytes was too small for a Windows boot drive, preposterous as that is. Between now and then I've built one machine using Intel RST to get a small SSD to cache frequently used material from a physical hard drive, which indeed gave faster boot times and task launch times, but had enough setup and maintenance headaches that I'll never do it again. My next two machines used Seagate hybrid drives, which integrate their SSD component inside the standard hard drive case and use it for caching without any of the setup and intervention overhead problems of RST. Those have caused zero trouble, but I definitely notice the bad slowdown when a major Windows upgrade or other event outdates important cached material. It appears that the current offerings in m.2 connected NVMe will let me have a big enough boot drive to outlast Microsoft's contamination buildup for years, while giving me full speed all the time and not just on good days, while using up no SATA ports, nor upright motherboard slots, without requiring a house payment for price. Maybe I could even transfer it to a new motherboard without losing my Windows license or my software installations, if a similar failure makes me wish for that in the future.
I saw this RX 570 linked at
)
I saw this RX 570 linked at my home forum. A 570 for $100 at Amazon. It's not in stock and may take 1-3mo but I can wait. Not like I need another GPU. Might have to upgrade to 20a Circuits, ha.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MCDNQX2/
Richie wrote:That's a great
)
That's not surprising because there is more going on in the BIOS than what you can see or adjust with common clocking and power utilities. Here is the pstate tables for my XFX RX 570 with the BIOS switch in the gaming position, followed by the tables when the switch is in the mining position (SCLK is shader(core) clock, MCLK is memory clock, index numbers are states):
Gaming:
SCLK: MCLK:
0: 300MHz 750mV 0: 300MHz 750mV
1: 588MHz 765mV 1: 1000MHz 800mV
2: 952MHz 918mV 2: 1750MHz 900mV
3: 1076MHz 1025mV
4: 1143MHz 1087mV
5: 1208MHz 1150mV
6: 1250MHz 1150mV
7: 1286MHz 1150mV
Mining:
SCLK: MCLK:
0: 300MHz 750mV 0: 300MHz 750mV
1: 588MHz 765mV 1: 1000MHz 800mV
2: 952MHz 918mV 2: 1850MHz 900mV
3: 997MHz 956mV
4: 1021MHz 975mV
5: 1052MHz 1000mV
6: 1071MHz 1018mV
7: 1100MHz 1043mV
So even if you used AMD's WattMan or MSI Afterburner to match the pstates for mining, you wouldn't match the computing speed and power efficiency of XFX's mining BIOS. From perusing cryptocurrency mining blogs, I'm guessing that's because that particular mining BIOS also adjusts memory timings. Cryptominers frequently tweak memory timings in GPU BIOSs. It seems somewhat straightforward to do in Windows systems, but I don't know how to put together all the necessary steps to pull if off safely in a Linux system (which is probably just as well, LOL).
Ideas are not fixed, nor should they be; we live in model-dependent reality.
My walk to the AMD side has
)
My walk to the AMD side has today taken a stumble, but it has nothing to do with AMD.
As Gary suggested, I got to work on selling my surplus to requirements Pascal-generation graphics cards. Rather to my surprise, a 1050 2Gb which cost me $120 brought $80 on eBay. I'm pretty sure my fractional recovery of the original price for the remaining Pascals will be less, perhaps a lot less in some cases, although the 2080 looks likely to yield quite a bit.
Meanwhile, Amazon lowered their price for the XFX branded RX 570 that served me well for three weeks to $150, so there is a new one delivered yesterday, waiting to be swapped into my remaining Nvidia powered PC, replacing a 1060 3Gb and 1050.
But... This morning after I powered it down to put a power meter in place, the machine failed to wake up. Functionally I have a dead PC. Just in case someone has bright ideas, I'll give details:
On hitting the power button:
1. PC consumes power 70 to 110 watts, seemingly normal
2. the disk activity light is pretty active, in a non-random pattern, but after minutes of time goes quiescent.
3. no beep is heard (I customarily attach a $2 "speaker" to the motherboard speaker pins, and think I did on this one, but am not certain).
4. Not only no pixels on the monitor but no indication from the monitor that it has sensed anything at all.
5. If I attempt blind log-on (on the theory this is a monitor problem only), I do not detect disk and power activity suggesting it noticed.
Maybe my monitor suddenly died.
Maybe something on the motherboard died.
Maybe the CPU died (which is the thing actually driving the monitor, as I have it attached to the I/O panel DVI port, not to one of the graphics cards).
Just to make life extra joyful, this PC seems a poor candidate for a simple motherboard+CPU implant.
1. I employed a small SSD plus a large hard drive as the boot drive, using Intel RST method.
2. The Windows 10 on the machine is the "free upgrade" from Windows 7 originally installed.
If I can't somehow revive the machine, I think my most likely path forward it to build a new machine, with a new case (the old one is under-fanned, and lacks generous graphics card length capacity, and has already served over ten years, holding at least two and maybe three builds), new motherboard, new CPU, new RAM, and probably a new SSD boot drive using an M.2 connection, with a new Windows 10 installation. Once up, I'd expect to connect my existing hard drives from the current machine and find data still there, but face an extensive effort to get back the use of applications previously installed.
Any words of wisdom or things to try before I give up and start serious shopping would be welcome.
FWIW: I have been squeezing
)
FWIW: I have been squeezing my RX 570 as much as possible to minimize fan noise while obtaining reasonable output.
This is an "ASRock Phantom Gaming D Radeon RX 570", and I use the ASRock Phantom utility to set the values, while using GPU-Z to measure them. It is supported by an i7-4771 (two cores free) running Win7 64-bit, Radeon 18.9.3 drivers.
To keep the fan noise inaudible, the fan speed needs to be below about 25%, which means a power limit of 100 watts.
Also, to prevent invalid errors, I keep the minimum GPU voltage from falling below 1.000 volts during the active GPU portion of the run (it may fall below that during the CPU portion).
These values work for me in my mid-tower ATX case:
GPU Clock: 1248 MHz
GPU Voltage: 1.020 volts
(Also, the Power Limit is set to -10%, but that should not be limiting with these values.)
This results in an average power of 97.8 watts, a GPU temperature of 74.0 C, and a fan speed of 21%.
I am getting times of about 12 minutes 20 seconds with the current work units (a little longer than the old ones).
archae86 wrote:Maybe the CPU
)
How about the obvious(!?), try to connect the monitor to the GPU directly.
Holmis wrote:try to connect
)
Thanks,
I had wondered whether that was worth a try. I got pixels first try and watched the recovery process as the RST stuff complained about an improper shutdown. Then I saw the Windows logo, then a couple of diagnostic Windows indicators I've never seen.
But Windows finds nothing to fix, and after not many seconds the Windows progress circle goes away, and not longe after that the monitor shows no input.
So it is dead, but at least I can get to the UEFI. I've shut down RST.
It looks pretty sick, but at least I have something to look at.
I'll probably spend some more time poking around here and there (maybe try pulling out one, then the other RAM stick just in case I get lucky that way). My guess is I'm on my way to building my tenth machine, with not much left from this one save the power supply, optical drive, and hard drives. Oh... and the RX 570 intended for it which never got out of the box.
archae86 wrote:This morning
)
You don't mention anything about removing cards so my assumption is that all you did before restarting was add the power meter. Since machines that have run uninterrupted for a long time can sometimes object to being disturbed, here are some things I would check first. (I'll use the term 'BIOS' for whatever firmware system you may have).
I'll leave it at that for the moment until you report back on progress. Normally, the first thing I change tends to be the PSU but I haven't suggested that because I don't expect you would have a known good one just laying around :-).
Good luck with the trouble-shooting. Most likely you will be able to resolve the problem.
EDIT: Sorry, I hadn't seen Holmis' response or your subsequent answer. I was just trying to get something down as quickly as possible.
Cheers,
Gary.
archae86 wrote:Holmis
)
Well if you can see Windows logo I'd guess the the CPU/motherboard/etc hardware is OK and its limited to software or the disk. Maybe fixmbr/check disk can be done then a windows repair via a Windows CD/DVD/USB stick.
archae86 wrote:Oh... and the
)
Sorry for your down time. Hope you get that new card crunching soon. When you do, don't forget to flip the dual BIOS switch to the mining position. As far as I know, XFX are the only 570 cards that offer that golden opportunity for faster tasks and lower power with a pre-loaded mining BIOS.
$150 is a good price for a new card. I'm in the market for two XFX 570s and have been perusing eBay, but will now check out Uncle Jeff's place.
Ideas are not fixed, nor should they be; we live in model-dependent reality.
Gary Roberts wrote:If it
)
While I agree with you and another responder that the fact it can put BIOS pixels and the Windows logo on the screen when attached to a graphics card means a great deal has to be working, I also think that failure to display any pixels when connected to the motherboard graphics DVI connector is very troubling. I think somewhere on the motherboard proper, or the CPU or RAM plugged into it, something has failed.
So I'm inclined to leap forward to the stripped down minimalist machine "proof of life" check. I might change the details, but my general intent it so open up the case and remove all cards, disconnect all drives (both from power and from the motherboard, and pull one of the two RAM sticks out if they are not too badly obstructed by the CPU HSF. Then I'll hook up the same monitor which is currently able to show BIOS when attached to the 1050 card to the motherboard port it has been living on for the past couple of years, power up, and hope to see BIOS. If no joy, I'll pull out that RAM stick and put the other RAM stick into the other primary RAM slot, and try again.
If I can't see BIOS at that point, I'm inclined to write off the motherboard, CPU, and RAM and make my shopping list for components for a new build. I run a three PC household, and happily this one is not my own primary daily use machine, nor is it my wife's, but it is the primary fallback machine for both of us, host to the drive that gets backups from most of the other machines, host to our scanner, our color printer, my PDF mongering software, and other stuff. It is not just a mule to support a graphics card running Einstein, so my personal tradeoff in hours spent debugging, and probability of future failure concerns differs from some other participants.
For me, the big bad thing about building a new machine is the time it will take to configure software. That always takes me far longer than choosing components, putting the machine together, and getting it up and running.
If I do build a new machine, I'll have my second try at a real SSD boot drive. My first try was years ago, when SSD was expensive, and I learned the hard way that 80 Gbytes was too small for a Windows boot drive, preposterous as that is. Between now and then I've built one machine using Intel RST to get a small SSD to cache frequently used material from a physical hard drive, which indeed gave faster boot times and task launch times, but had enough setup and maintenance headaches that I'll never do it again. My next two machines used Seagate hybrid drives, which integrate their SSD component inside the standard hard drive case and use it for caching without any of the setup and intervention overhead problems of RST. Those have caused zero trouble, but I definitely notice the bad slowdown when a major Windows upgrade or other event outdates important cached material. It appears that the current offerings in m.2 connected NVMe will let me have a big enough boot drive to outlast Microsoft's contamination buildup for years, while giving me full speed all the time and not just on good days, while using up no SATA ports, nor upright motherboard slots, without requiring a house payment for price. Maybe I could even transfer it to a new motherboard without losing my Windows license or my software installations, if a similar failure makes me wish for that in the future.