Beeeeer Vs YPool

A little off topic but not so much when NaN's incredible miner only works on these two pools.
I used to mine @ Be^5r a week ago but it seems like they are either offline higher than usual
and now the time between solved blocks is increasing (perhaps due to less miners and technical
difficulties like DDoS). YPool has been pretty darn steady the past three days until yesterday when
clpts says it disconnected, will wait 45 seconds, and then just exit out to the command line.

NaN : How do you handle disconnects from the server? Do you only try one time after 45 seconds
         and then just exit out? Last night it happened twice to me and fortunately insomnia had me
         restart clpts by hand. Perhaps I should script it to keep trying. I seem to recall someone else
         asking about fail-over as well and I suspect this is due to the issues these two pools are having
         lately.

Everyone : Which pool do you prefer using, YPool or Be^5r? YPool works so well but I dislike pools
                 that are too large in fear of block control.

You indeed ARE a lucky person to have grabbed those 290X's for so cheap! Everyone
is in the mining craze (which is good/bad) and so many of the cards are hard to get,
well except for the 290X as the price is so high that profitability isn't there for the
performance.

First question is if you bought a reference cooler design or did you buy a GPU card
with an advanced cooler design, such as MSI Gamer card with twin fans and special
radiator? The reference design cooling system is awful and it will be very hard to
keep them cool while running high performance tweaks. Fortunately, NaN has very
optimized software that provides GREAT performance with much less power consumption
than cgminer (not a super fair comparison since one is MOMENTUM mining and the other
is SCRYPT mining). NaN keeps pushing the envelope though and each revision is faster
but does consume a little more power. Still WAY better than SCRYPT performance though.

The key to high performance is great power supplies (I use two Seasonic 860 Platinums)
using the proper PSU coupler (amazon for $29) and more importantly a good plan for
cooling. First step is to forget mining inside a case. Get yourself large plastic crates or a
wireframe rack. Next is to space out the GPUs properly! The farther apart they are, the
better. Actually the BEST thing you can do is make sure there is nothing in front of the
intake fans on the GPUs, that is the fans are pulling in fresh room air and NOT preheated
air from the GPU next to it. Having all the GPU's next to each other produces the cascading
heat effect where the GPU on the furthest right runs super cool as nothing is in front of it.
The next GPU gets pre-heated air from the GPU to the right of it, and so on and so on until
the furthest card on the left is running super hot. Same principal applies in cases but from
top to bottom.

Having said that, use some ingenuity to keep those GPU's cool! My goal is to keep them
under 80C while running full steam and better yet, keep them 70C or lower. It *CAN* be
done but requires some thinking *smile*. Keep the GPU fans running 85% or higher as
that is your first line of defense (closest to gpu/radiator) to keeping temps down. Sure it's
loud but you're mining.... PROTECT YOUR INVESTMENT.... second line of defense it to keep
cool air in front of the GPU fans.

Good luck!

Yea I got lucky and I managed to get these 4x R9 290X for $599 ea off Amazon.

Aside from my 4x R9 290X I have 3 GTX 780 which are pulling a measly 6500 cpm together....I bought those last year before I planned on mining. *shrug*

Now I'm just creeping around Amazon, Newegg, Tigerdirect, and Ebay until i find some rightly priced R9 290(x).

Edit: What temp are your cards running at? I just bought some 1x to 16x powered PCIE adapters and I think I'm going to pull out all but one of my GPU(s) from the case. The second card is making my top card run at 80C - 85C at all times with Fans @ 100%.....while second card stays at 60C-65C.

From my post a day or so ago :

I think I finally have my 4 x MSI R9 290 rig setup under Ubuntu running clpts v0.2.2
with all the tweaks for now. Currently mining on Ypool at the moment and getting :

collisions/min : 15130
shares/hr : 1730

The total rig is pulling 1100w with a 20" box fan running on low to keep air circulating.

What is your cpm with 4 R9 290?

My rig has 4 x R9 290's (soon to be 5 x R9 290's when I get home) and since
switching to Linux yesterday the multiple threads work great for that little *oomph*
in computing power. Another way to look at my unique idea is to run certain GPUs
(multiple thread) on Ypool and then run the remaining GPUs (multiple thread) on
Beeeer, essentially devoting a GPU card to a pool. This is great for those with even
amount of GPU cards which I will NOT have when my fifth arrives today....

Just thinking out loud.... :-)

@mbender71: I've never tried that because I always tested with a multiple GPU setup. But I think it should work.

Now THAT is quite the find! I can't wait to give that a shot when I get home as well!
Right now my solution is to run cgminer in a shell in which I immediately disable all
the GPU's by hand (haven't figured out a way to do that in a cgminer.conf). This allows
me to monitor GPU temps and FAN speeds... plus have control over other GPU parameters
if I want, but again this is mostly to monitor. The cgminer.conf I run when I start cgminer
has all my tweaks. Just thought I'd pass this out as a work around, albeit a little messy.

Edit: I found this http://sourceforge.net/projects/amdovdrvctrl/?source=navbar, I'll give it a try once I get home. It was last update Dec 13 2013.

I forgot to mention that these are random/rare errors. Very sporadic and not really an issue at all.
I thought I would throw them out for future debugging or possible low-level issues to investigate.
Time on my Ubuntu rig is spot on and set automatically from the internet. No worries, just wanted
to pass this on. As always, many thanks NaN!

Quote from: mbender71 on February 13, 2014, 02:35:02 am

ERRORS when running clpts-v.0.2.2 on Ubuntu 13.04

Invalid share
Reason: Merkleroot is invalid or corrupted. Update your miner.

Invalid share
Reason : No valid momentum

Was just looking through the output of my current mining run and though I'd pass these on to NaN.
Many thanks again for all your hard work NaN!!

Is your time correct (execute date to get the time)? I have no idea how Ubuntu handles time zones. Windows sets the hardware clock to local time but Linux normally assumes UTC.

I think I finally have my 4 x MSI R9 290 rig setup under Ubuntu running clpts v0.2.2
with all the tweaks for now. Currently mining on Ypool at the moment and getting :

collisions/min : 15130
shares/hr : 1730

The total rig is pulling 1100w with a 20" box fan running on low to keep air circulating.

Quote from: mbender71 on February 12, 2014, 08:53:15 pm

I've switched over from Windows 8.1x64 toUbuntu   13.04x64 and INDEED there is a significant
increase in speed. Wow.. thank you NaN! Now I'm delving into tweaking the GPU clock, memory,
fan, etc. I've read extensively about aticonfig and I can seem to get it to work on the first (default)
adapter, but every time I try to use the --adapter parameter it seems to only be setting/getting the
first (default) GPU. For example, aticonfig --adapter="all" --odgt  returns four values but they are
all the same. I'm suing kernel 3.8.0-35 and catalyst 13.12. Is this a good combo? Perhaps there
are other (GUI) utilities out there? Much appreciated!

Running 4 x MSI R9 290 Gaming

What is the speed of R9 290 Gaming under Ubuntu?

Can't thank you enough for your software AND that great suggestion!!
Time for me to go implement it!!
:-)

Indeed, aticonfig does not work in multi GPU setups. The easiest thing for me was to write a cgminer config-file so that after booting up, cgminer is started, then closed and after that I execute my miner.