Hi everyone,
Welcome back and thank for reading my blog.
Check out my first post if you want to see my build.
It took me a few days and a lot of research to optimize my rig. I went through a bunch of YouTube videos, bitcointalk post, and steemit post, just to find out that all the information out there is confusing with a lot of mismatched information.
This is what I did to my build and the research material I used to optimize it.
The cards that I am using are 4 x Sapphire RX580 Nitro+ 8gb (3 Micron memory & 1 Samsung memory) and 1 Sapphire RX580 Nitro+ 8gb Special Edition (Micron memory).
Out of the box, each card has a hash rate between 28 Mh/s to 30 Mh/s, but averages around 29 Mh/s. Averaging 29 Mh/s is pretty good, but the hash rate started to drop and it just stayed around 24~26 Mh/s. I got worried, so I did some research and found out that I can push the cards to 31 Mh/s if I did some software tweaks and/or bios mods.
I started with just software tweaks using MSI Afterburner and Sapphire Trixx, it was simple to use and you can apply the changes as the miner is running.
I was happy with it for about a day until I found out that the miner program that I'm using (Claymore Miner) can do the changes if I just edit some language in the .bat file.
Within the Claymore Miner, I set the parameters to:
-cclock 1150
-mclock 2250
-cvddc 850
-mvddc 850
(Parameters were acquired from 1stminingrig.com)
The entire system was stable and running at 145 Mh/s - 148 Mh/s, occasionally it will dip to 142 and rise to a high 150 but overall I was happy. Then I remembered reading a tutorial from 1stminingrig.com that I can squeeze another 1-2 Mh/s from the cards pushing them to 31 Mh/s each, but it requires me to modifying the bios.
Modifying the bios was a scary thing for me because there is a risk of bricking the card, so I started with one card following the bios mod instructions to the T. By using GPU-Z, I found out that all of my cards were equipped with Micron memory except for one.
There's a lot on the Hynix and Samsung, however there is little to no information on the internet about Micron chips. Luckily, I stumbled upon a YouTube video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKM60VVIfRg) for RX400 and RX500 series card. The video says that the type of memory does not matter, only the series. For my RX580 cards, I downloaded and save the original bios 'TWICE' for each card using ATIflash and modded the bios roms with Polaris Editor. Reflashed the cards and now they are all running at 30 - 31 Mh/s.
Here's a picture of it running at 152 Mh/s, ignore GPU3 it occasionally does that, restarting the miner program fixes that problem.
This setup uses about ~840W on the high end and the cost of electricity here is 0.125 kWh, so it cost me about $2.51/day to run this machine. It was running over 1000W without the mods and tweaks.
Here's an estimate of what I am making from the rig.
Thank you again for reading my blog. If you like to see a more detailed explanation on the bios mods or the claymore settings let me know in the comments, I can blog about it next time. If you have any other comments, questions, or suggestions please let me know.