cgminer with two R9 290 giving me headaches

I've got two R9 290, using cgminer I'm getting nothing but trouble. I'm using the 13.12 driver and installed the 2.8 SDK.

When I launch cgminer it sees both cards, GPU0 and GPU1. They both happily start mining, but after about 30 seconds cgminer hangs for a few seconds and GPU0 starts dropping its hashrate (it gives HW:1). I'm not sure what's causing the issue since both cards are identitical and I've only defined the settings once using -g 2.

I've seen that there are some difficulties with the particular card (had to define --no-asl to stop it from crashing the display drivers). Does anyone have any tips or clues to find the problem?

I'm running two Gigabyte R9 290 with an i7-930, 18 GB memory and a 1000w PSU on Windows 7 professional x64.

Is there an alternative to cgminer for ATI cards which can succesfully use the ASL api?

cgminer

Lucas Kauffman

Posted 2014-02-06T09:47:02.900

Reputation: 133

Answers

I managed to fix this by using the kalroth patched version of cgminer 3.7.2. Sometimes my cards still black screen after rebooting the mining process, but generally it runs quitestable once started from a clean reboot.

Lucas Kauffman

Posted 2014-02-06T09:47:02.900

Reputation: 133

R290 tends to overheat. Then it automatically starts to lower frequency to avoid HW damage. You have to provide adequate cooling for it. Some units are worse than others. It usually helps to replace thermal compound under its cooler. The one from factory is usually of very bad quality.

See http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-r9-290x-thermal-paste-efficiency,3678.html

Ondrej Bozek

Posted 2014-02-06T09:47:02.900

Reputation: 341

Temperatures are quite ok, they aren't going over 72 degrees C – Lucas Kauffman – 2014-02-06T10:29:38.140

I was able to solve my problems with the Gigabyte R9 290 by

completely uninstalling all sdk packs and installing sdk 2.9
completely uninstalling all Catalyst drivers and installing version 14.1b (I think)

Now it's working, no dramas.

beanbag

Posted 2014-02-06T09:47:02.900

Reputation: 1

This could be better as a comment, or if you expanded upon it more a complete answer. – John T – 2014-03-24T21:06:15.097

@JacobTorba: To be fair, new users are not allowed to comment. – Tony – 2014-03-24T22:02:12.617

@Tony that's true but it is way better for a user to gain the small amount of rep needed than to create short and incomplete answers. – John T – 2014-03-24T23:09:47.893

It's pretty short, but at least gives a suggestion how to fix the asker's issue based on personal experience. It could be improved by providing a description of the problems that the answerer had before applying his solution. – Murch – 2014-03-25T11:37:04.817