PC freezes while mining ... help please?

Mizugori

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2004
Messages
1,240
The PC in question consists of the following:

-Asus P8Z68-V LX mobo
-i5 2500k quadcore CPU
-8gb Corsair DDR3
-2 SSDs & 1 7200rpm SATA drive
-Win 7 pro 64bit
-Corsair Carbide 400R case

Now, I originally had a Corsair 650watt PSU (I believe bronze) and an evga GTX 560 ti video card in this machine. I started mining a tiny bit with that card using cudaminer. Then I ordered an MSI R9 290 OC (the one with the twin frozr cooler on it) and a Seasonic 860watt Platinum PSU, but newegg sent the wrong PSU (850watt bronze version) so at first what I did is just remove the nvidia video card and put the 290 in it's place. I wasn't sure if the 650watt bronze psu would be able to handle both the cards + my cpu, ram, etc and I didn't want to push it.

So, with just the 290 installed, I played around with cgminer and eventually got to where I could get about 630kh/sec with this code in cgminer:

Code:
cgminer --scrypt -o poolwebsite:port -u workername -p password -I 14

But if I tried to go to Intensity 15, my computer would either freeze or blue screen within a second or two of entering the code in cgminer. I consulted another miner who gave me this code to try:

Code:
cgminer --scrypt -o poolwebsite:port -u workername -p password -g 1 -w 256 --lookup-gap 2 
--thread-concurrency 32765 -I 20 --auto-fan --gpu-fan 60-80 --temp-hysteresis 1 --temp-target=88 
--temp-overheat=95 --gpu-engine 1000 --gpu-memclock 1250 --gpu-powertune 20

strangely enough, that allowed me to get an impressive 880kh/sec, and did not instantly crash my PC. however, after a few hours, it would eventually freeze. The temps were not getting above the low 80s so I don't believe it wasn't shutting down from heat.

From doing some reading, I believed that the problem must be either my power supply not really being up to snuff for this, and/or the video card not being able to handle mining while also driving my desktop (and to support this theory, if I did stuff on the desktop it would freeze my faster, usually in 10-20 minutes rather than 3 hours or so.)

The Seasonic 860watt Platinum PSU arrived a day later, so I removed the 650watt and put in the Seasonic 860. I put the nvidia card in the top PCIE slot on my mobo and put the MSI R9 290 card in the bottom PCIE slot (there are only two PCIE slots wide enough for video cards on this mobo.)

First I couldn't get cgminer to "see" the second card (the 290) at all. I tried changing the registry keys to disable UPLS or whatever its called to stop powering off the card, but still the only way I could get Windows and cgminer to acknowledge that there was even a 290 in my freaking PC, was to hook it up to my monitor. As I only have 1, that meant having BOTH VIDEO CARDS attached to the same monitor. I don't have a dummy plug or the necessary supplies to make one, if I need to I will end up trying it but read on.

So I have the nvidia going to the monitor via HDMI cable and the 290 going to the monitor via DVI cable. By doing that, I can now mine on the 290 (I had to add "--gpu-platform 1 -d 0" to my code however) and my nvidia card is "driving" the desktop AND I now have a badass Seasonic 860watt Platinum freaking PSU, so I should be able to rock and roll now, right????

Not quite. If I use the code above that I got from a fellow miner, which yields 880kh/sec on my card, it still makes my computer a bit sluggish and freezes it after a few hours (or like 10-20 minutes if I browse the web or anything like that.) The temps on both cards are fine - the 290 ends up in the low to mid 80s and the nvidia card hovers around 50 (understandable due to being near the 290.) I am very confused. I have heard of plenty of people who have multiple cards and are using some of them to mine, and can game on the other card at the same time. I can't even browse the freaking web lol. What am I doing wrong here? Is the issue somehow related to me having them both connected to the same monitor? That sounds absurd but I don't know what else it could possibly be. I thought that as long as I controlled the heat (which I am doing fine) that I should be able to have the 290 mining at breakneck, balls-the-wall-speed and still be able to use the computer on the nvidia card (and even play games on it if I want to - again assuming they are cooled adequately. I would understand if heat was the issue here but based on the temps it is not.)

Can anyone steer me in the right direction here??
 
Your intensity may be too high. Try dropping to "I 18".
It will lower your hash some but freezing up wastes a lot more.
 
You could try to use the cgminer miners fork by (Kalroth or sgminer). I assume the Sapphire bios also works with the MSI 290 since it uses the default pcb. Check your VRMs temps also afaik your MSI 290 is bad for mining (VRM overheats?)
 
Did anything work for you? First of all I'm surprised he got 880 hash at all at 1250 memory. I find that odd. Most cards prefer 1500. If his memory was overclocked, I would say that the freezing sounds like what I get with an unstable memory overclock.

I would try running the 290 by itself without the Nvidia card to see how that goes.

Definitely check those VRM temperatures.

Why would you buy a MSI 290 when you're going to watercool these all anyways:?
 
My first thought was VRM temps as well. I was also surprised to see 880 on 1250 memory. First I've seen 880 out of a non-1500 memory speed, wondering if he has the good Hynix memory that doesn't need messed with (see this link, credit to mkrohn, started for the 280x but same applies to 290 from what I've been reading).
 
My first thought was VRM temps as well. I was also surprised to see 880 on 1250 memory. First I've seen 880 out of a non-1500 memory speed, wondering if he has the good Hynix memory that doesn't need messed with (see this link, credit to mkrohn, started for the 280x but same applies to 290 from what I've been reading).

Somebody else originally posted it but I never backtracked to figure out who. There's like 3 guys on here that read seemingly everywhere on mining. We need to just take over this DC forum to the point where they give us a mining forum. Having so much fantastic data stuck in just 1 thread makes it impossible to find good information
 
Try taking "--auto-fan" out, apparently the 290's & x's can report fan speeds that cgminer misunderstands, and cgminer can try and apply fan settings that freak out the card.

H.
 
hey guys, sorry for the delay - I ended up getting it to run stable at I=19, also incidentally i took out the fan code because I just wasn't happy with cgminer's fan mgmt so I do it myself with Afterburner. It is now running stable and I get about 865kh/sec.
 
I have been having this issue as well in one of my rigs. I have tried everything, low intensity, re-installing windows multiple times. It will mine for up to 15 minutes or even half an hour but eventually the whole system locks up. Strangely it was working fine a couple of days ago and now it is happening again.

The card will run 3DMark 11 without a problem. Google searches are yielding surprisingly little results. Does anybody have any experience with this issue?
 
Lets try moving this to the correct sub-forum, may be of more help :p
 
I have been having this issue as well in one of my rigs. I have tried everything, low intensity, re-installing windows multiple times. It will mine for up to 15 minutes or even half an hour but eventually the whole system locks up. Strangely it was working fine a couple of days ago and now it is happening again.

The card will run 3DMark 11 without a problem. Google searches are yielding surprisingly little results. Does anybody have any experience with this issue?

I'd your system worked fine for awhile and then started exhibiting this, you may want to try swapping out the PSU. Or if it's a multi card rig, disable one of the cards.

I've seen this exact problem many times and it's always been an aging PSU that has been ran 24/7 at 80%+ max wattage.

I have a two month Corsair 850 (Gold). It would do 850 outta 850 if I wanted. But now that it's 3 months old, it locks if I push anything past 700w on it for more than a minute.
 
Do not use CGMINER on 290s, they it is a utter nightmare. I would get SGMINER and it works 10 times better and you will not get the black screen crashes if you have to restart the miner. I would also start to monitor your watt usage with a killa watt meter.
 
I've been using sgminer with the same issue. Last night the pc froze twice playing (streaming) video.

0 errors with one pass of clean-boot memtest, and ran OCCT GPU for a while at max settings with no issues. Also ran a pass of 3dMark 11 with no issues.

However I seem to have gotten it stable at I=13 and 1 GPU thread, underclocked to 800Mhz Core and 1200Mhz memory. - only ~ 440KHash :(

Plan on re-installing windows again. Utterly perplexed.
 
I've been using sgminer with the same issue. Last night the pc froze twice playing (streaming) video.

0 errors with one pass of clean-boot memtest, and ran OCCT GPU for a while at max settings with no issues. Also ran a pass of 3dMark 11 with no issues.

However I seem to have gotten it stable at I=13 and 1 GPU thread, underclocked to 800Mhz Core and 1200Mhz memory. - only ~ 440KHash :(

Plan on re-installing windows again. Utterly perplexed.



If you want to see if it is OS related, download a copy of PiMP at getpimp.org. Flash to a spare flash drive and boot off that drive.

You can then do a quick configuration and let it run for a bit (or let it run on the donation pools). If it's stable there, you'll know if it's Windows or driver related.
 
Wait, your getting the crash when streaming? Like playing flash video? Because that is a whole different issue and completely driver related. I had the same issue until I did a ton of research online. Do you get it when playing videos on youtube or any other flash based sites?
If so go into CCC, go to video and change global video quality and uncheck enforce smooth video playback.
 
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