PowerColor RX 480 8GB Red Devil with Samsung :( memory

HoobsHoobs Member Posts: 4
edited January 2017 in Mining
Hello Ethereum Community,
Before I talk about my experience with these particular cards, I would like to thank you all for providing guidance and feedback that helped me understand ETH Mining, BIOS mods...etc. Special thanks to Boysie for doing a lot of testing and providing his Low Power and V2 bioses for Red Devil 8GB cards.

So as I mentioned before, I recently got into mining Ethereum and put together my first RIG. I had some misfortune with my first AS ROCK H81 PRO BTC mobo that I had to ship back. After receiving the other one, I hooked it up and started testing the cards.
As the title says i had a misfortune that all 6 cards I ordered (4 from NewEgg and 2 from Amazon) had Samsung memory which from what i understand is the worst kind for OC and good MH/s rate.
But moving on with the AMD driver hack to disable BIOS sig check and patch, finally did Boysie's Low Powered BIOS mod on all the cards and started mining.
Then I saw enormous mining speed fluctuations in 3 out of 6 cards. While 3 of them were firmly on 29 MH/s, 3 of them were going down to 20 MH/s...
For the longest time I couldn't figure it out and then someone mentioned HWInfo to check the GPU Memory errors...so I got the utility and checked. Lo and behold 3 of those cards had memory errors in the billions.
Then i started to play with Memory speed and since Low Powered BIOS puts the Mem speed at 2080 I lowered it to 2040 and things started looking up. After few hours of mining, memory errors started increasing again so I flashed the cards back to original BIOS.

I would like to add that I also tried Boysie's V2 bios but each and every card that I tried it on, BSOD'ed the rig. None of the cards were able to run Claymore miner on 30-31 MH/s which was what Boysie said his V2 BIOS would do.

I then took his V2 BIOS and modified it to reduce Mem speed from 2220 to 2100 and all 3 cards started working albeit with increased power draw and about the same speed of 29 MH/s which is the same as Low Powered BIOS.

Grand finale after a day or so of mining is that one of the 3 cards that I had issues with originally completely died and couldn't boot into windows.
After repeated failed attempts to flash it back to original bios from USB FreeDOS boot disk, i finally managed to boot into Windows and use AtiWinFlash to flash it back to it's original bios.

I have come to find that these particular PowerColor cards with Model number (AXRX 480 8GBD5-3DH/OC) and that have Samsung memory are, extremely flaky and cannot be OC'ed and run sable even with Low Power BIOS mod from Boysie.
I also learned that this also card comes in Version 2 which is a bit more expensive, so I wander if maybe memory is different/better on V2?

Thank you all and hopefully this experience will give you some useful information if you happen to have these same cards and are experiencing some of the same issues I have had.

Post edited by Hoobs on

Comments

  • wirelessnet2wirelessnet2 Member Posts: 385 ✭✭✭
    edited January 2017
    Powercolor cards are shit in the first place. They have the worst VRMs and a shitty cooler. Shouldnt have bought them at all. Anyway memory errors dont always mean crashes. I have my reference 480 going at 31 MH/s (miner reported and pool side effective 24hr hash), and its producing millions of errors. Its been stable for days now.
  • HoobsHoobs Member Posts: 4
    Thanks for your response Wirelessnet2. If I knew all the things I know now after 2-3 days of testing PowerColor cards, I would never have bought them even though they were quite cheap at $229. I wonder if there is a way to know which memory is on the card before you buy it?

    Which memory brand is on your ref 480?
  • wonderfullifewonderfullife Member Posts: 103
    Where did you read that samsung is the worst memory? AFAIK all 8gb 470s/480s have samsung in them, I don't know about the latest revisions though. How much that memory will go depends on luck mostly, some do 31Mh others 29.
  • HoobsHoobs Member Posts: 4
    Thanks wonderfullife for your response. I have seen few Youtube videos of people complaining about Samsung memory in 470/480 and I have my own 6x RX 480 PowerColor with Samsung memory and they didn't OC well.

    First batch of 470/480 came with Hynix memory which by many accounts is the best one in terms of OC/Undervolt. But I do agree that most of BIOS modding is pure luck on how high you can get the OC.
  • bhanu545bhanu545 Member Posts: 53
    Hoobs said:

    Thanks wonderfullife for your response. I have seen few Youtube videos of people complaining about Samsung memory in 470/480 and I have my own 6x RX 480 PowerColor with Samsung memory and they didn't OC well.

    First batch of 470/480 came with Hynix memory which by many accounts is the best one in terms of OC/Undervolt. But I do agree that most of BIOS modding is pure luck on how high you can get the OC.

    Yes this is a shitty card, I got mine today same model as yours with Samsung memory. I have other cards with Samsung memory working perfectly fine for mining. Only this model is weird.

    Problem 1: Atiflash dsnt recognize the bios
    Problem 2: Watttool shows "current scale:B9" WTF does that even mean???? Others show "A0" usually
    Problem 3: Ran claymore on lowered GPU 1200 with default bios, system hangs
    Problem 4: Default settings with "0" offset- System hangs
    Total BS.

    I dnt know if newegg would accept a return as this is a non-refundable deal. FML
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