Need help badly Please with 290's on water not mining. (Strange Problem)

Hiya Guys,

I have 2 Sapphire 290's that mine perfect at 880khs each on air. BUT

As soon as i add my EK Nickel/Plexi CSQ Clean blocks the cgminer will open say the first line of text and not continue. (Although GPU's are showing under load in GPUZ)

So if it was 1 block then ok people can mess up i could see maybe i had a bad mount but i mounted these cards like 6 times each now and also have 10 other cards on water and have mounted countless numbers of blocks for myself and customers. (So ruling mounting out as a problem at this point)

Here is the part driving me nuts:

As soon as i put the stock coolers on the cards mine perfect again ??

My conclusion is it has to be something to do with the fan being unplugged and cgminer but i cant seem to find anyone else mining a 290 or 290x on water and im hoping so badly someone here knows because i really want to keep my blocks on.

All Games and Benchmarks work Perfect - Only cgminer is effected.

Things i tried already:

Deleted .bin files from cgminer and re ran these commands:
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1

Remounted blocks many times and left back plates off for now. (cards always mine with stock coolers)

Reinstalled same driver and Trixx utility which i prefer over Afterburner.

I am using this .bat file which always works perfect on my cards with 1003 Core and 1500Mem :
START C:\cgminer\cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://earth.vircurpool.com:3333 -u username.5 -p password --thread-concurrency 32765 -I 20 -w 256 -g 1

Tried crossfire and non crossfire mode and am also am in slots 1 and 2 on an MSI Z87 G-45 Gaming Board with 8 gigs of ram.

Tried Plugging the fans in while the cards are on the bench but the wires are to short and my cards are not mounted.

last week i tried just 1 card and had the same problem and even reinstalled windows and it did no good so not bothering this time as i know if i put the stock coolers on they will work.

Between $300. it costs me for Blocks and Back Plates and the money i am losing daily not running these cards i seriously need some help but for 1 i cant even find anyone with a 290 or 290x on water that mines which i cant believe. I really need to get this fixed today before i take the blocks off yet again for good which will be very bad as i got the blocks to run 4 cards on 1 board without risers so i need to blocks working.

Oh yeah also tried --gpu-fan 0 and --gpu-autofan and still nothing.

Come one PureOC i know someone here must have the answer. I wil be checking this post every 5 minutes hoping for an answer :)

Thanks in advance guys and Take care.

MybadOmen


Also i added a new Alt coin Guide here for those interested: http://forums.pureoverclock.com/digi...mybadomen.html

Can you try plugging in the fans and letting them dangle to see if the problem is not having a fan attached while mining?

still trying but cant reach they are extremly short, trying other more aggressive benchmarks with the cards oc'd to make sure they are performing fine. Cgminer opens i can even see it switch pools but then the box goes black but my gpus are def under full load still. i check the pool and sometimes it shows the cards for a few minutes and then dissapears even though they are still under load. I am worried where this new series depends on the fan and temp targets to operate there might be a big problem with mining on water withn them . Just my guess and i hope im wrong.

At the least you could make a little resistor plug for them. Make them ~think~ that they have a fan attached to them.
Or you could add a length of wire to the fans, or use other fans.

If card bios requires input from fan rpm wire then perhaps any fan connected or cut and extend wires to existing

I wonder if you have an old card lying around that has a fan with long enough cable.

2nd thought ....When running gpu-Z, what do you see from sensors? ...sshot please

Well i got some good news and some really bad news for the community until someone somewhere resolves this problem.

1) R9 200 Series GPU's will not mine water cooled (sorta see next)

2) R9 200 Series GPU's will Mine if you have the stock coolers plugged in and dangling from your Rig.

3) R9 200 Series GPU's will however Game normal , Benchmark and Overclock normal with waterblocks (Just Cgminer wont work)

So it looks like cgminer needs to be informed of this issue in hopes they can have a command to bypass the fan as a resistor shouldnt be needed as its not for anything else.

Or maybe some coder wants to jump on this and we can get this fixed even sooner.

Please pass this issue on before others go through the same hell as me.

Here is my rediculous looking setup now with 2 stock coolers hanging off the side (But it mines now 880khs per card again)

Attachment 5979

Well thanks everyone for the help and if anyone finds a code or flag to fix this issue please post it here but ive already messed with --gpu-fan 0 ,--gpu-autofan etc and nothing helped but plugging the cards in.

Take Care

MybadOmen

wow. that is messed up. I am glad you confirmed the issue but it sucks that cgminer is looking for this information. I doubt a solution will come from AMD. There would have to be a bios update with an option for mining mode that changes how the gpu data is presented. Cgminer may be able to address it sooner but it might not be easy for them either. Ill keep an eye out for updates that address this issue

Huh... interesting read on this issue. Never heard of something like this happening before, that sucks for the mining community :-/. Is there a way to at least disconnect the fans from the rest of the stock cooler so that you at least don't have all that bulk resting near your rig?