Do you experience much more crashes/restarts of xmr-stak with the latest 2.3.0 version (Vega 64 rig)?

Question

I was using the old 2.2 version for about 3 months. I used it along with the 'JJ's XMR-STAK HashRate Monitor and Restart Tool' on Windows 10 with the blockchain AMD driver (Aug 2017). Mining rig contains 4x Vega 64 and one Vega 56. On a good day it will restart itself about 5-6 times "soft restart" and 2-3 times "hard" (OS restarts itself). On a bad day it will go up to 15-20 softs, and 4-5 hards.

Recently I've installed the new 2.3.0 version (monero7) and now I experience about 30-40 soft restarts and about 10-15 hard using the exact same configuration settings for the cards and the miner.

Do you experience similar problem with XMR-Stak 2.3.0?

Any idea how to avoid it?

(btw, I've tried to use the newest AMD driver - not just the hashrate was about 10% lower and in the same time power consumption 10% higher but also the restart rate was about the same).

Answer 1

At this time, with cryptonight_v7 you're not mining Monero. You should use the cryptonight_v8 algorithm with the latest xmr-stak 2.7.1 to mine Monero, but when the question was posted probably there was no v8.

Anyway, the new algo (before the v7 and now the v8) is more hungry with power consumption and you must use different settings to find a good sweet spot.

The new xmr-stak version provides you an autoconfig function pretty useful with double thread enabled. So, you can use it to find the best settings for your hardware.

Apart from that, the AMD blockchain driver (Aug 2017) is a BETA software and it can cause many issues. The latest Adrenalin is more stable and, enabling compute mode, it can give you same hashrate as blockchain driver.

Last, but not least, soft and hard restarts (or crashes) in the most part of cases are due to overclocking, undervolting or power issue. A VEGA card can require a lot of power during mining, so check if your PSU can handle all that hardware and try to set less aggressive settings for overclocking and undervolting.

Answer 2

According to xmr-stak 2.3.0 release notes, config files from 2.2.0 are NOT compatible with the new version. If you still used them, you can get 'restarts' for this reason.

Also, between xmr-stak issues you can find that less aggressive 'intensity' values prevent crashes and restarts. I'm a newbie about Monero, but usually too high overclocking can also cause crashes in mining other coins.

Answer 3

try taking the vega56 out of the equation; I had the same problem with my rig 5xVega64 + 1xVega56. Having the vega 56 in there made the whole rig very unstable. I tried both cast-xmr and xmr-stack

Removing the Vega56 solved things for me...