System crashes when trying to run salad

kucharczykt · October 5, 2021

I recently put together a pc and decided that mining overnight was worth a try, but whenever I try to start mining my entire system crashes. My specs are:

Intel i3 10100

Gigabyte B560m

MSI GTX GAMING 980

Thermaltake smart 600w

I know my psu isn't the greatest and I do regret underspending on it but still even a 980 ti, which has notably more power draw, it shouldn't trip opp or anything. I've never had issue before with my system completely crashing, even when I applied an unstable OC it was always just a soft crash and the program would just close (no overclocks are currently applied, unless you count XMP). I didn't check my thermals but I don't see anyway that it could thermal throttle in under 3 seconds, and even if it did it shouldn't be crashing.

The program I'm using to mine is "Salad" and I haven't had issue with cpu mining (even with a stock cooler) its only been gpu mining that crashes.

Edit: Not a bluescreen the system just shuts down and there's no display output (although led's and fans stay on).

Edit no.2: Event viewer crash report "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly." a few "events" before that there was an error about "Event ID 56" not being found idk if thats related. Also it has the same info about each crash so at least its not fluctuating between different issues, however it does make this more likely a psu issue.

Edit no.3: I set my power limit to 80% in MSI afterburner and it appears to be stable now. Damned thermaltake psu.

jaslion · October 5, 2021

I mean the smart is known to just crap out when it experiences any kind of heavier load so replace that crappy thing with a good psu and call it a day.

Get an A or B tier unit and please don't try mining on a known bad psu that kills systems.

OscarMike · October 10, 2021

im not to sure its ur PSU. i used a no name brand ketchup and mustard PSU for like 7 years. still going strong. thats not to say every ketchup and mustard psu is ok. im not aware of the reputation of your particular PSU but i know alot of stuff gets thrown around on these forums. i bought a 1000w LC power supply because it was dirt cheap. there were whole threads on here saying how bad they were. but it was too cheap to miss and im glad i got it as its perfectly fine. a lot of online shop reviews say they are fine too.

mining puts a lot of demand on your GPU it could be that its just not stable if you dont under clock it.

im looking after a rig with 8 cards. and have my own 3 card rig. i know for a fact that without underclocking the cards it wont run stable. as soon as a GPU reaches 80c the miner will kill that card and stop mining on it as a precaution. every card in the rig needs either the core speed lowered or power limit reduced. otherwise it will mine for a few minutes then start killing gpus. (killing as in "stopping" not actually damaging the card).

it really depends what coin you are trying to mine. we mine ETH. i would suggest mining ETC on your card as it only utilizes the VRAM and not the gpu itself. we personally use pheonix miner 5.5c. you can significantly reduce the cards power draw and costs by underclocking it a lot. RVN uses both the GPU and the VRAM and is very taxing on your card. even the pros limit a cards performance significantly mining raven just to keep temperatures in check. for example a card might be capable of 30 mh/s but guys like red panda mining and such only achieve about 22-24 mh/s because they need to underclock to keep things safe for the cards.

kucharczykt · October 12, 2021

On 10/10/2021 at 11:56 AM, OscarMike said:

im not to sure its ur PSU. i used a no name brand ketchup and mustard PSU for like 7 years. still going strong. thats not to say every ketchup and mustard psu is ok. im not aware of the reputation of your particular PSU but i know alot of stuff gets thrown around on these forums. i bought a 1000w LC power supply because it was dirt cheap. there were whole threads on here saying how bad they were. but it was too cheap to miss and im glad i got it as its perfectly fine. a lot of online shop reviews say they are fine too.

mining puts a lot of demand on your GPU it could be that its just not stable if you dont under clock it.

im looking after a rig with 8 cards. and have my own 3 card rig. i know for a fact that without underclocking the cards it wont run stable. as soon as a GPU reaches 80c the miner will kill that card and stop mining on it as a precaution. every card in the rig needs either the core speed lowered or power limit reduced. otherwise it will mine for a few minutes then start killing gpus. (killing as in "stopping" not actually damaging the card).

it really depends what coin you are trying to mine. we mine ETH. i would suggest mining ETC on your card as it only utilizes the VRAM and not the gpu itself. we personally use pheonix miner 5.5c. you can significantly reduce the cards power draw and costs by underclocking it a lot. RVN uses both the GPU and the VRAM and is very taxing on your card. even the pros limit a cards performance significantly mining raven just to keep temperatures in check. for example a card might be capable of 30 mh/s but guys like red panda mining and such only achieve about 22-24 mh/s because they need to underclock to keep things safe for the cards.

I went ahead and switched to nicehash and I haven't had any issues so far. I probably wont switch unless I have any major issues, mainly due to its polished-ness. I plan on getting a 3060ti once supply gets better and then maybe I'll look for the most efficient and most profitable miner but I'm only mining at night (at least for the school year) so its not like I'm running a major mining operation.

OscarMike · October 12, 2021

31 minutes ago, kucharczykt said:

I went ahead and switched to nicehash and I haven't had any issues so far. I probably wont switch unless I have any major issues, mainly due to its polished-ness. I plan on getting a 3060ti once supply gets better and then maybe I'll look for the most efficient and most profitable miner but I'm only mining at night (at least for the school year) so its not like I'm running a major mining operation.

glad to hear its working fine. i really had my doubts that it was your PSU. nicehash is good for smaller opperations. only problem with NH is that it chooses which coin to mine. so i had to turn off all the miners which supported RVN to make sure that it wouldnt auto switch to RVN. 3060ti is awesome card i wish i could have one for my gaming rig. keep in mind that 3060ti will be LHR so you will need to use a miner that maximizes its profitability. i think NB miner was one of them.

kucharczykt · October 12, 2021

4 hours ago, OscarMike said:

glad to hear its working fine. i really had my doubts that it was your PSU. nicehash is good for smaller opperations. only problem with NH is that it chooses which coin to mine. so i had to turn off all the miners which supported RVN to make sure that it wouldnt auto switch to RVN. 3060ti is awesome card i wish i could have one for my gaming rig. keep in mind that 3060ti will be LHR so you will need to use a miner that maximizes its profitability. i think NB miner was one of them.

I wasn't thinking about LHR, what coin does NB miner use? Also what's wrong with mining raven? I thought it was a more profitable coin.

OscarMike · October 13, 2021

5 hours ago, kucharczykt said:

I wasn't thinking about LHR, what coin does NB miner use? Also what's wrong with mining raven? I thought it was a more profitable coin.

So the ETH (ethereum) algorithm is run only on the VRAM of the graphics cards leaving the GPU core itself doing very little. it means that you can underclock the core a lot saving a lot of energy and efectively extending the longevity of the chip. if you leave the VRAM stock then effectively you can extend the lifetime of the card by so much that it will last a lot longer than if you were gaming on it for example. this goes for any coin that uses the Ethereum blockchain and algorithm. this includes ETC (Ethereum Classic) which you can mine on a 4gb card. RVN (raven) algorithm on the other hand slams the VRAM and the GPU chip. it uses the whole card meaning if you want to get the best results you dont want to underclock the Core. this means it will use a butt ton more energy costing you more money in the long run. the problem with this is that RVN hits your core and vram so hard that in order to keep temps down within safe limits you need to underclock it anyway reducing its efficiency. most sites will state a cards potential hashrate not its realistic hashrate. a card might be capable of say 30mh/s but in reality you need to underclock it to keep things safe so you might only get 23-24mh/s in the end.

for example i have a vega 56 in my rig i have underclocked it to 900mhz @ 920mv on the core. stock its about 1500mhz so thats a huge reduction. i think my vega uses about 80-90w. this is not at the cost of hashrate as im still getting close to its maximum hashrate (with no bios mod) of 40mh/s. this would not be possible on RVN.

basically RVN costs you a lot more in electric and degrades your card a lot faster than if you were mining a coin on ethash.

these are the stats of NB miner and the coins it can mine

https://minerstat.com/miner/nbminer

on LHR miners check out this video by Son of a Tech