It appears that NiceHash is TRYING to kill my GPU

[Sarra]

Every time I open NiceHash, it kills MSI afterburner.

 

Then, it starts mining, and my GPU fan stays at 33%.

 

Later, I check my stats, and my GPU is throttling, with a GPU hotspot sitting in the 120°C range.

 

So, I'm not going to touch NiceHash until this is changed.

[Levent]

Nicehash is a provider that has 3 different applications for mining, so which one? Their apps also have their own fan and gpu control mechanisms so that is why it kills afterburner. You can tweak settings within nicehash.

 

It seems like you did not configure it properly.

[Sarra]

9 hours ago, Levent said:

Nicehash is a provider that has 3 different applications for mining, so which one? Their apps also have their own fan and gpu control mechanisms so that is why it kills afterburner. You can tweak settings within nicehash.

 

It seems like you did not configure it properly.

I was using the standard miner, not the Quick Miner, nor the Linux OS miner.

 

I seriously doubt it was a misconfiguration, since, I've been running NiceHash for months and months and it never did this. I'll check the settings.

 

Edit: I did check the NiceHash Miner settings, and there was nothing about disabling or stopping MSI Afterburner; Nor did I find anything about GPU fan control.

[alyen]

There may have been a NiceHash update that seemed to have closed Afterburner when it loaded it, but I reinstalled Nvidia drivers it seemed to fix the problem. Even thought it closed up Afterburner I think it still left the overclock profiles running as long as it was stable.

[Sarra]

6 hours ago, alyen said:

There may have been a NiceHash update that seemed to have closed Afterburner when it loaded it, but I reinstalled Nvidia drivers it seemed to fix the problem. Even thought it closed up Afterburner I think it still left the overclock profiles running as long as it was stable.

Well, I'm using an AMD card, and Afterburner does sort of a real time update to the fan curve, so once Afterburner closes, the GPU fans stay at the speed they were set to before. Since NiceHash launches when my card is idle, the fans are idle, and they stay there.

 

I opened a ticket with NiceHash support, but they haven't responded... I'll give it a week, but I'm not expecting anything.

[alyen]

You will most likely need to start NiceHash first, then Afterburner and Radeon Software last if reinstall drivers/software didn't work. Not much of a solution, but if your overclocks are stable you only need to do it once until you need to restart the system/mining. You can try setting the AMD overclocks and fan setting in Afterburner, but I never found any GPU settings stably optimized compared to just doing it from Radeon software. It's what I was doing until I recently switched to NiceHash Quickminer for my Nvidia cards and AMD to HiveOS to make everything easier and may not need to do anything until something crashes. Seems like things could be stable for weeks and possibly months until the summer heat starts.

[Sarra]

1 hour ago, alyen said:

You will most likely need to start NiceHash first, then Afterburner and Radeon Software last if reinstall drivers/software didn't work. Not much of a solution, but if your overclocks are stable you only need to do it once until you need to restart the system/mining. You can try setting the AMD overclocks and fan setting in Afterburner, but I never found any GPU settings stably optimized compared to just doing it from Radeon software. It's what I was doing until I recently switched to NiceHash Quickminer for my Nvidia cards and AMD to HiveOS to make everything easier and may not need to do anything until something crashes. Seems like things could be stable for weeks and possibly months until the summer heat starts.

Yeah, I did this, but there's a problem: The NiceHash client self-updated and restarted, and when it did so, it killed Afterburner again.

 

I'm doing part time mining when I'm not gaming, so setting up an alternative OS just for mining isn't really going to be an option, unless there's a free VM Host for Windows that allows GPU passthrough, and I do not have an iGPU in my CPU, which makes it even more difficult.

[alyen]

You will most likely have to switch to Quickminer if NiceHash keeps updating and terminating Afterburner. I was able to set custom overclocks to with similar hashrate and power very similar Nbminer, but its not exactly as before on the regular app. Before you switch to Quickminer you should take note of the core, memory, wattage for each card is using first with your current miner. You may need to set the power to 1-2 wattages higher than before. I haven't tried using AMD GPUs on it since I no longer mixed my rigs with AMD and Nvidia with Windows, but it was easier to setup than I had thought. I wouldn't recommend using the low, medium, high or auto tuning settings just from seeing what the temperatures I got on some cards were at on the lower settings.

[Sarra]

6 minutes ago, alyen said:

You will most likely have to switch to Quickminer if NiceHash keeps updating and terminating Afterburner. I was able to set custom overclocks to with similar hashrate and power very similar Nbminer, but its not exactly as before on the regular app. Before you switch to Quickminer you should take note of the core, memory, wattage for each card is using first with your current miner. You may need to set the power to 1-2 wattages higher than before. I haven't tried using AMD GPUs on it since I no longer mixed my rigs with AMD and Nvidia with Windows, but it was easier to setup than I had thought. I wouldn't recommend using the low, medium, high or auto tuning settings just from seeing what the temperatures I got on some cards were at on the lower settings.

I wasn't able to get quickminer running on this machine. The only way I could get anything mining was with the regular miner...

 

As I said, I wasn't running any kind of OC, stock clocks, just a custom fan curve.

[alyen]

30 minutes ago, Sarra said:

As I said, I wasn't running any kind of OC, stock clocks, just a custom fan curve.

Please tell me you tuned the GPU for most efficiency for hashrate to power ratio and not only adjusted the fan curve. 

[Sarra]

10 minutes ago, alyen said:

Please tell me you tuned the GPU for most efficiency for hashrate to power ratio and not only adjusted the fan curve. 

I use my GPU 70% of the time for gaming. I undervolt everthing I run, my CPU and GPU.

 

I tuned it. But I didn't OC it.

 

Also keep in mind, my electricity is close to $0.09/kwh.

[Sarra]

I got a response from the NiceHash support team informing me that NiceHash doesn't have any method for closing Afterburner.

 

I'm going to reinstall Windows from scratch and see if that fixes it.

[Sarra]

I spent around 3 hours digging through the Windows Event Logs, and determined that Windows Update was responsible for the crashing of MSI Afterburner. >_> Thanks, Microsoft.