ASUS GTX 970 STRIX - Mining Ethereum with 22MH/s?

Start minig is really complicated these days, all the hardware is sold-out and if you have an gtx 970 there are so many "make this and that ... posts" that may confuse you.

Are 22mh/s possible with this card? 

Maybe, but the watt per hash ratio is horrible! My personal best was ~21MH/s an that was unstable and my card going like crazy with ~7.8watt per MegaHash.

After this guide you are able to mine ETH on the "sweet spot", means:

1. Economic - prob. best watt per hash ratio for you
2. Not blocking your PC - able to work with your PC with no "pixel-fails" etc.
3. Stable - No heat problems or crashed miner exceptions

Hard-/Software:

• Windows 10
• 1x ASUS GTX 970 STRIX 
• Nvidia driver 382.53 (actual driver)
• ASUS GPU Tweakll
• Genoil 1.1.7 (OpenCL-mode)
• NVIDIA Inspector 1.9.7.3 (other versions crashed often)
• nanopool.org as  mining-pool (works great for me)

NVIDIA driver:

There are so many recommendations for the older (Win7) drivers, and i tried most of them with different setups, miners etc, but in the end the current 382.53 driver was doing his job great.

There is only one limitation: 

1. You cannot use cuda-miners (genoil-cuda, claymore-dual)

Required setting:  NVIDIA Control Panel -> Manage 3D Settings -> Optimize for compute

Miner:

I'am using the genoil 1.1.7 miner in OpenCL-Mode and this miner works really fast/stable imo.

Github

Pro's:

1. OpenCL support
2. Fast 
3. Configurable

Con's:

1. No integrated monitoring
2. No dual-mining
3. No remote control

Monitoring:

The NVIDIA Inspector 1.9.7.3 is easy to use and you got most of the informations.

1. Power  - this should be as low as possible
2. Temp - under 65° you can mine almost silent with this card
3. GPU usage - informational
4. MCU - informational

Now you can create 3 different setups with these information

1. Mine silent
2. Mine with best watt/hash ratio
3. Mine as fast as possible

SETX ENV-Variables:

On every Miningpool-site i found something like this:

setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100

You just don't need this with a single gtx 970 (2GB Memory, Multi-GPU etc.)

cl-local-work / cl-global-work

The genoil-miner has 2 options who are really important.

This options are required for a stable Win 10 an max. watt/hash ratio. After searching on Google and trying some combinations i found my personal best:

--cl-local-work 128 --cl-global-work 3584

Nvidia-smi:

With this tool you can enable the OC-functionality and getting some informations like enabled devices, P-States and Clock-speed.

Short: (just place the first 2 numbers into the XXX fields)

cd C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\NVSMI\

nvidia-smi -q -d SUPPORTED_CLOCKS | more
[ctrl+c]
nvidia-smi -ac XXXX,XXXX

Long:

http://cryptomining-blog.com/tag/nvidia-smi/

Batch files (start miner with scheduler):

Create 2 Files in the genoil folder:

start_scheduler.bat

:loop1
start start_nanopool.bat
timeout /T 5000

taskkill /F /IM ethminer.exe
timeout /T 5
goto loop1
pause

start_nanopool.bat

ethminer.exe --farm-recheck 200 -G -S eth-eu1.nanopool.org:9999 -FS eth-eu2.nanopool.org:9999 -O [ETH Account].[Worker name]/[EMAIL] --cl-local-work 128 --cl-global-work 3584

This will also work for other pools or regions, just don't forget the cl-settings.

Now you can start the "start_scheduler.bat" and every 5000 seconds it will shutdown the miner and start a new one.

Step by step:

Prepare:

1. Install Nvidia driver and reboot.
2. Preconfigure OC via Asus GPU Tweak with a new profile (all on complete low)
3. Enable OC posibility via nvidia-smi
4. Loop over drivers/miners if you think there are better ones

Loops:

1. Choose your first goal (silent, economic, full-power)
2. Create a new profile on GPU Tweak and modify it with your suggestions
3. Create a new start_xxx.bat and modify it with your suggestions
4. Start NVIDIA Inspector
5. Start your miner and save the informations like (power, hashrate, temp etc.) after 5min and test something like firefox.
6. Adjust and repeat till you reach the goal

Note: Loading DAG-File is always "laggy". 

Profiles i found useful:

Tweak:

GPU Boost Clock : (-50 Economic) (-10 Performance) (+50 Peak)

Max GPU Voltage: (+0 Economic) (+0 Performance) (+0 Peak)

Memory Clock:  (-1000 Economic) (+700 Performance) (+1000 Peak)

Power Target: (-38 Economic) (-25 Performance)  (+5 Peak)

-----

genoil:

--cl-local-work 32 --cl-global-work 1024 (PC Usage)

--cl-local-work 128 --cl-global-work 3584 (Econonic/Performance/Peak)

Personal sweet-spot "Economic":

In my case it's about 68% power  (145 * 0.68 = 98,6 Watt) (98,6/16 = 6.16 Watt per 1MH),

63° with 750rpm spinning fan (pretty silent)

This setup is complete stable and economic. Best Hash/Watt ratio, stable OS and miner.

Nanopool guessed my 72h mining-session with 18.5MH/s (found more shares than expected for 16MH/s)

In this case we are mining with 5.32Watt per MegaHash -> not the best one but still pretty good.

(The wattage is just suggested and only includes the GPU without the mainsystem)

Note:

This guide is not complete and iam 100% sure it includes wrong suggestions with the wattage.

Just wanna share my experience and hope it saves you some time.

Also thanks to all the reddit and youtube guys who posting about the gtx970 and mining