Windows 7: Win7 Ultimate x64 SP1 Updates Fail - KB2619339 - KB2729094 - KB976932

Yeah it's a great card and now that's it's getting older it's also getting cheaper but still a really good card.

As for the Vegas issue im still gonna try the basic troubleshooting steps since i was unable too without upgrading Windows 7 such as reinstalling everything, redoing all the drivers, and reinstalling OpenCL.

Im rending a lot of HD 1080 video which takes forever when they are over 2 hours long, my i7 920 does a good job but would like to take advantage of my GPU to start helping with this process. Just in the Vegas options it does not allow me to enable GPU acceleration, even if i edit the output template to use OpenCL if available.



Funny thing is also within Vegas if i do the "Check GPU" option is says OpenCL is Available.
So gonna update everything or try a reinstall and see if that helps out.

Yeah, those high end AMD cards are great. I splashed out on a i7 3770k, so I couldn't get a graphics card like that - but my build is fast enough as it is, so I'm not complaining

What version of Catalyst do you have? You need 11.7+ to be able to use GPU acceleration. I'd be surprised if you had drivers that old, but it's worth a try I guess.

Tom

The i7 3770k sure is a fast, especially with applications that take full control of all the threads. Till i needed to start rendering these videos my CPU would never be more then 20% with my 920

Im using the latest stable release which is 12.10.

I just reinstalled the AMD OpenCL SDK and everything is working now, Vegas see's my GPU's and is using them to render videos. Rendering is going much better now and my CPU is now hovering around 30% instead of 100% during the process as well it going much faster.

Yeah, it hurt my bank balance quite a lot though! lol. It runs quite hot though, even on water. On the maximum setting on IntelBurnTest it gets up to 100C (I stopped it before it did damage) and that's on water

That's great news, thanks for posting back your solution. I'm a keen skier and bought a helmet camera last year and I plan to do some edits for this season, so it's good to know how I can speed up the process.

Yeah so did my 5970, i managed to get it off of Craigslist for a good price though and still had warranty and have had no problems with it which is a good thing lol.

I haven't overclocked my CPU but under full load it can get up to 99C with just stock cooling. Though i rarely get up that high, currently idling at 60C on all cores with almost 0 load. I was gonna do water cooling but i initially built this for BitCoin mining and the ROI with water cooling just wasn't worth it.

Oh nice, I had to buy mine new

I keep hearing about BitCoin mining, but I don't actually know a thing about it, any chance you could explain the basics? Like, what's the point?

Tom

It can actually gets really technical if you want to know the real workings but basics are you download a program that "generates" random numbers again and again and again (millions of times per second depending on your computer speed). Think lottery. In the beginning CPU Mining was great and an i7 920 could generate roughly 20 Million Hashes per second. Though this phased out as you are able to use your GPU to your advantage. The 5970 can generate around 700 Million hashes a second, Much faster then the CPU as well as using a lot less power looking at the Hash rate compared to the power rates. That's not even getting into multi card setups, plus even GPU's are gonna start phasing out as ASIC Cards are getting much better not to mention even less power usage.

So now that your generating hashes there are rules to the network. Two different people will not get the same me, while numbers from 1001 to 2000 belongs to you. If the random number/hash matches a "pattern", it is accepted. If it doesn't match the "pattern", it is rejected. For a very simplified example, if the "pattern" says we accept only even numbers, then ~50% of the random numbers will "win lottery" and 50% will miss. If the pattern was so easy to match, I can simply generate the numbers 2, 4, 6, 8... and get a 100% hit rate. Apparently in the real case, even the simplest "pattern" is so hard to match that we can't simply work backwards and try to derive a number that will match the "pattern". The only way to get a number that will match the "pattern" is though trial-and-error, which is why its exactly like a lottery. Don;t forget these are long hashes and not just single digit number.



If the pattern is easy to match, we will get many hits. If the pattern is hard to match, we will get lesser hits. The pattern changes every certain amount of hits to ensure that we get roughly 1 hit every Certain amount of time. If we hit too quickly, we get a harder pattern to match for the next block so that it will take longer. If we hit too slowly, we get an easier pattern to match so the next block will be faster. This is why CPU and GPU is becoming more and more useless with bitcoin mining as when ever one was using CPU's the "pattern" (difficulty rate) was easier but when a lots of GPU mining started happening the "pattern" got harder to ensure that bitcoins could not be generated too fast. The thing with this is with ever new method to hash faster the older methods become more and more useless as a CPU mining at only 20 Million Hashes per seconds (Mhash) is no longer profitable having such a high difficulty rate due to the global hashing speed increasing. Now with the new ASIC Cards coming out it will be possible to have 1 rig hashing at a speed of 1'500 GHash (1500000 Million compared to high end CPU 20Millon) on only 1250 Watts of power. You can see that the difficulty rate will probably dramatically increase once these things hit the market to compensate for the large increase of hashing speeds to make sure that the network stays stable.


Something like that

Wow, thanks for the explanation! Who is paying for all of this though? And why do they want these hashes? It seems too good to be true to be honest!

Tom

That is probably the biggest controversial issue with BitCoins but also one of the reasons behind it. Bitcoins theoretically have no value what so ever, Bitcoins are a fully digital P2P currency not governed by any parties. The rules of the network are put in place to keep the network stable over time. This includes that the block value will decrease probably some time soon from the current value of 50BTC per block down to 25BTC per successful hashed block. This will be the first time this event is going to happen for bitcoins since it was started but it will not be the last.

There is a maximum possible number of 21 Million Bitcoins that would ever be aloud to be created and this is to ensure that BitCoins can last. Every "x" amount of time or solved blocked (not exactly sure) the value per block decreases the current and starting point is 50BTC but this will be lowered to 25BTC then years after this it will again be lowered to 12.5, then to 6.25, and so on. Also why Bitcoin numbers go into decimals as in the event that the price per bitcoin is too large for normal purchasing or currency trading transactions could start taking place at the first decimal value.

But there is no company behind BitCoins giving out this money, it is just the trust in the BitCoin system/network and the need or want for a free currency not governed by a third party. Which in itself does have many advantages.

Another things with BitCoins is the Value can change rather quickly. People have been theorizing on what they think will happen when the block value decreases for the first time to 25BTC. Will the Difficulty rate get dramatically easier as the time per successful block will take twice as long, will the value increase as they might be twice as hard to generate ? Many possibility but only time will really tell.

I definitely took advantage of GPU mining when it was hot, if you didn't mind paying a transfer commission it was relatively easy to transfer BitCoins into simple paypal. But you could also setup P2P exchanges if you wanted to get a better deal but have to find an individual to sell to. With 1BTC = 11USD (Constantly changing) i managed to pay myself back for my whole computer. But i personally think were getting to the end of the GPU stage.

Thanks again for the detailed explanation. My internet isn't exactly slow (see below) and it's taking forever to sync to the network. I've got roughly 6k blocks left to download and it's going at less than one per second. Looks like this could take a while!