[moltuae]

Originally Posted by ainarssems

The power consumption is between 1150-1350W as it changes over time. the combination of these 7 cards is fairly stable, I don't think it has ever crashed but sometimes I have 1 or 2 cards that change back to default clocks in Wattman and power setting changes from -20% to some random number. It's always one of 480 or 580 card that is affected. 570 has always remained the same. I have 2 more 480 cards which would crash, cause restarts or reset Wattman settings for all cards if I used them in in this configuration and power usage would go over 1700W. But oddly enough they running both together fully stable on my old PC.

My 4 x 1080 rig is pulling just over 1000W, so it sounds like your rig is quite comparatively proportional from an efficiency point of view. I'm guessing your 7 cards were a bit cheaper than my 4 1080s though, so your ROI should be a little faster (although I wonder how they compare in terms of depreciation).

But that's been my experience too with rigs of 5 or more cards, especially AMD cards and even more so where there's a mix of AMD and nVidia. AMD cards can be a little temperamental at times and Wattman's habit of resetting back to factory defaults after a crash is a real annoyance. I'm finding nVidia cards are just so much more plug and play. The tweaking/over-clocking software is better too (you can, for example, adjust all cards from one set of controls), they seem to have fewer driver issues and they benchmark and run more algorithms. For me, any time spent looking for the right drivers or trying to get a rig stable is time I could've spent working on customer's servers, so it's lost earnings. Which is why I'm now leaning more towards 4-card nVidia rigs that are low maintenance and quick to build. Having said that, if AMD release a new card that performs much better than the 1080s, I may consider building some AMD-only rigs too. I'd probably still avoid mixing AMD and nVidia in a single rig though.