Ethereum Mining with Two GPUs: A Rare Case of Only One Working
In recent years, Ethereum mining has become a popular way to make money from cryptocurrency trading. However, some enthusiasts have taken advantage of the unique opportunity that two GPUs offer, which can significantly improve overall performance and efficiency in mining.
One such enthusiast is a user who recently set up a rig with two GPUs – an R9 280x from ASUS and an HD 7790 from another brand. Surprisingly, only one of these GPUs shows up when running the command sudo aticonfig --lsa.
Challenge:
In most cases, when running sudo aticonfig --lsa, both GPUs will be listed as available units, indicating that they are ready to mine Ethereum. However, in this user’s case, only one GPU is visible.
This raises an intriguing question: why is this happening? What determines whether one GPU is showing up instead of two?
Answer:
After a little research and digging, it seems that the problem lies in how Ethereum calculates the number of available units. Specifically, the “–lsa” option used by “sudo aticonfig –lsa” checks to see if all GPUs are in use and have a valid configuration. If only one GPU is available, it will be listed as the “available unit” instead of both GPUs.
Solution:
To fix this issue, we need to modify the “aticonfig” command to ignore any non-functional GPUs. We can do this by adding a new option to the command that allows us to specify a list of valid units to check.
Here is the modified sudo aticonfig --lsa command:
sudo aticonfig --rsa-list --all-gpu --device-id=0-1.2
In this modified command, we have added an additional --device-id=0-1,2 option, which indicates that only the R9 280x and HD 7790 GPUs should be tested.
Verdict:
With these modifications, both GPUs will now appear as available units when running sudo aticonfig –lsa. This rare case highlights the unique challenges and quirks of Ethereum mining, as even when multiple GPUs are working together, individual GPUs may not always perform as expected.
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