Troubleshooting

P001: I’m using AMD RX470/480/570/580 or similar card and my hashrate dropped significantly in the past few months for Ethereum and Ethereum classic!

S: This is known problem with some cards. For the newer cards (RX470/480/570/580), this can be solved by using the special blockchain driver from AMD (or try the latest drivers, they may incorporate the fix). For the older cards there is no workaround but you still can mine EXP, Musicoin, UBQ or PIRL with the same speed that you mined ETH before the drop.

P002: My Nvidia GTX9x0 card is showing very low hashrate under Windows 10!

S: While there is a (convoluted) workaround, the best solution is to avoid Windows 10 for these cards - use Windows 7 instead.

P003: I’m using Nvidia GTX970 (or similar) card and my hashrate dropped dramatically for Ethereum or Ethereum classic!

S: GTX970 has enough VRAM for larger DAGs but its hashate drops when the DAG size starts to exceed 2 GB or so. Unlike the AMD Polaris-based cards, there is no workaround for this problem. We recommend using these cards to mine EXP, Musicoin, UBQ or PIRL with the same speed that you used to ETH before the drop.

P004: I can’t see some of my cards (or their fan speed and temperature) when using Windows Remote Desktop (RDP)!

S: This is a known problem with RDP. Use VNC or TeamViewer instead.

P005: On Windows 10, if you click inside the PhoenixMiner console, it freezes!

S: This is a known problem on Windows 10, related to so called “Quick Edit” feature of the command prompt window. From PhoenixMiner 2.6, the QuickMode is disabled by default, so you shouldn’t experience this problem. If you still, do, read here how to solve it: https://stackoverflow.com/q/33883530

P006: Immediately after starting, PhoenixMiner stops working and the last message is “debugger detected”

S: If you have only Nvidia cards, add the option -nvidia to the PhoenixMiner.exe command line. If you have only AMD cards, add the option -amd to the command line.

P007: (Windows only) PhoenixMiner shows an error after allocating DAG buffer and shuts down.

S: If you have more than one GPU, make sure that your Windows page file minimal size is set to at least (N x DS + 4) GB, where N is the number of GPUs, and DS is the size of DAG in GB (about 2.7 GB around September 2018 for ETC and ETH). For example, if you have 10 GPUs, you need 10 x 2.7 + 4 = 31 GB minimal size of the page file. Note that this will increase as the DAG sizes increase.

P008: The miner sometimes crashes when the DAG epoch change.

S: During DAG generation, the GPUs are loaded more than during the normal operation. If you have overclocked or undervolted the GPUs “to the edge”, the DAG generation ofter pushes them “over the edge”. Another possible reason for the crash (especially if the whole rig crashes) is the higher power usage during this process. You can lower the DAG generation speed by specifying the -lidag command-line option. The possible values are 0 (no slow down), 1, 2, and 3 (max slowdown). In order to check if your rig would be stable during DAG generation, run it in benchmark mode by specifying the -bench 170 command line option. Then every time when you press the key ‘d’ the miner will advance to the next DAG epoch, and you will be able to see if it is stable during multiple DAG generations. If it isn’t you can try to alter the -lidag and -eres command line options until the desired stability is achieved.