Get Up to 30 MHS from Mining Ethereum on AMD Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs

22 Jan
2021

It is time to dust off those old AMD Radeon R9 290/290X and Radeon R9 390/390X GPUs with 8G VRAM you may have lying around and wondering what to do and make them mine Ethereum (ETH) with full power and some nice profit as well. The Hawaii and Grenada GPUs that these Radeon video cards use feature a 512-bit wide memory bus and that is more than welcome for mining Ethereum, even if they are already pretty old. You can be getting about 29-30 MHS hashrate for mining Ethereum (ETH) with these, although they are more power hungry than more recent GPUs that offer the same performance it is still worth it with high mining profit we have at the moment.

With Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs there is a bit of a catch in order to get 29-30 MHS Ethash mining hashrate with about 150-200W of power usage per video card (with optimized video BIOS for lower power usage). It is only possible to do it under Linux as the AMD video drivers for Windows 10 do not feature support for Compute Mode for Hawaii GPUs and you can get only 14-15 MHS, but the Linux drivers do and you get 29-30 MHS. What you need to do is to make sure you have up to date video drivers and that you are using the latest version of PhoenixMiner in order to be able to fully utilize the Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs for mining Ethereum (ETH).

If you are not very good with Linux you can make your life much easier with a dedicated crypto mining operating system such as HiveOS. HiveOS simplifies getting a mining rig with AMD Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs ready for mining Ethereum (ETH) with the full 29+ MHS hashrate. Again, in order to be able to get the optimal mining performance for Ethereum on these Hawaii GPUs you need to stick to Linux, Windows is not an option for the full performance and HiveOS just makes it easy. Do note that for HiveOS you can use the promo code CMB10USDPROMO that will give you $10 USD in your account balance!

– To Download the latest PhoenixMiner 5.5b Ethash AMD and Nvidia GPU miner…






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39 Responses to Get Up to 30 MHS from Mining Ethereum on AMD Radeon R9 290/390 GPUs

Jason Miller

January 22nd, 2021 at 19:34

Welcome back, missed your blog!!! Curious, is this the 2gb versions?

admin

January 22nd, 2021 at 23:45

2GB versions? The R9 390 cards are with 8GB video memory… Do note that there are R9 290/290X GPUs with 4GB VRAM and these would need to run in Zombie Mode like the 4GB RX 470/480 or RX 570/580 cards and won’t be able to give you the max performance, you need a version with 8GB video memory for the full 29-30 MHS.

Henry

January 28th, 2021 at 18:09

Hi,

i have the exact same numbers as you, i’m using HiveOS too, and im getting only 24.29mh. Any idea ?

Drew

January 30th, 2021 at 16:32

It appears to be only worth mining with a 390/390x if you can dramatically reduce the power consumption. Aren’t they ridiculous out of the box? What BIOS was used

Ricardo

February 8th, 2021 at 03:35

Hey, could you make an article on how to do the whole process on Ubuntu 20.04? I tried to but failed over and over again. Had to change Kernels and once I got to install amdgpu-pro, it didn’t show any sort of program to change the card to compute mode. Also, once I downloaded PhoenixMiner, I used a hmod 777 command to enable it to run, and then it didn’t run, saying there were no OpenCL platforms available and no CUDA drivers available, which I don’t understand since I have a AMD R9 390, not NVIDIA.

admin

February 8th, 2021 at 08:42

Ricardo, have you tried HiveOS or another Lunux-based mining OS ready for use… it is much easier than having to start from scratch?

damyanoh

February 20th, 2021 at 17:16

except overclock have you done bios mod on the hawai card for 29mh as i only got 25?

admin

February 20th, 2021 at 19:31

damyanoh, yes, the result is with modified BIOS, so you should try editing the video bios of your GPU to get a bit more performance out of it.

Pablo

February 20th, 2021 at 22:21

Buenas tardes, muy interesante la nota, estoy pro armar un rig inical (pincipiante) con una o 2 r9 290 Vaporx 4gb. ya se las limitaciones del DAG de ETH y el consumo pero el consumo no sería un problema para mi.
Serían minimamente rentables las 290x o vaporx 4gb?
Aputo a las r9 290 porque son las que el presupuesto me permitiría.
Sino que otra GPU podría utilizar?

Gracias y Saludos

Pablo

February 20th, 2021 at 22:22

Good afternoon, very interesting note, I am pro building an initial rig (beginner) with one or 2 r9 290 Vaporx 4gb. I already know the limitations of the ETH DAG and consumption but consumption would not be a problem for me.
Would the 290x or vaporx 4gb be minimally profitable?
I aim for the r9 290 because they are what the budget would allow me.
But what other GPU could I use?

Thanks and regards

admin

February 20th, 2021 at 23:33

Pablo, for 4GB 290 GPUs you might want to check out VTC or RVN mining, it will most likely be more profitable at the moment than trying to mine ETH.

damyanoh

February 21st, 2021 at 02:10

@admin – which strap you use for the HEX, 1250 or some of the highers ?

tom

February 25th, 2021 at 09:03

I only get 25mh/s. any idea? can you post your overclocking for r9 390?

admin

February 25th, 2021 at 17:16

You need to do the overclocking by editing the BIOS…

Kowalski

March 13th, 2021 at 11:36

Hello all,
I am happy to see a discussion regarding the R390 8GB, I have 13x of them on Simplemining, but when they get initialized, there is no CUDA support, and also anything that I set in the overclocking tab is “parameter out of range”. I get about 27 MH, but every 20 min hashrate drops to 0 for 2-3 sec, lucky it does not restart the rig.. any clues?

admin

March 13th, 2021 at 12:32

Kowalski, CUDA is for Nvidia, overclocking (downclocking) needs to be done via BIOS editing and flashing for these GPUs, how are the temperatures. Have you recently replaced the thermal grease of the GPU as it may have dried up and need changing up for better efficiency?

Kowalski

March 13th, 2021 at 16:22

Hello all,
I am happy to see a discussion regarding the R390 8GB, I have 13x of them on Simplemining, but when they get initialized, there is no CUDA support, and also anything that I set in the overclocking tab is “parameter out of range”. I get about 27 MH, but about every 20 min hashrate drops to 0 for 2-3 min, lucky it does not restart the rig.. any clues? I use two power supply’s 1,8kW + 2,2kW with no mix between power sources per card.

Keith

March 22nd, 2021 at 09:47

Good Day Mate,
can you provided your modded bios?

Michael

March 31st, 2021 at 00:14

Hi, I would also like to kindly ask for a modded BIOS. Since Anorak is down, it is difficult to get decent modified BIOS… – I have the very same card as you use. Hope you can help. Thanks!

admin

March 31st, 2021 at 21:52

Here is the modified BIOS, make sure you backup the original one before reflashing: https://we.tl/t-o1jbRmKnW6

Michael

April 1st, 2021 at 10:53

Thank you. When I try to upload the bios via Hive, I get following message:
“ROM file size is only 131072 bytes, there is something wrong with it, skipping”
did you just override the check and uploaded it anyway and it worked?

Michael

April 1st, 2021 at 10:59

Even when I override the security check, I get the error message. However, the same is true with the original BIOS, – some issues with hive os? Did you have similar Problems? I am on the newest hive os version.

admin

April 1st, 2021 at 15:07

We have not flashed the BIOS through HiveOS, using the AMD flasher under Windows worked just fine.

Michael

April 1st, 2021 at 15:32

Will give it a try, thanks. The Hive thing is however much more comfortable, and works just fine when you update Vega BIOS for example. Maybe they did not assume, someone would try to update a 128K BIOS. If it works under Windows, I will be very happy. Will let you know guys if it worked.

David

April 4th, 2021 at 07:33

I tried editing my rom on asus srtix 390 but it never work it seem like the size of the bios is too big and any program can support it I would like to know what is the amd flasher you used on windows and wich editor, also do you think i could directly flash your bios on my model because they have same memory.
Thank you

admin

April 6th, 2021 at 20:16

You can try flashing with AMDVBFlash. Flashing BIOS from other GPU model might work or might not, so it is a good idea to have the original bios of your GPU backed up and a spare GPU in case you need to restore it.

David

April 7th, 2021 at 02:48

It work now i am getting 29 MHS at 126 watt the problem is that I was using the amd vb flash 2.93 you have to use the version 3.04 on igorslab and i tried flashing directly your bios but it say ID do not match so I found Hawaii editor and I copied your setting and I also tweak down the fan and it worked.

Nasos

April 9th, 2021 at 23:49

Can sb upload again the bios file ? It’s not available any more :(

Per

April 10th, 2021 at 10:18

Hi Admin !

Please upload bios again, Thanks :-)

Have a nice weekend.

admin

April 10th, 2021 at 10:23

Download link updated: https://we.tl/t-o1jbRmKnW6

Djo Djow

April 13th, 2021 at 15:50

Hey guys! I am currently mining with this GPU on HiveOS, getting 30.5 mh/s, with default overclock settings.
Now, my question is:
Is 71celsius temperature and 60 fan speed okay? I am mining 24/7.
Also, it says 172 w power consumption, is that too much or should I flash the BIOS and try to reduce power consumption? My GPU is Asus STRIX CU III 8 gb, will the BIOS file ^ work?
Thanks!

Eino

April 18th, 2021 at 12:36

Hi! The vbios WeTransfer link has expired again. Can you send a new link?

Appreciate it!

Chris_M

April 19th, 2021 at 10:47

I also would like to grab the bios, but the link is down again.

I’m running the same Sapphire R9 390 8Gb cards, with modified bios but I can’t seem to get them stable below 120watts, plus, how are you getting them to run so cold? 32 degrees is amazing!?

@Djo Djow it’s not recommended to flash a bios from a different vendor. But, you could modify your own with Hawaii Bios Reader. (google it)

David

April 20th, 2021 at 05:02

Here is the link https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1c2W7-ZBN_uIgcik5xYO0wUaxAN26SUcG?usp=sharing

Chris_M

April 20th, 2021 at 06:59

@David Croteau

Thank you for posting the link!

David

April 23rd, 2021 at 06:09

Chris M
He must be using liquid metal to achieve those temp, I would not see otherwise how this is possible. I would like to know if anyone found better settings than 29MHS at 126 watt because I am searching for the best efficiency possible and I tought I could get 30-33 MHS. I think everyone would appreciate it.

fencer

April 27th, 2021 at 09:56

I try to flash my 390x but i get the ID do not match what can i do to go flash it?

J.Cooper

May 16th, 2021 at 08:10

Those getting ID Mismatches while trying to flash your bios – use RBE.

Ignacio

February 13th, 2022 at 13:05

No puedo conectar mí r9 390stix a hiveos.. logré conectarla una vez y me dio 43.58mh pero la temperatura llego a los 89 y lo pare pero no puedo lograr conectar denuevo a hiveos. Si alquien me puedo ayudar cuando inicio me da ( AMD OpenCL platform auto-detected 0 Initialization failed, unknown device name: ‘Hawaii’ Failed to initialize device idx 0 (-8) Successful clean shutdown. The Hatchdog script executor thread is exiting.) ese error

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