600w goes to the comp and the first HD5850 which has worked fine for days.
500w [new separate psu] goes to the new card, which works, I just havent been able to mine with it yet.
Total of 1.1KW

All the memory clock voltages have been raised to their max in CCC. I will soon attempt to mine again with another worker and hopefully it wont crash but we'll see :o)

Good news: I am mining with 2 miners and 2 cards. Success.

The new card is running at around 96c...
The other one is stable most of the time around 75c...

Should I be worried about this temperature difference?



Also I am noticing something interesting. It looks like the 2 cards are competing for power or something. They shoot up to 300 each and then slowly lower down to around 200 each and rest around there.

I'm not sure what's causing the fluctuations. After a couple stable hours of mining I think I will attempt some overclocking. I am averaging 400mhash with peaks into 500 and 600. The "Activity" bar in CCC definitely fluctuates down and up a lot, unlike before with 1 card when it was a constant 99%. I wonder what the trick is to getting them both max out at 99%

slowly raising memory clock...

I've read the 5870 BIOS works wonders on the 5850...

BIOS collection - Only if you have a reference card

Temp difference is normal with the multi-card GPUs I've had in the past. Device0 assumes a 'master' role while device1 (device2, etc) become slaves and take a large load off the master card, typically running a bit cooler and a bit less than the master card.

I don't understand the fluctuating activity, tho.

It looks like it's all about cooling as far as I can tell right now.

I haven't been able to figure out the bios stuff-

But I opened up the computer door and am blasting a big fan in there. I watched the mhash rise dramatically.

EDIT: After some overclocking I am rather stable at 610 mhash (320 x 290) at these temperatures and conditions. If I even turn my fan from Hi to Medium the mhash drops by 30!