I have been mining Zcash since genesis and have burned out several cards and am unable to identify what is causing this to happen. A little background:
I have 3 rigs, all 6 x RX470. After the first few cards burned out I assumed it was due to lower quality risers. I upgraded to higher quality risers and ran for over a month with no issue. Then, within a 36 hour period, one card on each rig burned out. A week later and another card has burned out. (It always happens like this where everything runs fine and then in a short period of time, several cards burn out) The equipment is set up in a clean and cool environment, cards never exceed 74 deg. and optimal drivers are always used. The only thing I can think is that the old power in the building is causing this but I don’t know enough about electrical systems to verify that. Can anyone lend some insight into this issue I am having?
I have also burned two RX 470 and I have no idea why too.
What is your wattage is your PSU?
Do you use proper surge protection?
I’d guess it could be something with either your PSU or surge protector.
i had problems like these in our farm a while back, and we traced it into incorrect wiring from the PSU to the GPU risors, you must use proper wires, so we invested in good ones and never had any problems since.
When you say burn out what do you mean? Do you mean burn the cards? Burn the cables from the cards to the motherboard? Burn the cables to the PSU? Any photos? Sure we can help with more detail.
1300W power supply on all rigs
The cards start to smoke and then don’t work.
those 6 cards alone are going to pull a minimum of 900watts stock, this doesn’t include HD, mobo, cpu and fans, and variations that happen in the card. If you are O/C’ing…
does this happen on all three rigs?
if yes, you might want to look at 1500-1600 psu’s.
also it was mentioned about risers, cabling, and surge protectors.
Rule of thumb, just because its a 1300 watt psu doesn’t mean run it to 1200-1280, bad bad bad idea
Right, if your PSU is gold one, it can provide maximum 90 percent of 1300W which is 1170W. It should be ok.
unless you are using metric math 90% of 1300 is 1170 
and again if you are overclocking, this is why
Just for reference I run some rigs with x6 RX 480 8G nitro+Oc stock they use 1250 watts power supplies gold,been mining from start and have had no issues with powe,house has 240v I suspect if your burning up cards and heat is not an issue and risers have been replaced next thing to look at is power surges and power spikes,if live in a old building this is worth exploring
You running 240v is probably why you haven’t had any issues. 240v is more stable and efficient than running 120v
Are you running Sapphire cards? We’ve had some ridiculously high failure rates with Sapphire cards. After doing some research, we’ve found that others have reported abnormally high failure rates with Sapphire as well.
That’s RMA/return rates; failure rates are higher by an unknown amount.
I think our failure rate for the reference design Sapphire RX 470 cards that we got has been in excess of 30%. I don’t have the exact number offhand, though. (It keeps changing, and not in the direction I like.)
I have a kill-a-watt and it says that its only pulling 1100-1150 watts when mining.
I have a mix of sapphire and xfx 10 sapphire nitro+Oc on stock settings but one did die on me after 3 months,Overclockers.co.uk replaced it for me with no problem,sent me new card same day which was cool
@CitricAcid yes 240v much better that 120v
This is referring back to @Stealth8368
Your problem could be at the very root of where you are actually getting your power. Just because you have a 1300w psu, doesn’t mean that’s what is where all the power is coming from. Your receptacles are supplying your power to your psu. I had to run 2 dedicated circuits to run my 5 rigs. 30amp romex is what I ended up using and that’s more than enough. You have to consider that your house is more than likely daisy chaining it’s power in every room. Basically, one circuit feeds one bedroom, and it jumps between each receptacle. Most of the time you have atleast 3 receptacles and they are usually fed with 15 amp wire. Go to your breaker box and see on the circuit breakers whether or not it says 15amp or 20amp. Also, I would shut one off at a time and test every outlet in your room you are using, to see which breaker feeds which receptacles. Your main pc could be drawing power from the same circuit you have your miners on. It’s just an idea, because if your gpus are getting enough power, it’ll either trip the breaker, or it’ll not allow the fans to work at a decent capacity either.