Having Trouble with MotherBoard and Gpu's

[Hudstr22]

Hi, I initally posted this in the Troubleshooting subsection but I am reposting this in this subsection to possibly see if I can get some help with this.

 

So to start off, the hardware i have is a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 motherboard (might not have been the best choice but it made sense to me) with the most current BIOS, AMD FX-4300 CPU, 4 gb of DDR3 Ram, 2 R9 290's (Gigabyte Windforce), 2 R9 280x (Asus), and 2 CX 750m psu's from Corsair. I am running Windows 8.1, AMD 13.1 display drivers, AMD APP SDK v. 2.9 (I dont really know what this does but I was told I should have it), CGMiner 3.7.2 and CGWatcher.

 

The problems I am having is the Board at one time I can only get 3 GPU's to be recgonized and in addition to them not mining well (1 of the 3 gpu's will always have problems). The motherboard has 2 PCI-e 16x slots and 2 PCI-e 4x slots. With the GPU's I am using 16x risers. Correct me if I am wrong but using a 16x riser with a 4x slot shouldnt be a problem since I am not driving a display for example from that slot.

 

I have disabled Crossfire so that shouldn't be causing any problems. Looking looking from the "top" (CPU socket, Northbridge) to the "bottem" (sata connectors, Southbridge) the PCI-e slots alternate 16x, 4x, 16x, 4x. Currently I have the R9 290's in the "top" 16x and 4x slots and the R9 280X's in below that in the remaining 16x and 4x slot. When i try to mine with this configuraiton, the very bottem R9 280x is not recgonized by windows or CGMiner. Also, when running working mining settings *(will put at the bottem of this post), the very top R9 290 (16x) and the R9 280x (16x) both run fine. The middle R9 290 (4x) however has problems. When I try to run it with the same settings as the other R9 290, the middle R9 290 (4x) comes up with Hardware Errors. I have conculded though that there is nothing wrong with this card (works fine when not in the current 3 card configuration). When I lower the intensity to 13 the card seems to work fine at that setting.

 

On top of these problems, the display driver seems to fail and recover quite often (not while mining though) and I have bluescreened several times too. Also, after letting it run for a few hours, I sometimes return to find it has crashed, and the BIOS not recgonizing a bootable drive. After powering everything down, it will boot back up as normally.

 

This is just a side note: I found that one of the R9 290's vibrates (not too severe but still noticable) when the fan speed is above ~50% and I have not found any of the other cards vibrating. I used a small wire to "tighten" the cooler to a frame attacked to the card and found that the vibrating stopped. I assume that this is nothing major, possibly just a small manufacturing error or the cooler was slightly loosened durring shipping ect.

 

Mining Settings: For the 2 R9 290 (Gigabyte Windforce): Intensity-19, Thread Concurrency: 20480, GPU-Engine: 1000, GPU-Memclock: 1250, Powertune:20, Target temp:75, Threads:2

 

For 2 R9 280x (Asus): Intensity-13, Thread Concurrency: 8192, Engine:1000, Memclock:1500, Powertune:20, Target temp: 75 Threads:2

 

Any Help is Greatly Appreciated

 

Thanks,

hudstr22

[AK0490]

Have you looked into motherboard slot shorting? I've had to do this on a few boards to get all the slots to work. You will also likely have to use some of the 1x slots. Check out this link for more info on jumper wires http://www.gobitgo.com/articles/1001/How-To-Correctly-Use-and-Install-PCI-E-Riser-Cables/

[Hudstr22]

Thanks for the link, also regarding with the 3 card setup with the middle card not working properly, could that be a result of the gpu's being powered by the motherboard even though i have the 8 pin and 6 pin connected on the gpu?

 

Would using a jumper wire on a 4x slot work as well? or it only for 1x slots?

[AK0490]

Thanks for the link, also regarding with the 3 card setup with the middle card not working properly, could that be a result of the gpu's being powered by the motherboard even though i have the 8 pin and 6 pin connected on the gpu?

 

Would using a jumper wire on a 4x slot work as well? or it only for 1x slots?

I would guess that a jumper could work on the 4x slot, but I'm guessing you will still need to use some 1x slots.

 

On all my dual PSU rigs I had to use nonpowered risers for the cards running off the secondary PSU, and I used powered risers for the cards running off the primary PSU.

 

What risers do you have? If all you have is 4-16x non-powered risers I would recommend getting a 1x powered riser. I wouldn't want to run thoose 4 cards all off the motherboard power anyways.

[Hudstr22]

Yeah the thing is I dont know if they are running off the motherboard or not. I have 4 pci-e 16x risers (http://amzn.to/1pegpz7r). If for some reason with the 3 card set up that currently is "working" right now, the cards are running off the motherboard, is there a way to check that/turn it off?

[Whaler_99]

In addition to everything else, some boards completely disable some PCIe slots when others are connected, typically x4 and x1 slots. You need to review the mobo manually carefully, hopefully the documented this, to verify. On my Gigabyte GD45 board this was the issue.