Bitcoin Forum

Does anyone out there have five or more RX480 working with an MSI Z97 Gaming?

Background :-

I already have a 6 x RX480 mining rig working perfectly fine with AsRock H81 BTC Pro on Windows 10 with Catalyst 16.11 drivers.

I did have a 7 x 290x mining rig working perfectly fine with an MSI Z97 Gaming 5, with Windows 10 and Catalyst 16.11 drivers.

I bought 6 more RX480 (Sapphire Nitro+ like the other 6 I have), risers, case, motherboard etc. ready to build a new rig.


For the new rig I could only get as far as installing 4 cards. It didn't matter what cards, risers, slots, drivers I used, the graphics card installation always corrupts on the fifth card. It first locks up, and upon reboot, none of the cards work. I'll post some screen shots later of the errors Windows throws up after a reboot, something about some files installed not being correct.

Eventually, the motherboard I was trying to use (ASUS Z97-A) appeared to die completely(Doesn't POST at all anymore), it was a cheap second hand board that had already seen a fair amount of mining use. So wasn't too fussed.

So I turned my attention to putting all the 6 new RX480s into the MSI Z97 Gaming 5 rig. So out came all the 290xs, uninstalled the drivers. Put the RX480s in. And would you believe it, I'm now having the exactly the same driver issue with this mining rig too. I get four(any four of the six it seems) cards installed and mining fine, regardless of what slots I plug them into. But connect a fifth and everything just fucks up.

I KNOW this is a driver issue, just wondering if anyone else has experienced it and how they worked around it. I'll post screenshots of error later.

Thanks

Tdid you set the pcie config to 8x/4x/4x disabled all unnecessary stuff like the soundcard etc?
I have the same mobo I just modified the BIOS to let TSX still work from microcode point of view.

Yeah, set pcie config to 8x/4x/4x and disabled unnecessary stuff. Already had for when I was mining with seven 290x.

What's TSX though?

whatever it is , who cares.

as long as your lanes are set, 7x 480 is no different then 7x anything. supply proper power, use powered usb risers ( 12v for winners ) , and your rig will fly. decent ram, ssd, 1840g. mine on. it works, we have many. 480s, 470s, 390s, 290s, 280s, 7 works fine with all, same mobo exactly. works with 8 as well.

I know in theory all of that is correct, but when it comes to installing drivers it just doesn't like more than four RX480. Very weird, the exact same rig works fine with seven 290x, just not more than four RX480.

I'm trying a Linux install right now to see if that fixes it.

EDIT: That's worked, got 6 RX480 mining now under Linux, albeit each card is hashing about 1mh/s slower than under Windows. So fucking annoying, why would 7 290x work in Windows but not more than 4 RX480, on the exact same motherboard? Another motherboard and 6 RX480 works fine in Windows. Seems it's combination of MSI + Windows 10 + RX480 means can't use more than 4 cards. Hate it when PCs are annoying like this.

The driver install is tricky indeed. But i have 6 AMD and 1 NV GTX1080 running on my MSI Z97 Gaming 5.

TSX is a instruction set of intel..btw

Same problem on H97 Anniversary with win 10 X64, 4 RX480 works fine, 5 impossible! Damn

Tricky yes, but I'm damned if I know what I did to get 6 RX480 working in Windows 10 on my ASRock board. I think it just worked as expected.

I had the exact problem, I would recommend you fresh install windows 10 home(recommended but may not be needed) and reset cmos, set pci-e to gen 1 and 8/4/4 latency to 96, use DDU before installing the new reLive drivers on 4 cards first then install your other gpus one at a time until you've got them all installed and it should work. Hopefully this saves you hours of troubleshooting

Already done all that..... Doesn't help. :(

Got another motherboard today to replace the dead one, was only able to get something cheap and local with 3 pcie slots(But I have a 1 to 3 adapter to give me a total of 5 usable slots). So divided the 12 RX480s up with 7 on the MSI board and 5 on the other board. They're both mining fine, albeit using SimpleMining Linux distro.

So I started putting together the ASRock H81 BTC Pro with 6 of the 290x, and I've now got the same bloody problem on that. Driver installation fails on the fifth card. Will give it one last chance before I end up using Linux on that too.

Yeah when I was installing drivers it would always crash if I had more than 4 GPUs connected. What happens when you try to install one at a time?

I was, just can't plug the fifth in.

Got fed up of trying to work it out now, all three mining rigs working fine under Linux. Losing a total of about 20mh/s though across all my cards :(

I have MSI Z97 Gaming 5, Win 10 Pro, 16.11.3

Installed 6x RX 480 Nitro+ with no problems.

Did it by one by one installation. Clean Win installed with 1st card, then 16.11.3 drivers. Plugged in second card, wait until it was recognized, restarted. Repeated 5x more times

How did you installed cards?

anybody had success with this mobo and 16.12 drivers?

I have 16.11 working with 7 gpu, but 16.12 only with 1

If you used modded ROMs you cannot use 16.12 - it uses  driver signature enforcement. So you either need to disable it or use 16.11.x versions

Have the Z97 running with 3x RX 480 4GB + 2x RX 480 8GB + 1x R7 370

I had to install the cards one at a time starting from the far end away from the CPU socket. I did try to install all cards at once and I believe it corrupted the drivers and/or registry entries. I would get a bluescreen and then no combination would work. To get back to normal I ran the amd clean uninstall utility (http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMD-Clean-Uninstall-Utility.aspx). Before this, make sure you disable Windows from automatically downloading drivers, and also remove any remaining Windows Update drivers from the system:

On Win10: Disable Windows Update from automatically installing drivers: Right-click 'start' > System > Hardware [tab] > Device Installation Settings [button] > Disable ... shutdown. Unplug all cards except pci #7 .. boot --> Run amd clean utility and reboot --> Check device manager and make sure its running the generic driver. If not right click, uninstall+remove drivers [checkbox] .. reboot. Install 16.12 w/out relive .. shutdown. Now plug in additional cards one at a time going up the slots from the end, letting windows load and sit for 3-5min so drivers fully load for the new card (watch dev manager and task manager -- you'll see the cpu usage installing drivers). Shutdown!, not restart, after every new card. Every time you install a new card into a 16x slot down the line go ahead and move your monitor cable to the 16x slot as it will take priority. As you get further down the slots the install on each reboot will take longer and longer as it looks like the drivers are reconfigured for EACH slot. Wait for dev manager to show all good and task manager not working on drivers. For 6 cards here it takes about 15-25min.

Good luck!

Just had a similar issue. I'm very very new and just built my first rig. Spent 3 hours trying to get 6th card working with BOD, windows 10 x64, MSI gaming 5.

However, I read that primary display card should use full cable which I don't have, so thought to enable onboard graphics and use that.
Wallah!!  All working, 6 cards now showing up without error.

How can you make it work with 8 cards ? :)  ???

Same mobo,running 7x RX 480 now and fine,Windows 10 with Catalyst 16.8.3 drivers.But can't work with 7x GTX 1070.

if you mix AMD and NVIDIA ? will it work ?
6 x nvidia and 1 AMD ? ???

I assume he did not try the RX cards

I'm setting up this rig.  Same motherboard, with Sapphire 480 Nitro 8gb cards.  Cannot get past 4.  I did use drivers mentioned above, then tried again with very latest divers.  4 work fine whilst installing one at a time, (working from slot 1 up), then on the second x16 slot...nothing.  Then the 6th slot..nothing.
Has anyone else progressed from this in windows 10?

I had successfully run 7x RX480 8GB on Z97 Gaming 5. I use older driver like 16.9.2 or tried 16.11.x. Set at bios, 8x4x4x, Gen 1.
Extra thing I did was using Window Testing mode on by below step:
Open Command Prompt , enter bcdedit.exe -set loadoptions DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS and press Enter. Then enter bcdedit.exe -set TESTSIGNING ON and press Enter.

Hope this help.

that's interesting, never done the testing mode, I shall try that tonight.  I have tried the older driver before I tried then new driver, I was only getting 18Mhs on 4 cards.  the latest driver runs at 25Mhs on 4.

Just noticed the 2 missing cards are hidden in device manager, so I enabled one and after some rebooting and messing around, I now have 5.  So one to go.  It did not work with the 6th, now stuck in a loop of repairing windows so something has gone wrong.
Might end up re-installing windows and installing gpu;s from 7th slot down one at a time with an older driver.

Tried the bcdedit.exe thing and it could not be opened 'access denied'.  Not sure what to do with that.

Next thing I tried was removing all cards, booting on 6th PCI-E slot first.  Then reboot and connect each one counting down.  Every time I came accros a x16 slot, I had to move the HDMI cable to that.
When I got to PCI-E slot 1, windows simply does not boot up.  I remove that card and boom.  24.5Mh/s x 5.
I shall continue...

Also, I notice on this video...
https://autosurfbrasil.com.br/bitcoin/btc-how-to-build-a-7-gpu-mining-rig-for-zcash-ethereum-monero-crypto-altcoins-msi-z97-gaming-5-ganhar-bitcoin/

...that he is using x1 to x16 risers on all slots.  That includes on the x16 slots.  I'm using 4 x1 to x16 risers and 2 x16 to x16 risers.  Would that make a difference.  I can't see how as I have 5 cards running.

WooHoo...done it.  Using a combination of different help and common sense...Thanks klak for the note you put up they helped.
I cleared the driver using AMD clean tool
Rebooted
Installed 16.12 on one card...the 6th slot, not 7th from cpu
then shutdown, instal next, restart.

Last time I did this it did not work but this time I waited a long time before shutting down (5-10mins)  especially the last card...that took ages, looked like the screen had frozen with nothing on the desktop.  but I walked away and made a cup of tea, when I came back...the 6th had arrived.

fired up miner and it cut out  (had this before too).  I think it was too much power for my 1200w supply.  So I turned everything off in the bias and device manager that I did not need.  watched the power intake and it runs at 1080 W...

So now to work on getting that power down a bit, but at least I havve 147Mh/s

Think I'll run it at that speed for a few days.

OH, also put the PSU fan on permanent in case it was somethinng that got hot too quick in there.

Thanks all and I hope my experience helps someone else.

Si