Bitcoin Forum

Ok.  so most of my farm i have 5 or 6 cards to each rig.  (gd70's, 5870's, 5850,s etc).


last year i started building out the 7970 rigs with 5 cards.. no problem with the beta driver: (amd_radeon_hd7900_win7_64)


now i have purchased some new 7950's.  they dont hash as fast with the older drivers (~30% less).

as soon as i install any driver 12.1 or newer, only 4 of the cards will load the drivers.  windows and msiafterburner sees all 5 cards, but only 4 will load drivers.  wtf?

anyone else experience this?  
any help would be appreciated .. bounty!

windows7 64
SeaSonic psu's (plenty of power)
4gram
phenoms
no molex

Jim

Man all these small time newbie miners start coming out of the woodwork...  ;D




I thought you lost the lease for your place and were selling off your cards?  Or am I confusing you with somebody else?

somebody else...  i am buying more rigs!!
but i like the density of 5 and 6 cards per rig.. my farm gets about 2.5Mh / watt now

 
how much is the SeaSonic psu's watts?
are you using a single 4gram?

If you knew about Jim's farm you wouldn't be asking him about wattage...that's not an issue.  He was one of the biggest hashers back in the days of ARSBitcoin if I recall correctly.

We need somebody with a 5+ 7xxx series rig to chime in.

Your beautiful!


edit:  just to clarify, i have 5x7970 rigs going with the beta drivers from original release of the 7x cards.. but as soon as i update drivers, CCC in all its wisdom wont load more then 4 cards..


yes, one 4 gig stick for memory.
2x seasonic 750's. so 1500 watts of power if i need it.

Hey Jimm,

Im contemplating of building 3 rigs with 3gpus each or 2 rigs with 5 each, seeing as you have 5 cards, can I just put everything on the mobo with no risers, or pci-e extenders ect?

No standard Mobo will handle 5 cars all on the board directly, let alone 5 7970s.  You will need risers, and if they're high end cards you should use a few powered risers.

I'm getting 5 7950's here is the mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128509, Same issues probably right? I guess 3x3 is the best bet?

Why are you using Windows?

I know for a fact Linux supports up to 8 7970s on a system, as I've done this before.  The new drivers (at least 12.8, and I believe the current versions) support this easily.

Beyond 8 GPUs is a problem as ADL relies on X11, which won't handle this, but you shouldn't have any trouble with 5 7970s on Linux.  I'd suggest Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit and 13.1 - it should work fine.

I'd be happy to help with the setup if you run into issues.  I just don't know my way around Windows, and I'm honestly not surprised that ATI drivers and Windows don't get along with a lot of GPUs.  Everyone I know uses Linux for these things.

I only have 3 x 7970s per rig here, so I can't help answer the question directly. 

If you know that beta driver is working better, I am wondering why not just continuing to use it?  Do you get better hashing rate or better stability on the newer drivers?

Other thoughts: 
Are you seeing this with only one new rig or is it happening across multiple? 
Running the latest MB BIOS and drivers?
Have you moved cards around to see if the issue follows a particular card, extender, or could be tied to a specific MB slot?
Moved around the power connectors running to each card to test for failure there as well?

I had a rig get wet (long story) and thought I'd killed a card, but after some troubleshooting and moving everything around multiple times, I found that avoiding a particular PCIx slot got it running fully again, and it wasn't a card after all.

I would try to run a single powered riser in the set of 5 and see if that card will pick up the drivers.  I find it odd that you can see it in device manager, do all cards show a working driver there?  Where does it tell you there is no driver loaded?

If you're willing to install Linux on it (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS), I'd be happy to remote in & help with setup.  Contact me via PM if you're interested.  As noted, I've done this a good bit before, though only on Linux.

yes, you see all 5 in device manager, but one will be red......


hey,  can i have my cables soon ;)

all of my older rigs i am using linuxcoin, which is a flavor of ubuntu.

I guess i will have to install ubuntu on a hardrive for miner25 and see how much trouble i can get into that way.

I have one thousand 7970 in a single box, and it uses a full power plant to run. I make a million dollars per day.

yutroll?

she/it was probably commenting on my 'miner25' deal... .. i think many of us have given away more bitcoins then she/it will ever mine in a closet..with a window

I tried every driver version and couldn't get them to work either. amd_radeon_hd7900_win7_64 is the only driver that works so far :(

You may have some resource problems for all the 5 cards. Free up some resources. Go to the BIOS settings and disable paralell ports, audio (if not needed), game port, etc. If you can't find them in BIOS, you can look in windows and see if you can disable some devices not needed (like a second LAN device, but you only use one) or the paralell port because you never ever used it (maybe).

see if that helps starting the 5th "instance" of the driver. The problem is not the driver, it's the insufficient resources windows has for that 5th card. I bet if you disable one of the other cards, the 5th one will start up just fine.

Steve

Have you taken a look at this thread?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=193695.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=193695.0)
looks a bit similar to me

Sounds familiar... the reason could be Win7 plus newer drivers.

Here is a shorter version based on this post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=193695.msg2054705#msg2054705) how to get most cards working at once:

- Install Win8

- or, if applicable: Wipe any old drivers off with amd_cleanup_util_1.2.1.0.exe (google)

- Install drivers 13.1 plus OpenCL included with it

* You may now have 5 GPUs working with one with an error code 43 inside the Device Manager.

- Open Drivers 12.6 and install only to the point where it extracts stuff into C:\AMD\Support\. Do not actually install drivers. We just need to extract.

- In device manager, on the card with the "!" manually install the extracted driver from C:\AMD\Support\12-6_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc_whql\Packages\Drivers\Display\W76A_INF

* It should now proceed to downgrade from 13.1 to 12.6, which is the highest version driver that allows an extra GPU.

Note: You screen may flicker MANY times, and your device manager may appear to freeze/hang. Just let it do it's thing. It may take upwards of an hour or longer. You may get a BSOD too. Just go with it. If you're coming on 2 hours or longer, try doing a hard reset. You -should- now have all 6 GPU installed OK in device manager and detected in OpenCL. If not, reboot again (just in case).

have you tried dropping your pci latency to 32 in the bios?