GPU Compatibility?

[RyanWebber]

Hey guys, I have a quick question. I'm building a mining rig from spare parts, and I got a 3 slot motherboard and 3 gpus laying around. Thing is I have cards from different series. I have one 5850 and two 6950's. Now I know they won't crossfire together but would I be able to plug all 3 into the mobo and mine with them all seperate or am I stuck with just the two 6950's?

[tachi641]

I run a 6990 and a 6950 on 1 mobo, you wont have problems I don't think. Make sure you have a dummy plug, and do not cross fire them. You should be fine.

[RyanWebber]

that's the same series.....I run a 6970 and 6990 on the same board crossfired on my gaming rig. 6xxx series go with 6xxx cards and 5xxx cards go with 5xxx cards. What I'm asking is if I can stick 2 cards from completely different series of cards together and have them mine together.

[RyanWebber]

Anybody...?

[Meatball]

Yes, it should work.  For a while I had a 5850 running in the same box as a 6950 without a problem.

[Meatball]

And actually, come to think about it, I have a media center PC rocking a 4350 that I'm using for the interface and I stuck a 5850 in the other slot and that's been chugging away without a problem as well.  Of course, I'm not mining with the 4350 so the media center interface stays snappy, but it's working.

[RyanWebber]

Yes, it should work.  For a while I had a 5850 running in the same box as a 6950 without a problem.

Okay so it works, glad to hear it. You didn't use a crossfire bridge right? Assuming you just plugged them in and left them separated?

[Yanz]

Did you guys have to do anything special? I can't get my 6950 and my 5970 to play nice together. BSODs and other issues. Who's running linux?

[Meatball]

I did not crossfire them.  From what I gather, crossfire is not good for mining.

I'm running Win7 here with Catalyst 11.5's and SDK 2.4.  I had a bear of a time getting things working right on Win XP so I went with 7.  I've also found that the AMD drivers can get a bit wonky at times.  If you try to do uninstalls/installs, sometimes crap just gets gunked up and I had to format/rebuild.

Make sure you have more than enough power for both cards on your PSU or you could see all sorts of problems, especially if your PSU has more than 1 12 volt rail.  You could be overloading a rail and if one of the cards doesn't get enough power it might not start or it might work half arsed...

[RyanWebber]

I did not crossfire them.  From what I gather, crossfire is not good for mining.

I'm running Win7 here with Catalyst 11.5's and SDK 2.4.  I had a bear of a time getting things working right on Win XP so I went with 7.  I've also found that the AMD drivers can get a bit wonky at times.  If you try to do uninstalls/installs, sometimes crap just gets gunked up and I had to format/rebuild.

Make sure you have more than enough power for both cards on your PSU or you could see all sorts of problems, especially if your PSU has more than 1 12 volt rail.  You could be overloading a rail and if one of the cards doesn't get enough power it might not start or it might work half arsed...

We'll I guess I'll see what happens tomorrow when I piece it all together. Hopefully it all works properly without much issue.