Pcie 1 to 3 Port 1X Switch Multiplier HUB Riser. Which motherboard works.

[Etherion]

So I thought I try and reduce my rig system/gpu cost by going for a 8 GPU rig.

I got one of the pcie 1 to 3 pcie switches.

Sadly I picked the wrong motherboard. Msi Z97 guard pro does not boot past the bios splash screen when i connect the 8th GPU. 7 is fine.

Please post your setup if you had success of failure.

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[cptfisher]

it is not about the multiplier . it is about how many resources the motherboard can allocate for i/o from external cards.

[felixbrucker]

are there boards known to work with 8 cards or more?
i expect mostly server boards, no?

[sony87]

I'm also interested if this works with H81 PRO BTC board because I have such but missing the multiplier.

[Prelude]

People don't want to reveal the secret to getting more than 7 gpus working. It gives them an edge that they don't want to share.  I remember reading that the motherboard's bios needs to be modded for 8+ to work.

For what it's worth,  I had a go at 8 and 9 gpus on an MSI Z87.  Board would boot woth 8 but only detect 7. With 9, the board just wouldn't boot.

[batko]

Not working on H81 BTC pro with 3in 1HUb

7 gpu max, with 8 black screen not boot

[felixbrucker]

i believe (some) server boards should work fine as they are getting used for cuda compute cards (there are models with 8 and 10 gpus iirc), it might also be a specific mobo with updated bios for this case, who knows

[sony87]

People don't want to reveal the secret to getting more than 7 gpus working. It gives them an edge that they don't want to share.  I remember reading that the motherboard's bios needs to be modded for 8+ to work.

For what it's worth,  I had a go at 8 and 9 gpus on an MSI Z87.  Board would boot woth 8 but only detect 7. With 9, the board just wouldn't boot.

i think win10 works with 8gpu without any mods - just rumor, need to confirm.

[Prelude]

People don't want to reveal the secret to getting more than 7 gpus working. It gives them an edge that they don't want to share.  I remember reading that the motherboard's bios needs to be modded for 8+ to work.

For what it's worth,  I had a go at 8 and 9 gpus on an MSI Z87.  Board would boot woth 8 but only detect 7. With 9, the board just wouldn't boot.

i think win10 works with 8gpu without any mods - just rumor, need to confirm.

I think it would work with 8, but the issue is getting the motherboard to work with 8.

[sony87]

People don't want to reveal the secret to getting more than 7 gpus working. It gives them an edge that they don't want to share.  I remember reading that the motherboard's bios needs to be modded for 8+ to work.

For what it's worth,  I had a go at 8 and 9 gpus on an MSI Z87.  Board would boot woth 8 but only detect 7. With 9, the board just wouldn't boot.

i think win10 works with 8gpu without any mods - just rumor, need to confirm.

I think it would work with 8, but the issue is getting the motherboard to work with 8.

the custom board of pandaminer support them, however it's quite expensive (260$) and need mobile GPUs..

[Etherion]

Well I have a Asrock H97 Anniversary with 3 Hd7990 and 3 390x. It boots fine and all 9 shows up under window 10. One of die hd7990 gpus are buggy so I disabled it. Although I have not tried the pcie switch I am more convinced that it would work on the asrock h97 anniversary. No modifications or windows registry hack required.

[Prelude]

Well I have a Asrock H97 Anniversary with 3 Hd7990 and 3 390x. It boots fine and all 9 shows up under window 10. One of die hd7990 gpus are buggy so I disabled it. Although I have not tried the pcie switch I am more convinced that it would work on the asrock h97 anniversary. No modifications or windows registry hack required.

Plenty of reports of 3GB 7950/7970 cards working, the issue is 4GB + cards. Your setup would be 30GB of VRAM reported to the motherboard's BIOS. 8x 4GB cards would be 32GB.

Than again, I'm running rigs with 7x 8GB GPUs without issue, so 56GB reported. So that's probably not the actual problem.

I've also tried running 2x 390 Devil 13 + 4x 290 for a total of 8 GPUs which also didn't work. Tried with both W10 Pro and W10 Enterprise.

[jstefanop]

I should have a pretty interesting announcement on this front in the next few weeks ...if I were you guys don't buy anymore of these cheap switches (they suck and are not even designed properly), or even GPU risers. I will have something that will change the way we GPU mine

[Prelude]

I should have a pretty interesting announcement on this front in the next few weeks ...if I were you guys don't buy anymore of these cheap switches (they suck and are not even designed properly), or even GPU risers. I will have something that will change the way we GPU mine

Awesome. Can you share any more details?

[bittawm]

I should have a pretty interesting announcement on this front in the next few weeks ...if I were you guys don't buy anymore of these cheap switches (they suck and are not even designed properly), or even GPU risers. I will have something that will change the way we GPU mine

spill the beans

[JaredKaragen]

I should have a pretty interesting announcement on this front in the next few weeks ...if I were you guys don't buy anymore of these cheap switches (they suck and are not even designed properly), or even GPU risers. I will have something that will change the way we GPU mine

Same, i'm interested.   maybe it's the PCIE thought USB people have discussed for a while......

I have a few boards with one 16x and one 1x slot that I plan to make into 4-5 card rigs... which would make it cheaper in the end to make the miner;  because those mobo+CPU+memory are typically coming from discarded pc's and are free to me usually =)  Even if I buy the $40 1-3 adaptor;  it's still cheaper than sourcing a newer board, etc.

[Prelude]

I should have a pretty interesting announcement on this front in the next few weeks ...if I were you guys don't buy anymore of these cheap switches (they suck and are not even designed properly), or even GPU risers. I will have something that will change the way we GPU mine

Same, i'm interested.   maybe it's the PCIE thought USB people have discussed for a while......

I have a few boards with one 16x and one 1x slot that I plan to make into 4-5 card rigs... which would make it cheaper in the end to make the miner;  because those mobo+CPU+memory are typically coming from discarded pc's and are free to me usually =)  Even if I buy the $40 1-3 adaptor;  it's still cheaper than sourcing a newer board, etc.

If he managed to get GPUs working on USB protocols that would be quite something. If anyone can do it, it would be him.

[JaredKaragen]

Since mining traffic to the cards isn't all the latency/bandwidth dependent; I don't see why a software driver and protocol interpreter would be too terrible to do.  Just wrap the pcie data into a serial stream, and reverse it out the adaptor....

[Etherion]

Since mining traffic to the cards isn't all the latency/bandwidth dependent; I don't see why a software driver and protocol interpreter would be too terrible to do.  Just wrap the pcie data into a serial stream, and reverse it out the adaptor....

Yes on a technical level it should work. Sadly I can't see  gpu drivers supporting this though

[JaredKaragen]

Since mining traffic to the cards isn't all the latency/bandwidth dependent; I don't see why a software driver and protocol interpreter would be too terrible to do.  Just wrap the pcie data into a serial stream, and reverse it out the adaptor....

Yes on a technical level it should work. Sadly I can't see  gpu drivers supporting this though

if the protocol is properly coded in the driver;  the GPU driver is not a concern, as the PCIE ports added will be a system device, which would accept commands just as the driver for the physical on-board PCIE would be in windows....  They already emulated PCI/PCIE ports (in a pseudo sense) in the past with the early virtual pc emulators;  before VMx was a thing.  Pure software emulation with system level hardware control capability. (super early vmware versions for instance).

I've done something like this only once when I was about 15 years younger;  and I only did a small portion of the entire project.  We had to code a driver for a network packet protocol that was just coming out...   But for the life of me, I don't remember exactly what it was... Something about it being universal....  The main part I did was I had to write the functions that built the packets based on input source, size and type..

My friends dad did something similar designing the first PCMCIA universal docking station for laptops in the mid 90's...  so I have people to bounce ideas off of....

(sorry for skew, but we are all curious)