GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 - How to Enable 6 GPUs

[alitomari]

I have the GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-Gaming 7. It has 6 PCI-e slots, however Windows will only recognize 5 cards at one time. I have the latest bios and tried disabling things like excess sata ports and onboard audio, but it will not recognize the 6th GPU. Has anyone got 6 GPU's working with this or a related Gigabyte board?

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[tutu_young]

Same thing here. If i put 3 cards into the pcie * 1 slot, the mb would stuck in an infinite startup retry.


My other z170x gaming 7 only recognize 4 cards. WTH.

I contacted customer service they basically gave me a dummy reply. I am thinking of switching to asus z270-a

[alitomari]

Glad to know someone else has the same issue, I read a reddit post where someone with a Gigabyte Gaming 5 was able to get 6 cards running on the latest bios. That mobo has 7 pci-e slots for whatever reason, while the Gaming 7 only has 6. I'm wondering if theres some bios code that limits it to 1 less than the max number of slots to save resources or something. But if anyone WAS able to get their Gaming 7 to work with 6 GPU's please share it would help me out a ton.

[theh0f]

I've only been able to get 5 GPUs running myself.  The majority of the time adding the 6th causes a failure for the motherboard to POST or it will load into windows and only show 4 GPUs.  Very frustrating for sure, not sure what else to try or if it's even possible

[mktorn]

I don't have this exact board but I had to do the following to get >4 GPUs working on my current boards:

First, download the latest bios from Gigabyte's website for your motherboard to a USB drive and flash it to your motherboard (a lot have just recently added multi-gpu support for mining)
Second, ensure that 4G decoding is set to disabled, only UEFI boot is allowed in your BIOS, all the PCI-E slots are set to Gen1, and only have 1 GPU plugged in
Third, install your OS and the drivers for your main video card that your monitor will be plugged into
Fourth, reboot and go back into your bios to activate 4G decoding

At this point you should be able to plug all your cards in and have the OS recognize them without failing to boot. You can then install any remaining drivers necessary if you are mixing nvidia with amd cards.

Note that I am not sure if your motherboard actually supports the 4G decoding option, if it has nothing like this anywhere in the bios even after updating to the latest version then it just might not be possible to run all the slots at the same time with video cards. These are just steps I have had to do to get it working on the motherboards I am using. The issue with black screening during boot ended up being due to enabling the 4G Decoding option with the OS not having the video card drivers installed or not using UEFI boot to load the OS. Once those were both fixed I haven't had any issues with black screens during boot with 4G Decoding enabled.

[StylnJoe]

I have the exact same board and issue. I tried disabling all of the sata ports except for 1 SSD slot as well and didn't work. The next thing I'm going to try is installing windows 10 to a thumb drive and completely disabling the SATA driver and see if that works. Another option may be to purchase a usb ethernet adapter and disabling the LAN. If neither works, I just purchased an ASRock H81 BTC Pro from newegg so I can get 6 easily and resell this board.

Ethereum: 0x13d031B650Fb2cBfaf66BF6586F18335deA638E2

[StylnJoe]

Neither option worked. Board kept entering an endless boot up and reset cycle before posting. Only option left is to get a M.2 NGFF to PCIE card and that may get you 6. At this point without a bios change I don't think this board can do more than 5.

[tutu_young]

BTW, i can only get 5 GPU running on each ga-z170x gaming 7 board.

Have another azus z170-a that can run 6 card and asus z270-a can currently runs 8 card. Will only going to purchase asus z270-a in the future.

[StarLord823]

I had a similar issue with my Gaming 6 MB, I could only get 4 cards to recognize in Windows 10.  I ended up disabling the onboard video and switched to Gen1 for PCIe and had all 6 show on next boot.  I think the switch to Gen1 was the thing that actually made the difference.

[M2017N]

Could someone please explain how to switch to Gen1 in BIOS of this motherboard?
I have the same issue and 6th GPU is not shown.

Thank you all.

[Cereberus]

Could someone please explain how to switch to Gen1 in BIOS of this motherboard?
I have the same issue and 6th GPU is not shown.

Thank you all.

Enter the BIOS by hitting fast the DELETE button. Go to the top right of the screen and you should see an Advanced tab there, and in there there is the PCIE configuration, change it to Gen1.

[1amguy]

I got 5 working.
When I put the 6th in things start to go haywire.
I'm using SimpleMining Nvidia.  Looks like he's running ubuntu 16.04.

[ygr204]

It's been awhile since this post was updated, but I got mine working.
At first, I was able to get only 5 running as well. But I was able to fix it with help of a very smart computer engineer.
You have to update the BIOS.
And that's it.

[gaijinminer]

I got this link from Gigabyte support where they have specific Bios for Mining.
Will be trying this today.

https://www.gigabyte.com/MicroSite/462/mining.html

[gaijinminer]

Worked for me! Followed the instruction and it is able to detect 6 GPU.

[Nux322]

Worked for me! Followed the instruction and it is able to detect 6 GPU.

What model mobo are you using with which bios version?

[LrdAnubis]

Worked for me! Followed the instruction and it is able to detect 6 GPU.

I would love to know the answwr to this aswell. I can’t even get a 3rd GPU going. My system just ingores whatever card i put in PCIE x4 slot even if the x8 slot is used or empty.

I’ve tried moving my M.2 NVME SSD around, I’ve tried disabling sata slots.

I will give the “Gen 2” setting a go. But this is driving me nuts and costing me money.

Update:

I have moved the M.2 SSD into M2H_32G as not to disable the PCIE x4 slot. - Still no 3rd GPU detected.
I have updated to the F22f mining version listed in the link above. - Still no 3rd GPU detected.

Other than that actual slot being U/S. i don't know what i am doing wrong...

[TheHypnoToad]

has anyone managed to have more than 6 gpu's running on this board?

i've tried to get 8 going but m.2 to PCI-e adaptors don't seem to be working, card is not recognised.

very odd, i'm going to try loading BIOS settings from defaults and see if it fixes it

[jhob]

has anyone managed to have more than 6 gpu's running on this board?

i've tried to get 8 going but m.2 to PCI-e adaptors don't seem to be working, card is not recognised.

very odd, i'm going to try loading BIOS settings from defaults and see if it fixes it

Yes.  I have 7 working on my rig.  Six PCI-E plus one m.2 adapter.  That's the max per the gigabyte mining website.

[TheHypnoToad]

has anyone managed to have more than 6 gpu's running on this board?

i've tried to get 8 going but m.2 to PCI-e adaptors don't seem to be working, card is not recognised.

very odd, i'm going to try loading BIOS settings from defaults and see if it fixes it

Yes.  I have 7 working on my rig.  Six PCI-E plus one m.2 adapter.  That's the max per the gigabyte mining website.

Oops I meant 7 cards, maybe I have a bad m.2 adaptor, my card is connected to the M.2 adaptor but it is not detected under Linux. Riser and card is good as they work when connected straight to the PCIe slot.

Can I ask what adaptor you are using? Is it the green kind with a power plug? or the black/blue kind which connect straight to the riser cable?

Also are you using the mining BIOS from this page:

https://www.gigabyte.com/MicroSite/462/mining.html

Finally which m.2 slot are you using? The one closest to the CPU (M2D_32G)?

Thanks