Asus Prime Z270-P 8th GPU Problems

[themonkii]

Hey guys

Working on a rig here, and can't seem to get my 8th GPU working properly. Seems to be an issue when installing the last (8th) card. Windows detects it, no issue in that, but when I launch Claymore it locks up with a "Thread Stuck in Device Driver" Windows error.

Kind of at a loss. Tried different card, M.2 adapter, and riser - so I know it isn't that. On board graphics disabled, 4G enabled, PCIe set to GEN 1, most recent BIOS installed.

I have lots of power too - 2k watts.

Any ideas?

[CryptoGriff]

I have the same motherboard in 2 of my rigs with 8 gpus. I would try to set it to Gen 2 in the bios and see if that helps. It may be a driver issue as well. When I originally set up my rig Windows recognized all 8 cards but Claymore would only recognize 7. I did a fresh install of windows and downloaded the drivers again and it all worked. Good luck

[themonkii]

Thanks, I'll try that this evening. I have another rig with the same board and running 8 GPU's (purchased built), so I know its doable. I really didn't want to re-install windows, but it sounds like a driver issue. I tried to uninstall using DDU in safe mode a few times, but to no avail. Stupid me has no restore points, something I've started doing now.

Anyways, thanks for the input, I'll give it a shot this evening.

[yobigd20]

If windows detects it without any warning in device manager, I'd say it's more device driver version. Try an older one. I tend to find the newer the driver the worse it performs or the more problems I have with it.

[Enigma54]

Are you overclocking the GPU's? I only have 6 GPU's with my Z270 and Claymore recognized all 6, but then it would give me an error on one of the cards and Claymore would re-start with just 5 GPU's.  This happened twice, but I decreased the overclock on MSI Afterburner and it's been running stable since with all 6 GPU's.

[themonkii]

I resolved last night by upgrading the drivers to the newest version. I think I'll do a clean install of the OS though, as I'm not a fan of the newest drivers - I lost Temp/Fan readings within Claymore, and noticed a drop in my hashrate.

That being said, the issue was driver related for anyone running into this issue in the future.

[iswi]

 In the description it is reported that sometimes on some motherboards the M.2 slots are shared with some of the PCI-E slots on the motherboard.

[themonkii]

So, would that be the cause of the lower hash rate? If so, that's no good....
In my troubleshooting, and if I recall correctly, I believe that I did notice that when only 1 card, 2 card, 3 card, etc was active, the hashrate was higher than when all were active.

I wonder if this is due to the PCIe bus lanes being maxed out?

Can anyone else corroborate this?

If this is the case, it kind of nixes the benefits to building an 8 GPU rig. It might be better to have 6 per rig, and just build a 4th.

I get that if its just a 1 rig operation, 1 or 2 Mh/s per card might not be significant, but in my case we're at 3, working on rig number 4.