Experience with Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 Motherboard

[swiftshoot]

Hello all,

I would like to give you guys some feedback on this Gigabyte Motherboard.
it has:
- FM2
- 1 x16 PCI-Express
- 1 x8 PCI-Express
- 1 x4 PCI-Express
- 3 x1 PCI-Express
- AMD A10-6800K processor on it.

At first, I wanted to have the 6800k as my primary display.  After putting in my 4 Gigabyte 7950s into the machine with powered riser cards, and set to force IGP mode, I tried to boot up.  No go.  System is stuck in a BIOS Boot loop.  So I take out all the cards and leave main video card with IGP.  it works, add 2nd card, it works, add 3rd card, boom.  stuck in BIOS Loop again. 

Additionally, the PCIEX1_3 slot seems to be a dead slot on my motherboard.  It could not detect any Video cards on it. 

I am now currently waiting for Gigabyte to get back to me about the issues I am experiencing but in the meantime, I am currently at 4 x 7950s without APU running.  I end up losing about 200 khash/s since I have to lower intensity to 17.

I have also underclocked mobo so that it uses the least power.
I am on a Corsair AX1200i PSU which is maxed out right now.

I hope that Gigabyte will release a new firmware to fix some of my issues with this board. 

Anyone else has this board as it would be a good 6 vid card board.

I am running BAMT with the latest ATI Catalyst drivers (for BAMT, you need to expand the freespace with Gparted [boot from another USB BAMT device to do this] and then install driver as you will run out of space.)

Still on 3.1.0 cgminer as 3.3.1 has some weird bugs in it.

Anyone else using this mobo for a mining rig?  any quirks with it?

[richtrix]

Hi,

I have 4 of these boards and that PCI 1x number 3 does not work on them either. Don't know what's up with that. Furthermore, I think 4 cards per mobo is the max right now. It is all I can get to work in Windows 7. Looks like in the forums folks are saying that is the max the drivers will allow. Have not really see a work around. I have not had any problems at all with the onboard GFX. I have them running on all the boards for a nice little 80k/Hash bump with a 6800. I put the IG bios settings to Force on and PCI NB although on some I force the IG to be the display and that works fine too so I don't know what to tell you there. These boards are pretty solid though. I mined Bitcoins for a while with them running 3 7970 off the board before getting powered risers and beginning litecoin mining. Was very disappointed when I put together my 6 card uber rig with 2 PSUs and it looked so beastly and cool only to have only 4 cards ever usable and to find out on my own that that 3rd 1x slot is a lie. I've since found this report in several places. For future builds I'm going to scale back to older tech I think and buy used cheaper mobos. The 80khash from the APU is a cute little bonus but I can shave off over $100 like I did with a pentuim 4 dual core rig I have that runs great for $55 for the mobo and cpu. DDR2 ram though. Don't know if that will negatively affect LTC mining yet. Let me know if you hear anything from Gigabyte about this. Also let me know if you find anyone that has more than 4 cards running in Windows 7 or 8 or hell I'll even try linux if I can get it working. PS [if you count the APU I do have 5 cards going ]