6xR9 290 on Windows -- (n00b scrypt'in)

[MIN3R]

Been a "long-time" lurker... If considering a few weeks is a log time due to the exponentially increasing difficulty of mining! I've found a lot of great info on the forums so far... Currently working on completing my 6x Sapphire R9 290 rig. So far I've gotten ~908KH/s from them after tweaking settings. I've got 4 cards up and running (3.6MH/s) on my MSI Z77A-GD65 mobo, but hit the window/driver "wall" last night. Initially just had 3 going because my risers had not arrived yet. Spend 7+ hours last night between making my risers (1X -> 1X) powered and adding the presence detection shorting, and then trying to get windows to recognize all the cards. I "think" I've found the solution here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=193695.0;all), hopefully find out tonight if it works on Win7 x64. If not then I'm switching up to Win8

Happy mining all!

Rig details:

• mobo: MSI Z77MA-G45 MSI Z77A-GD65
• CPU: Intel Celeron G1610 (dual core 2.6GHZ Ivy Bridge)
• HDD: ADATA 64GB SSD
• WiFi: usb dongle
• gfx: 6x Sapphire R9 290 (100362BF4SR)
• PSU: Cooler Master 1200W, Thermaltake 1050W
• OS: Win 7 SP1 x64
• gfx driver: catalyst 13.11 beta 9.5 (soon to try techpowerup 13.1)

[Bitconorama]

I had many issues getting more than 4 cards working in Win7 as well. So much wasted time ..so I went to 8 and within mins my 5 card rig was running great. If you're bound to staying with 7, give that a shot -it was unsuccessful for me. Could be that I missed something. I would highly recommend 8 if you're able to do it ..t'was simple! Though, if you do Win8, it will natively support up to 5 cards. To run 6, you have to do a special driver workaround.

Good luck! and welcome.

[MIN3R]

So I played with win7 a bit more... Oh say 30 minutes, then decided to make the leap to Win8! Followed the instructions in the thread I linked earlier, however I didn't realize that 13.1 drivers do not work on the R9 290! After some slight panic shortly after installing everything and it not working at all (driver not compatible), I decided to try the new 13.12 drivers released yeseterday at techpowerup (http://www.techpowerup.com/195941/amd-releases-the-catalyst-13-12-whql-graphics-drivers.html). Well low & behold uninstalled 13.1, reboot, install 13.12, reboot, and the 5 cards I have installed showed right up!

When I tried to run my original conf file though it was telling me I needed to lower thread concurrency... Then realized I forgot to do:
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 1
setx USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1

After that it tried to start mining on all 5 cores... However 1 core's memory was only at 150MHz (but engine was allowed to 1040)?! Repeatedly tried to use the cgminer interface to change it to no avail. Then downloaded MSI Afterburner and tried to set all rates that way. Well after several crashes it was finally "sticking" and now it just works through cgminer. Not sure what the real "key" was, but it's working, somewhat...

So after getting that squared away, I had an issue that my old settings would crash the computer almost immediately. So now I'm trying to decrease intensity from 20 to 17, seems to be doing fairly well. Getting 4.25Mh/s from 5 R9 290's... That actually quit a bit lower than what I'm used to from each card. That equates to ~850Kh/s each, whereas in Win7 with 13.11 beta 9.5 drivers I was getting a solid 900Kh/s (3 of 'em 908 except one card was 900).

Next up, see if adding the 6th card plays nicely Then see if I can "dial in" the settings for 13.12 like I did with 13.11 to get the most hashing per card

[Bitconorama]

I've always taken a little different approach. Typically, I've always tried to find the best config for the card that was installed -with 3 or less GPUs. Once I knew what the best settings were for that card, then I'd try bumping up the number of cards in a mobo.

I've got all my settings set through CGMiner ..but I'm also using 280xs if that makes any difference. Are you getting any crashes now? I've never used a 290x before, but try with an intensity of 13. It seems to be the sweet spot for the 7900 series. ..maybe try that with an r290?

How has the addition of a 6th card gone? I can't remember which driver, but from what I've read, I believe you need to install a 12.x driver for the 6th to be recognized in the device manager.

[MIN3R]

Well that is actually what I did, but not intentionally... I ordered 5 cards from one source, then the 6th card from another. Well the single card order came before the rest by about 5 days, so I found optimal setting for just the one card and have tried to apply that to each additional card I've added. There definitely variances between cards, because all of mine are Sapphire R9 290 w/ the BF4 included, however each of them don't hash exactly the same even with the same settings. For the most part they're all pretty close though running at ~900Kh/s average with 4 cards installed.

I found out (part of) the issue with my crashing at high intensity... I forgot to disable (set to 0) the automatic crossfire link (EnableCrossFireAutoLink) in the registry, as well as the ULPS power saving feature (EnableULPS). After I had all 5 running for a while they all of a sudden throttled down to ~80KH/s each, that's when I realized I forgot to disable ULPS. But 2 keys up from that are the EnableCrossFireAutoLink, after disabling both of those I was able to get it back up to 20 intensity.

I also do all my settings through CGMiner... As far as the 6th card,  I tried of course just plugging it in and hoping it would "just work", however that didn't go so well. It showed the "usual" code 43. So I tried to do the "downgrade" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=193695.msg2054705#msg2054705) method to 13.1 driver from techpowerup but I don't think the R9 290 is supported by that driver. So next I tried the downgrade method to 13.11 beta 9.5, which worked but still only allowed 5.

Just tried to do the 12.6 driver downgrade, but it says that version isn't compatible with my version of windows (8.1). Also I don't think the 12.6 drivers would support the R9 290

Not too sure what to do at this point. Might try a fresh install again since I've switched driver versions a couple times. Any ideas greatly appreciated! 

[Bitconorama]

I think you are right ..the downgraded driver trick to get the 6th card working may not be supported with these 290xs. From the digging that I've done, I haven't seen any successful attempts to run 6 290x in any Windows OS. You have shorted the pins to force card recognition, you're using powered risers ..the last remaining things that I can think of to try would be to check the BIOS to see what bandwidth is being given to the PCIe lanes -I had to downgrade from gen 3 to gen 1 in order to get all my cards working. Other than that, I think I could only suggest trying Linux. That seems to fix issues for many with 5+ card rigs.

Good luck!

[profall]

Personally i'd just run 2 cards on another rig. You can usually find an old gaming computer on your local craigslist with a decent PSU and 2 PCIE slots on the mobo for around $100-150ish if you are worried about spending a bunch of money on new parts. Just take what you want from them. This is how I build my mining rigs, cheapest way i've found.

[virtualaddict]

Did you mean Z77A? I'm running 4 280s on that. Did you try another 1x or 16x slot? When I plugged all into the 1x slots with 1x risers, it would always fail to detect the 4th GPU. It wasn't a problem with the riser because I swapped them around. I finally ended up plugging a 1x riser into the 16x slot and it was detected it right away.

[MIN3R]

Personally i'd just run 2 cards on another rig. You can usually find an old gaming computer on your local craigslist with a decent PSU and 2 PCIE slots on the mobo for around $100-150ish if you are worried about spending a bunch of money on new parts. Just take what you want from them. This is how I build my mining rigs, cheapest way i've found.

I actually have seriously considered doing that... But I want the most power density I can on one board. Also I don't think my 2nd PSU (1050W) will support 3x290 GPU and the mobo/cpu/ram/hdd. With the settings I'm running each GPU is pulling just over 350W at the wall, so even with 3 of those it'll max out the 2nd PSU. And the 1st PSU can't support 4...

[MIN3R]

Did you mean Z77A? I'm running 4 280s on that. Did you try another 1x or 16x slot? When I plugged all into the 1x slots with 1x risers, it would always fail to detect the 4th GPU. It wasn't a problem with the riser because I swapped them around. I finally ended up plugging a 1x riser into the 16x slot and it was detected it right away.

Oops! Actually I was running the Z77MA, but that was initially... Forgot to update my stats to the Z77A-GD65 I'm running now. I have all mine on 1x risers (some powered some not) with 6 detected in windows... Just can't get the driver to initialize the 6th