I bought a cheap used Chinese branded GPU (nvidia 1080) from ebay. It is listed in the device manager but it has an exclamation mark next to it (google says that this indicates a driver issue). It is listed in HWinfo but not in afterburner.
On reddit someone said:
So I did some research on this card. It appears to be a very unknown Chinese brand with locked driver support. So it won’t run with the most recent NVIDIA drivers. Of course if you like tinkering with drivers. It’s still a reference 1080.
There’s also a ton of people complaining about its terrible driver support though when I google it further. You’ll have to use pre-400 series drivers from 2017. And since some games will require certain versions or newer, you won’t be able to run them, i.e. bf1 bf5
I was able to locate the driver on the manufacturer's site (
http://www.xyingba.com/index.php/pro_v_116_147.html) but the latest driver is like version 377 from 2017.
I had some trouble downloading the driver because it is hosted on baidu and you need an account to download it and you cant make an account without a chinese phone number. thankfully someone was able to download it for me and they re-uploaded the driver here (
http://www.mediafire.com/file/d7tm4cv2fyocdz0/377.35_win10_64bit_international-1022014-02.zip/file).
After installing the driver I was able to see the gpu in my device manager as well as afterburner. It ran games well and benched as expected for 1080 in PCMark. But no mining programs recognized it. just said that there is no device detected or no Cuda devices detected. Im starting to think that the driver was released before cuda 9 and the two miners I tried dont have a version for earlier than cuda 9.
What can I do? Is it possible to run newer drivers on this gpu somehow? Can I run any mining programs in the card's current state? Or is there no option and this card is a dud?
EDIT: turns out it works in hive OS. woo! hashes on eth ez pz. so weird that its plug and play on linux but such a hassle on windows.