(SOLVED) MSI 790GX-G65 should be fine for 4x 5850s?

[El Cabron]

Hi all,

I am trying to troubleshoot whats wrong with a rig. I just got a new MSI 790GX-G65 and I am trying to run it with 3x or 4x 5850s.

Windows 7 64bit will crash a few seconds after they start mining. Then blue screens of death and windows wont reboot. Fail every-time and I can not think of what is causing the trouble. This PSU ran 2x 5850s and a 6990 fine so I do not think that's the problem.

Will this motherboard be able to power the 3 cards? I have no idea what else it could be.

Any ideas would be great.

Thanks.


Problem was a bad 5850:)

[worldinacoin]

What is the power rating of your PSU?

[sadpandatech]

Are you using power molex risers on the cards?  Have you tried one of your other PSUs?  If yes to both of those the mobo may have lost a return trace for the PCIe 12v. Atleast, I had that happen to a Gigabyte board.

[Chefnet]

what clocking do you use, which driver, for me the gd70 work with 6x5850 perfectly

[bittenbob]

I used to have a motherboard with the 790 chipset and it would overheat constantly. WHen it overheated it would downclock my CPU and other components. It sounds like your PSU is a little low for what you are doing but I suspect it might just blow up at some point like my last PSU did. You might not be getting optimal performance with those cards because of the lack of PCIE lanes. I personally just bought the Sabertooth 990FX and it works great. There is a 1090FX coming out soon which will have even more PCIE lanes. That is of course if your GPUs are saturating your lanes which I think you just might be.

[bittenbob]

Thank you for all of your help but I am 98% sure that my problem is a bad 5850 that is just messing up windows some how.


btw, when you say PSU blow up, what do you mean? How did that effect the rest of your rig?

I mean the capacitors popped like a shotgun blast. I was hoping it would still be operable and waited a few minutes before turning back on but then I had two pops. Luckily it did not damage anyting else but in theory it could have fried my mobo, gfx card and hard drives (5). The motherboard I have has surge arrestors which Im thinking may have helped to save me. I have the Antec HCP-850 now but wouldnt run more than 500W of graphics cards on it.

As I said with my 790 if I tried overclocking my CPU it would heat up and I think at 55-60 it slows down as a self protect. To the extreme with the 4 way crossfire you are running it may cause BSOD and crashes.  The PCIE lanes are also processed by the northbridge so I think that has to be a possible suspect for you.

[bittenbob]

Thank you for all of your help but I am 98% sure that my problem is a bad 5850 that is just messing up windows some how.


btw, when you say PSU blow up, what do you mean? How did that effect the rest of your rig?

I mean the capacitors popped like a shotgun blast. I was hoping it would still be operable and waited a few minutes before turning back on but then I had two pops. Luckily it did not damage anyting else but in theory it could have fried my mobo, gfx card and hard drives (5). The motherboard I have has surge arrestors which Im thinking may have helped to save me. I have the Antec HCP-850 now but wouldnt run more than 500W of graphics cards on it.

As I said with my 790 if I tried overclocking my CPU it would heat up and I think at 55-60 it slows down as a self protect. To the extreme with the 4 way crossfire you are running it may cause BSOD and crashes.  The PCIE lanes are also processed by the northbridge so I think that has to be a possible suspect for you.

It was not the 5850, I think it might be the motherboard again. I think you might be right about it getting too hot. 55-60 just seems way too low for it to do that... fail fail fail...

Thanks:)

No problem. I wasnt too thrilled about that chipset and i thought the temp seemed low but I would watch my clocks and temps while running prime 95. I oringinally thought it was my CPU overheating but then I  put a Corsair A50 on it which dropped the temps significantly. I then watched with HWMonitor for temps and I forget what else I was using to monitor the CPU clock but I noticed as soon as I hit either 55 or 60C it would underclock by 300%. It might not have the same protection method for GPUs and specifically multiple ones. I considered buying an aftermarket cooler but quickly ruled it out because I was using all 4GB of ram I had with some games and programs and DDR2 is not so easy to find anymore. I went with the sabertooth because almost all the components are rated for military specs which is amazing and the board coolers are much better. I havent regretted that decision one bit and I basically doubled my PCIE lanes with it. I also get bulldozer compatibility which I did not have before.

[bittenbob]

Can I be safe and assume it is the motherboard? I do not want to go back to the shop and try to exchange it and it be something else.

Thanks.

I would check your voltages from your PSU to see if they fluctuate any and also rule out hard disk issues. I am not familiar with those cards but if they vent inside your case then you may have cooked your hard drive too. Also run memtest to see if it is your ram. As a rule of thumb always rule out any other failure point before you buy new equipment. I am just saying this is the most likely suspect in my opinion.

[bittenbob]

Ram is fine, I change it. HDD is fine, I changed it.

Could maybe be more than one of the video cards went bad at the same time but doubt it.

Might be the PSU but it fails even with 2x 5850 and a 1x 5830. I guess to be really safe I should try it with a different PSU.

My case is open and it does not get that hot compared to my 7 other rigs.

I will not be buying new hardware, just exchanging it. My biggest fear is looking stupid:)

If you exchange it for the same 790 chipset I am afraid you will probably have the same problems. Like I said it does not take much for that chipset to overheat. I forgot to mention that i also ran a cpu fan directly over the chipset and it still wasnt enough cooling. My system is a closed case but its got 3 x 120mm fans and 2 x 140mm case fans. If they will let you exchange it for a sabertooth 990fx then get it. That motherboard has a 5 year warranty which is much more than any other because of the mil spec testing. It is from Asus too so they arent going anywhere in the next 5 years.

I re-read the first post that says this is a new motherboard so yes that is more than likely the issue. Replacing for the same board won't fix anything. Since it still happened with 3 cards (unless they are 250 watts each) then it is probably not your PSU either. I think I read they are appx 180W so 180W x 4 = 720 watts so that would push it but 3 shouldnt.

[bittenbob]

The only other board they had on hand was an ASUS that I wanted the first go around. They talked me into this because the ASUS used the same RAM that I already had.

Thanks for your help.

Gigabyte is good too but its the chipset that is important ultimately in a board. If its an asus with the same 790 then it probably wont make a difference. I had to buy new ram as well but DDR3 is cheap. I was a bit disappointed in the ram I bought though because its supposed to be 1600Mhz but I can only run it at 1333Mhz. I had a bad feeling about it as soon as they said it was an open box.

[likuidxd]

ATI CCC

[bittenbob]

ATI CCC

Yes you could also run different driver sets to see if that fixes the probleml. I run a single card setup and have not had issues unless I overclock too far. Even then it usually just crashes the driver and not BSOD. He did not mention anything about overclock and I would think the first thing he would probably try would be to bring down to stock speeds.

Good point on the drivers though, try a few different sets to see if this fixes it before you get a new motherboard.

Has anyone had success running the same setup as Goat more importantly? If not than it might be too much processing power for the chipset as I suspect.

[likuidxd]

Sorry I'm being vague. Windows will automatically try to install CCC when you boot for the first time with ATI cards. DO NOT install CCC on a computer with (+)4 GPU's. There is a problem with it that hasn't been resolved since 4-way crossfire came about, not everyone has this problem. I didn't have the problem till I went past 6 GPU's.

As for too much processing power for the chipset. I assume you mean the mobo's on board chipset. I doubt that is the problem. Not positive, and correct me if I'm wrong please, but the onboard chipset has very little to do with the hashing done by the GPU except to run the stream of data which is insignificant bandwidth compared to rendering a game, or gui for windows.

[bittenbob]

Sorry I'm being vague. Windows will automatically try to install CCC when you boot for the first time with ATI cards. DO NOT install CCC on a computer with (+)4 GPU's. There is a problem with it that hasn't been resolved since 4-way crossfire came about, not everyone has this problem. I didn't have the problem till I went past 6 GPU's.

As for too much processing power for the chipset. I assume you mean the mobo's on board chipset. I doubt that is the problem. Not positive, and correct me if I'm wrong please, but the onboard chipset has very little to do with the hashing done by the GPU except to run the stream of data which is insignificant bandwidth compared to rendering a game, or gui for windows.

Well I am not sure how much data is passing back and forth but like I said from my experience a slight overlclock on my CPU would cause it to overheat and its a sensative little chipset. I think I remember reading somewhere that with crossfire when mining your cpu runs full out which could cause a problem. If you are right about the bandwidth then no it might not be the problem. I just found a lot of limitations myself with the 790.

[worldinacoin]

Solved, the problem seems to be that I have a bad 5850. Have no idea what went wrong but it has been sent off to get fixed.  Thanks all.

I did you find out that the 5850 is bad?

[tnkflx]

Sorry I'm being vague. Windows will automatically try to install CCC when you boot for the first time with ATI cards. DO NOT install CCC on a computer with (+)4 GPU's. There is a problem with it that hasn't been resolved since 4-way crossfire came about, not everyone has this problem. I didn't have the problem till I went past 6 GPU's.

I don't have this problem... I'm running an 8 GPU Windows 7 64-bit rig with CCC installed, no problems at all.

[plastic.elastic]

Took a while to track that down. But after find what card it was I tested it in a different computer. Fail. Had to reinstall windows for both rigs. Took about 10 hours to figure this all out.

Goat, why do you use windows? It hogs resource and takes one harddrive. Use linux on USB drive.

No need to worry about reinstalling crap,

Btw, where do you host all these? your home? interested to see more pics of your setup.

[plastic.elastic]

Took a while to track that down. But after find what card it was I tested it in a different computer. Fail. Had to reinstall windows for both rigs. Took about 10 hours to figure this all out.

Goat, why do you use windows? It hogs resource and takes one harddrive. Use linux on USB drive.

No need to worry about reinstalling crap,

Btw, where do you host all these? your home? interested to see more pics of your setup.

Keep them at home for now. I do need to move them over to linux but I have been very busy and have not had time to learn. Trying to just keep things going right now:)  I hope to have more photos posted in a week. Thanks

Its not very hard, Take a bite at it. PM me if you need help. If you use Linuxcoin, you might want to test to see if your board is compatible first. (by just booting the USB). Otherwise, you can build one from Ubuntu. There are tons of guide on how to build persistent Ubuntu USB drive (persistent just means so your session or state can be saved on the drive). Easy way is to use Ubuntu Live and convert it to persistent. I really do hope Linuxcoin is compatible with all your boards.

I like how your effort so far.