A few of my 6 290 rigs will not post without a monitor, I'm not sure why. I bought a few displayport to vga adapters online for ~$5 each, and made dummy plugs from those. Each rig only needs one dummy plug, and it really only needs it to clear post, I got by with just one for a while, waiting for china mail. I got lucky and had a display port to dvi-d adapter from a v5900 I bought, worked fine as a test
![Grin](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/grin.gif)
I just made a bunch and I leave one in each rig so I can remotely reboot them reliably.
You will not be able to dummy plug a 290/290x with a non-active dvi to VGA adapter. There are no analog outputs on a 290, so the non-active adapter does not work. You need an active adapter, usually has a big box built into it.
Thanks for the info on the active adaptor needed.
My mining rig currently has 1 x 6970 & 1 x 7970. Unless I dummy plug the 6970 (no monitor attached), its disabled in Catalyst and of limited usefulness.
I'm adding 2 x 290x into the Win7 64 pc. Like other surprised posters in this thread, I discovered that an analog (passive) dvi->vga adaptor with resisters (my diy dummy plug) does not fit the 290x (due to no analog output).
I'm just about to purchase 2 x active adaptors in the hope of my resistors working when stuck into the vga port. Hopefully Catalyst will enable these gpus for full use within Catalyst.
I would imagine the posters in this thread who are happily mining without dummy plugs on their 290's are satisfied without having the 290's "enabled" in Catalyst. My experience so far is that the 290x I tested behaved just like my 6970. They are visible in Windows, but not enabled in Catalyst (listed as "disabled").