Topic: MSI Z97 Gaming 5 and five or more RX480 - page 2. (Read 5048 times)

Tricky yes, but I'm damned if I know what I did to get 6 RX480 working in Windows 10 on my ASRock board. I think it just worked as expected.

Same problem on H97 Anniversary with win 10 X64, 4 RX480 works fine, 5 impossible! Damn

The driver install is tricky indeed. But i have 6 AMD and 1 NV GTX1080 running on my MSI Z97 Gaming 5.

TSX is a instruction set of intel..btw

I know in theory all of that is correct, but when it comes to installing drivers it just doesn't like more than four RX480. Very weird, the exact same rig works fine with seven 290x, just not more than four RX480.

I'm trying a Linux install right now to see if that fixes it.

EDIT: That's worked, got 6 RX480 mining now under Linux, albeit each card is hashing about 1mh/s slower than under Windows. So fucking annoying, why would 7 290x work in Windows but not more than 4 RX480, on the exact same motherboard? Another motherboard and 6 RX480 works fine in Windows. Seems it's combination of MSI + Windows 10 + RX480 means can't use more than 4 cards. Hate it when PCs are annoying like this.

whatever it is , who cares.

as long as your lanes are set, 7x 480 is no different then 7x anything. supply proper power, use powered usb risers ( 12v for winners ) , and your rig will fly. decent ram, ssd, 1840g. mine on. it works, we have many. 480s, 470s, 390s, 290s, 280s, 7 works fine with all, same mobo exactly. works with 8 as well.

Yeah, set pcie config to 8x/4x/4x and disabled unnecessary stuff. Already had for when I was mining with seven 290x.

What's TSX though?

Tdid you set the pcie config to 8x/4x/4x disabled all unnecessary stuff like the soundcard etc?
I have the same mobo I just modified the BIOS to let TSX still work from microcode point of view.

Does anyone out there have five or more RX480 working with an MSI Z97 Gaming?

Background :-

I already have a 6 x RX480 mining rig working perfectly fine with AsRock H81 BTC Pro on Windows 10 with Catalyst 16.11 drivers.

I did have a 7 x 290x mining rig working perfectly fine with an MSI Z97 Gaming 5, with Windows 10 and Catalyst 16.11 drivers.

I bought 6 more RX480 (Sapphire Nitro+ like the other 6 I have), risers, case, motherboard etc. ready to build a new rig.


For the new rig I could only get as far as installing 4 cards. It didn't matter what cards, risers, slots, drivers I used, the graphics card installation always corrupts on the fifth card. It first locks up, and upon reboot, none of the cards work. I'll post some screen shots later of the errors Windows throws up after a reboot, something about some files installed not being correct.

Eventually, the motherboard I was trying to use (ASUS Z97-A) appeared to die completely(Doesn't POST at all anymore), it was a cheap second hand board that had already seen a fair amount of mining use. So wasn't too fussed.

So I turned my attention to putting all the 6 new RX480s into the MSI Z97 Gaming 5 rig. So out came all the 290xs, uninstalled the drivers. Put the RX480s in. And would you believe it, I'm now having the exactly the same driver issue with this mining rig too. I get four(any four of the six it seems) cards installed and mining fine, regardless of what slots I plug them into. But connect a fifth and everything just fucks up.

I KNOW this is a driver issue, just wondering if anyone else has experienced it and how they worked around it. I'll post screenshots of error later.

Thanks