Hello everyone... I have what is probably a really stupid question but here goes anyway lol...
I just received the 2 Sapphire Nitro+ RX470 8GB today and getting ready to try 1 out in the last slot of my rig already running 4 MSI 470 4GBs. My question has to do with the drivers... am I correct that I should NOT need to update/install drivers to use a different branding 470, since they are both AMD/Radeon? I already have the latest Crimson 16.9.2 package and its working fine on my MSI cards, so don't wanna mess with the drivers unless absolutely necessary to get the Sapphire card up and running.
I assume that I will have to install whatever the Sapphire equivalent to MSI's Afterburner is though in order to be able to tweak the clock speeds, etc... is that correct?
You can mix and match different vendors, and 4xx cards. You can run into issues mixing 3xx and 4xx., I've heard.
OK... so, I attempting to add this 5th GPU (Nitro 470 8GB) to my rig last night and it simply did not work. I tried a variety of different cables and connectors... the one exception being the 1x to 16x USB powered extender/riser because I don't have any extra of those at this time.
Here's the scenario... my other 4 GPU's (MSI 470 4GB) had been running stable for close to 2 days. So, yesterday, I power down, unplug everything, and hook up the Nitro. Note that the molex & 8-pin PCIe power hooked up to this card should not be the problem because they are using the 2nd connector on the same cables that are hooked up to my 4th MSI 470.
Everything looks good but when I turn the power back on, I cannot even get the machine to boot up. When I power on, everything starts spinning and lighting up as usual, including the new Nitro (fans spinning and lights on). However, after a few seconds (before even the mobo bios options hit the screen), it stops and restarts itself. It does this in a non-stop loop until I power it off. I tried multiple times (changing connectors, etc) but got the exact same thing every time.
I'm assuming many of you have probably seen or heard of this behavior before, so I would be looking for some opinions on likely causes. I am already going to order another 1-2 powered risers to make sure that is not the issue, but aside from that, is there anything else to try/check to trouble-shoot this? I have a really bad feeling that it could be that this is just one of those Mobos (ASRock x99 Extreme 4) that just won't work with more than 4 GPU's.
One final bit of info... this PCIe slot was the one that I had previously tried with 1 of my MSI's but was only getting the dreaded 4 Mh/s. I had not tried another card in that slot until last night. Not sure that could be related to this non-booting issue, but thought I would mention it just in case.
edit1: forgot to mention that once I unplugged the Nitro, by rig booted up fine and is back to normal.