Today I successfully f**ked up a PCIE Riser + 1x Slot + 1060.
I am just a beginner in building mining rigs, got some experience in gaming pcs. I already had 3 GPUs mounted directly to the board because my ordered risers take some time shipping. Since I got one 1060 shipped fast I decided to order another riser from eBay to get this 1060 running quicker. eBay Link:
https://www.ebay.de/itm/201748846321 I heard about bad soldered risers so I checked the looks for a problem but seemed good.
First thing I noticed was the riser wasn't fitting well. wobbeling inside the port, at first the rig did not boot. It was a little bit tricky for me to figure out what was the problem because simoultaneously I was also waiting for better PSU.
I decided to test using 2x600W PSUs: I powered the riser with molex from PSU that was powering also the motherboard and the second PSU was only for powering the new GPU with 6pin Pcie only.
I switched on 1st PSU, then 2nd, then fired up the rig by powerbutton. no boot. I was curious about that wobbleing riser so I decided to insert it in various ways until it began to boot. everything was working. But every time I needed to reboot or power off the rig the problem with not booting returned.
One time I plugged riser in and out with turned off rig but power on PSU1. PSU2 was disabled. when I pulled the riser from pcie port and stick it in again suddenly the rig started up even though I hadn't touched the powerbutton!
In the end I had to shutdown the rig for another time: I tried several clockings until GPUs crashed. weird thing here was: even when the power limit for gpu0 was set to 100, it only used 30w when mining. when I changed this max power limit, it worked again but other GPUs hashrate went down. So I tried to reboot but again the rig became stucked.
I tried putting the riser into slot in and out several times. it seems that I accidentally plugged the riser into the port wrong sided one last time, after that I smelled burned plastic and switched off everything so the death of riser and gpu is my own fault.
This should be a lesson for me. So what I still need to know for the future: When using 2 Power supply, is it correct to power mainboard + riser with 1st PSU and GPUs with 2nd? Why was my rig not booting/shutting down correctly? was it a powering problem or a riser-fitting problem? Maybe it wasn't booting properly because too many GPUs connected directly instead of using powered riser for all?!
hf roasting my dumb ass