Topic: Setting up 7970 with NVIDIA motherboard? (Read 1077 times)

It's okay. It does not care if you do general work. The mining is just summation.

Going to actually do just that with a fresh install and check out the CPU-z to see what it actually is when I get more free time. Thank you for the advice!


hmmm..I guess if the fresh install of everything doesnt work then that could be the main issue at hand. At the moment I installed it on the older motherboard withought NForce where I installed catalyst 12.8 and 2.7sdk and have it working at 550 kh/s at the moment. Nowhere near 700plus where I would like it but until I can do some more testing its better to have at 550 then zero   In the end I would like to put it back on the Nvidia board if possible as it has two pci 16x slots and was hoping to have two 7970's but only time will tell. Thanks for the help! 

NForce chipset boards are well before the time of the 7970. Your board might not be compatible.

Download CPU-Z (>C
Look at Mainboard tab to find out what your mainboard really is.

If it doesn't know, then look carefully on the board for the manufacturers part number and google it.

Visit that vendors product page and download the newest drivers. I have a suspicion that your problems all started when you removed some chipset drivers or something equally as important. Keep in mind that a mainboards chipset is what controls the operation of the PCI-e slots.

Do a fresh windows install and then install the mainboard drivers. Then install the AMD graphics drivers. I would suggest maybe not using the beta as it just another place something can go wrong. 12.8 seems to be a pretty well regarded version.

ok here it goes :

I just bought a used Sapphire 7970 and am trying to install it onto a older pc with looks to be some Nvidia fans connected to the Motherboard and maybe a chip as well. I pulled everything out of the case this time around and bought a AX1200 to get me started. I plugged the new GPU into the motherboard, attached DVI and started up just fine even with no other GPU attached. Of course it did not recognize but gave me funky desktop size until I went and installed catalyst 13.6 beta 2 as is on my other machine working AOK. Opened cgminer and everything i tried came up with HW errors so am thinking because it is a 32 bit maybe I need to go back to 12.8 and 2.7sdk and decided a uninstall of all drivers would be needed.

I then noticed a bunch of NVIDIA drivers and misc programs and thought maybe they were interfering so maybe an uninstall would do the trick on everything. Upon deleting NVIDIA and AMD drivers/catalyst i restarted and got nothing but one big black screen. no startup logo, info, nothing. I tried some other working OS hard drives and same thing with a black screen but did sound like computer might be doing something.

 I then added an older NVIDIA GPU onto the 2nd x16 port along with the 7970 beside it and was able to get the computer to start back up when the DVI cable went to the NVIDIA. System then did a restore to be able to load properly. Now I am assuming because of the NVIDIA fans maybe chips,etc on the motherboard deleting all of those NVIDIA programs/drivers maybe wasnt a good idea. So upon that restore it might of patched what i deleted for the mean time? Now when I try to install any type of Catalyst it does not recognize the 7970 only the Nvidia which the monitor is connected to. If i connect DVI to 7970 I just get black screen. The 7970 fans/lights are on and moving so that is a good sign but now I am not sure where to go from here.

 Should I take another drive and install with a fresh windows 7 after reformat and go from there? side note when i tried using other working OS 7 hard drives connected to NVIDIA GPU it was unable to start but the original HD would. Now I am thinking it definitely needs some type of NVIDIA program to even run this motherboard?

Any help or ideas on how to move forward is greatly appreciated! not a noob but by far no whiz kid..thank you!