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Topic: Why is a PCIE latency rise required for many GPUs??? (Read 3326 times)

legendary
Activity: 1876
Merit: 1000

I have a few rigs running 6 5870s.


still could not get the 7x series to do 6.  but I will try the 1x riser on all 6 and see if that works.
rjk
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
1ngldh
I ran 6x 5870s an one board (ASRock 970 Extreme4) for a while, never had to do any BIOS tweaks like that. Maybe it was automatic.
-ck
legendary
Activity: 4088
Merit: 1631
Ruu \o/
The amd driver seems to have scope for 16 devices but no one has successfully booted more than 8.
legendary
Activity: 3472
Merit: 1724
I thought that was a driver limit and not a motherboard limit?

It can be a mobo limit, an OS limit or a driver limit.
legendary
Activity: 1400
Merit: 1000
I owe my soul to the Bitcoin code...
I thought that was a driver limit and not a motherboard limit?
-ck
legendary
Activity: 4088
Merit: 1631
Ruu \o/
Perhaps in my case because they're all running on 16x slots and they're 7970s I hit the limit earlier.

Yeah shouldn't be too big of an issue since it's working for you now. 

That's a pretty good thought.  Must be why some mobos reduce the speed as you add more cards.

So the solution is to use only x1 risers to force x1 speeds and avoid x16 negotiations ?
I'm pretty sure I've seen people suffer this with x1 as well, but usually when in combination with some higher speed ones, so perhaps with all of them 1x this is true... OR it could be the reason no one has successfully used more than 8 devices?
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 500
Perhaps in my case because they're all running on 16x slots and they're 7970s I hit the limit earlier.

Yeah shouldn't be too big of an issue since it's working for you now. 

That's a pretty good thought.  Must be why some mobos reduce the speed as you add more cards.

So the solution is to use only x1 risers to force x1 speeds and avoid x16 negotiations ?
sr. member
Activity: 373
Merit: 250
Perhaps in my case because they're all running on 16x slots and they're 7970s I hit the limit earlier.

Yeah shouldn't be too big of an issue since it's working for you now. 

That's a pretty good thought.  Must be why some mobos reduce the speed as you add more cards.
-ck
legendary
Activity: 4088
Merit: 1631
Ruu \o/
Perhaps in my case because they're all running on 16x slots and they're 7970s I hit the limit earlier.
sr. member
Activity: 373
Merit: 250
Although I don't know the technicality in this area, it would appear that the amount of data the GPUs are requesting is too much for the motherboard to handle, so naturally the higher the latency, the less bandwidth is being taken up.
-ck
legendary
Activity: 4088
Merit: 1631
Ruu \o/
I've seen it reported on numerous occasions that on some motherboards when you get to about 5 GPUs, they won't work unless you increase the PCIE latency from 64 to 96 in the bios. As it turns out I recently added a 4th 7970 to my GD70 motherboard and ran into precisely that issue. Xorg would crash every time I tried to start it with all 4 GPUs. So I went into the bios and tried upping the PCIE latency to 96 and then it worked fine.  Anyone know why that is?
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