Help with risers

[nicodium]

Hey guys

So ive got a few mining rigs all running Asrock Z87 Extreme 4 mobos (3x16x slots, aswell as 2x1x slots), with Gigabyte / Powercolor R9 290's, on 1200w PSU's.
Ive got a few 16x to 16x powered riser cables as well as 1x to 16x powered riser cables.

Now for the life of me I cant get a board to boot with a riser cable installed. Doesn't matter the assortment, swapped cards around, swapped risers around, only 1 riser with 2 cards on the mobo, and every other combination. Get postcode errors like A2 and D6 when using the 16x risers.

When using the 1x risers, the mobo boots, but the cards aren't being recognized in device manager.
The 1x risers in the 1x slots doesn't work, neither does the 1x risers in the 16x slots on the boards.

Does anyone have anything else for me to try? This has got me stumped.

 

[roligov]

Something doesn't sound right. Unplug all cards, unplug all risers.

Plug a 1x to 16x riser into first 1x slot and plug a 1x to 16x riser into the first 16x slot.
Connect the 2 cards.
Reset CMOS.
Boot.

 

[nicodium]

Been trying so many different combinations, I don't even know what the outcome of this test will be. Will try tomorrow morning, and report my findings.

 

[gox1201]

That Asrock board has the same "util" as my asrock board, so essentially there is a GUI that allows you to "explore" the board in the cmos

Start off by removing all cards, except rise one card from the pcie-16 slot 1, using a powered riser (1x is fine, but 16x also fine)
Go into bios

Change your PCIEX interface generation to Gen2 for all the 16x slots, and Gen1 for all the 1x slots (or just gen1 for all slots)

Reboot

Boot into windows
Do a complete ATI driver wipe (use the util to clean it up)
And install the latest driver

Reboot again.

Now plug in 1x risers into the 1x slots (you can do all, doesnt matter), and reboot again into CMOS
--> see which cards the bios board explorer can see
--> the ones it doesn't see you will need to do a port short A1-B17 for (the Asrock board you have is known to require port shorting for most of its slots)


I will tell you that in my experience with 1x risers and 290 and win 8.1
--> less than 8gb ram will make cards fail frequently
--> whenever windows "disables" a card, you will have problems booting
--> you will need to remove all cards, and restart the install process

Just believe me when I tell you you want to switch to BAMT. Roligov told me this, I resisted, almost threw my pc out the windows, capitulated and have had 100% uptime on the 290 rigs till I hit my house's power limit.

PS> on my one rig I run 2x 290 on board, and the rest risen, and it works fine.
If you have reference 290s, they run quite well onboard, quite a few ppl run 4 of them next to each other. Just a thought.

 

[nicodium]

Wow, very informative post, I tip my hat to you sir! Will try all of this tomorrow.