I am trying to set up a machine with 4 ATI HD 5550 cards to crunch the ATI side of SETI.

I cannot seem to get Vista Ultimate 64bit to boot with more than 2 of them installed after installing AMD drivers.

Here are the details:

I have an ASUS L1N64-SLI WS, which has 4 PCIe slots, much like my TYAN S2915 and ASUS L1N64-SLI WS/B, both running 4 GT240s.

For clarity's sake, let's number the PCIe slots 1, 4, 5 ,6 (as shown in the POST messages). The POST messages show all 4 cards, detected twice: as VGA cards and MultiMedia devices (because of the onboard sound capability, I assume).

The normal SLI slots are 1 and 5.

I have tried inserting all 4 cards, and then installing Catalyst 11.2 (from AMD/ATI website); all appears to install OK.

As the last part of the install, the system restarts, but it hangs for > 10 minutes showing "Shutting Down". So I power the system down manually.

It will now boot OK with 2 HD 5550s in slots 1 and 4, but not 1 and 5 (again, the usual SLI slots). Or with more than 2 cards in any slots.

The symptoms are: POST is OK, get "starting Windows" progress bar. Then the screen blanks, as in normal boot. Then nothing - the usual startup does not occur, no matter how long I wait.
The monitor has a blank screen with video signal from card - that is, the monitor still sees the vid card, just no non-blank output, so it does not go into low power mode (no amber power light). I have tried various combinations of cards, so I am sure that the cards themselves are all OK.

Is it perhaps an artifact of the fact that the board has an NVIDIA chipset?

Short of buying a new board, is there anything you can suggest to get all 4 cards running?

Thanks!!!

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Hi

i'm no ATI expert but a couple of things to check/do

does ATI have a driver cleaner utility to remove all traces of the drivers? or use a third party app - as it sounds like the drivers are not installing correctly

how much memory do you have in the pc and on the graphics cards - small possibility is - i think windows has a fit if you have more memory on the cards than the operating system has (actually come to think of it i have had 4 295 in on xp 64 machine with only 6gig ram and that worked ok - so ignore)

I had the blank screen problem the other day and by logging in from another machine it was clear windows was seeing two monitors and just to be helpful the one with the login screen was on the hidden monitor!!! So might be worth a try to see if it has actually installed correctly - i just deleted the second "Plug and play" monitor from device manager and that sorted it when i rebooted - i think its something stupid like the graphics card thinks or had a monitor attached before and remembers between boots - this is with nvidia though

I assume you motherboard does support more than double crossfire - again just a thought

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Tim

as far as i know, ur setup is not possible with Vista, only with XP and 7.

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- Performance is not a simple linear function of the number of CPUs you throw at the problem. -

as far as i know, ur setup is not possible with Vista, only with XP and 7.

Were you thinking I was mixing ATI and NVIDIA cards? Your statement is correct for that, as far as I know, but I only want to have > 2 ATI cards, no NVIDIA. They will all have the same driver, so that should be OK (but so far, it isn't).

I will try Win 7 anyway, just to see if that works.

BTW: The Catalyst 11.2 I have is for both Vista AND Win 7.

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as far as i know, ur setup is not possible with Vista, only with XP and 7.

Well, OK then, I'll try it with 7. Will report back (much) later.
Hope you are right!

BIG SORRRY, IM Wrong!!!

should be possible, only diffenrent drivers (GPUs) aren't mixable.

from Wikipedia: "One of the limitations of WDDM driver model version 1.0 is that it does not support multiple drivers in a multi-adapter, multi-monitor setup. If a multi-monitor system has more than one graphics adapter powering the monitors, both the adaptors must use the same WDDM driver."

your setup is all on ATI, so it should work.

edit:
@ booting time, have u rotated the monitor-plug through all graphics ports?
perhaps some random prioritizing which is number 0 card?

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- Performance is not a simple linear function of the number of CPUs you throw at the problem. -

@ booting time, have u rotated the monitor-plug through all graphics ports?
perhaps some random prioritizing which is number 0 card?

No, I haven't - didn't think of it - you may be right - I'll try it later...
(wouldn't THAT be weird!!!).

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Well, I tried Win 7. Got the same - OK with 2 cards, but when added in two more, Win 7 hung up in installing the drivers for cards 3 and 4.

(Win 7's drivers were the same as those in Catalyst 11.2, by the way).

Incidentally, the main screen (card 1) was blank as above, but the "Installing Drivers" box was on card 2...

BFD.

Anyone have any better ideas?

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You try it with just 3 cards?

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Yup - fails with > 2. Even if I avoid the SLI slot (slot 5 in the nomenclature of the BIOS).

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Well, I finally figured it out.

The problem was, the MB I originally tried to install 4 cards on (ASUS L1N64-SLI WS) has an NVIDIA chipset, and doesn't understand Crossfire (neither do I); I tried it on an AMD chipset board (ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe) and all 4 HD 5550s were installed and have the ATI drivers (Cat 11.3).

YAY!

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Well, I finally figured it out.

The problem was, the MB I originally tried to install 4 cards on (ASUS L1N64-SLI WS) has an NVIDIA chipset, and doesn't understand Crossfire (neither do I); I tried it on an AMD chipset board (ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe) and all 4 HD 5550s were installed and have the ATI drivers (Cat 11.3).

YAY!

I would find it unlikely that an nvidia board would do Crossfire, but I would expect the cards to function separately. SLI and Crossfire and two different ways of doing the same thing, but that mode work relies on the MB as much a the cards. Originally Intel only supported Crossfire in their chipsets. Then both in their later chipsets.

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I would find it unlikely that an nvidia board would do Crossfire, but I would expect the cards to function separately. SLI and Crossfire and two different ways of doing the same thing, but that mode work relies on the MB as much a the cards. Originally Intel only supported Crossfire in their chipsets. Then both in their later chipsets.

Well, you would be wrong (apparently). I would have thought that, too, but it didn't seem to work. Physically installing > 2 HD 5550s on the Nvidia board never installed the ATI drivers, whereas on the AMD board, no problem.

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I would find it unlikely that an nvidia board would do Crossfire, but I would expect the cards to function separately. SLI and Crossfire and two different ways of doing the same thing, but that mode work relies on the MB as much a the cards. Originally Intel only supported Crossfire in their chipsets. Then both in their later chipsets.

Well, you would be wrong (apparently). I would have thought that, too, but it didn't seem to work. Physically installing > 2 HD 5550s on the Nvidia board never installed the ATI drivers, whereas on the AMD board, no problem.

That is why I try not to think. Normally all it does is make my head hurt. So I'll read spec docs. Save the wee gerbil in my head from having to run to much. (:

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