I'm having trouble with the windows drivers provided by AMD. I now have built two machines: let's call them Alpha (1xHD5450, 3xHD6990) with 7 GPUs, and Beta (8xHD7970) with 8 GPUs. I got Alpha working under windows after some trouble; I still haven't got Beta working under windows so any help is appreciated.
When building Alpha, every time with a 64-bit windows 7 professional,
- the first time I installed the entire catalyst center, with default options, on an existing windows. Result: BSOD whenever I login, consistently.
- the second time (on a new vanilla windows) I installed only graphics drivers + APP SDK. Result: OpenCL sees only 5 Cayman GPUs (out of 6), spread over all 3 cards.
- the third time (again on a new vanilla windows) I did exactly the same, but with/without (don't remember exactly the order) all windows updates first. Now OpenCL sees only 3 out of 6 Cayman GPUs (so it's even random behaviour?)
- the fourth time (again on a new vanilla windows) I did not install the AMD graphics drivers at all. Instead, I let windows update install their graphics driver and installed only the APP SDK. Now, all GPUs worked as expected! Hurray for windows updates, boo for AMD.
Now I'm buiding Beta, still every time with a 64-bit windows 7 professional,
- the first time (on a new vanilla windows) I install the newest Catalyst package from the website. Result: BSOD whenever I login, consistently. Yup, exactly the same scenario as with Alpha. Seems like the drivers are the only thing Alpha and Beta have in common, so I'm going to point a finger that way.
- the second time (again on a new vanilla windows) I let windows update everything and I installed only the graphics driver + APP SDK. Result: OpenCL sees only 5 Tahiti GPUs (out of 8). Seems familiar with the Alpha problems eh?
- the third time (again on a new vanilla windows) I installed just the graphics drivers + APP SDK. Result: OpenCL sees only 5 Tahiti GPUs (out of 8). Seems familiar with the Alpha problems eh?
Alas, windows updates does not propose me to install HD7970 drivers. So the fourth thing that solved it for Alpha, doesn't work here. Under Linux (Ubuntu 12.04), OpenCL sees all 8 cards, so there's no hardware problem. It's purely a problem with the AMD graphics drivers for windows (or at least win7 64-bit).
It's also not a problem with the APP SDK, since the problems arise already when just installing the graphics drivers. Looking in the device manager, it lists 5 HD7970 and 3 standard VGA display adapters.
I'm out of clue here. Are there any generic drivers for windows, like the linux people have made for linux? Or do you have any other suggestions for me to make all 8 cards work under windows?
