Good day,
I have read the entire manual for the GA-990FXA-UD3 v.4.0, and I have asked many competent people about this, and searched overclocking and gaming forums, but to no avail.
I normally run two R9 290X video cards directly attached to both PCI 2.0 x16 slots (so, PCIEX16_1 and PCIEX16_2) and my system has never had any issues. However, since I like tinkering, and since this motherboard is beyond any warranty period, I figured I would try to insert a third R9 290X GPU on the PCIEX4_1 with a powered riser cable as to not fry the 24-pin ATX connectors. It worked! I ran it through hours and hours of benchmarks (Unigine Heaven 4.0, Unigine Valley, 3D Mark Extreme, Firestrike Extreme, Catzilla, Geekbench, etc. and several games like Metro Last Light Redux) for many days, and it all worked fine. 3-way Crossfire shows up in GPU-Z and Catalyst Control Centre, and all three GPUs were at 100% load during these benchmarks, so I know for certain that all three were working.
If I use NON-powered cables, my system becomes very unstable and will crash within minutes.
My question is - given that I was able to make a 2-way-rated mobo work with a third GPU using a powered riser (it was not sucking any power from the mobo), is the main difference between the UD5 and UD7 mobos their ability to natively support a third and fourth, respectively, without the need for powered riser cables?
I love this board, thank you so much!
I have read the entire manual for the GA-990FXA-UD3 v.4.0, and I have asked many competent people about this, and searched overclocking and gaming forums, but to no avail.
I normally run two R9 290X video cards directly attached to both PCI 2.0 x16 slots (so, PCIEX16_1 and PCIEX16_2) and my system has never had any issues. However, since I like tinkering, and since this motherboard is beyond any warranty period, I figured I would try to insert a third R9 290X GPU on the PCIEX4_1 with a powered riser cable as to not fry the 24-pin ATX connectors. It worked! I ran it through hours and hours of benchmarks (Unigine Heaven 4.0, Unigine Valley, 3D Mark Extreme, Firestrike Extreme, Catzilla, Geekbench, etc. and several games like Metro Last Light Redux) for many days, and it all worked fine. 3-way Crossfire shows up in GPU-Z and Catalyst Control Centre, and all three GPUs were at 100% load during these benchmarks, so I know for certain that all three were working.
If I use NON-powered cables, my system becomes very unstable and will crash within minutes.
My question is - given that I was able to make a 2-way-rated mobo work with a third GPU using a powered riser (it was not sucking any power from the mobo), is the main difference between the UD5 and UD7 mobos their ability to natively support a third and fourth, respectively, without the need for powered riser cables?
I love this board, thank you so much!
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