Yeah making progress. BlackDragon and FireDragon are still running strong with dual 7970s. Hydra6 has been interesting. I got the MSI R7970 lightning to run overnight by down clocking from the factory settings. The first problem is heat. Hydra6 can't keep it cool enough. The driver aborts at 83c but it doesn't stop the Donate job, it pretends it's still running. I happen to be looking when the message briefly showed on the screen. So down clocking to 7970 ref specs (925/1375) and it runs at 76c. Not the best, but a start and it has proven stable. The GigaByte card handled it better (which is why it was in Hydra6 to begin with).

Next problem, the 6970, when enabled, wasn't doing jack and showed as "Disabled Adapter" in Catalyst 12.4. GPU-Z showed it as running at only 250Mhz. Did some searching and found someone reporting this http://devgurus.amd.com/thread/159062. Same issue, different cards and unanswered. But it got me to thinking, what if it wanted a monitor on the card (that old problem). Connected it over to a TV VGA input and sure enough Catalyst enabled management of it and GPU-Z saw it goto 940 Mhz. Woot!. I have had 7970 and 6970 in this box for awhile without a second monitor, so color me surprised by this one. Guess I will need to find old posts for building a fake VGA dongle.

Of course now heat problem is even worse. I am using TThrottle to control Boinc on the GPUs to keep the temp down until I come up with another plan. But at least for the moment I have all 6 GPUs running. Time will tell if they stay stable.

Now, solving the air flow and heat.... Take a look at the Hydra6 pictures, what else can a man do?