Octane / Nvidia Driver Crash Solution (x299 board)

[protokol]

Hi all,

After 2 weeks of trouble shooting I've found the solution to my problem and wanted to share it so save people some time. This is possibly the same problem found elsewhere in this forum relating to the PLX chips on Asus WS boards but I wanted to post about it for x299.

My System:
- Asus x299 Sage/10G
- 9940x (OC to 4.4)
- 32gb RAM 2666
- GPUs: 2 x 2080 ti, 1 x 1080 ti, 1 x Tian x
- PSU: Corsair 1600i
- Hard driver: Samsung 960 m.2 1tb
- Nvidia drivers (working) 419.71
- Octane version - 401.1
- Octane Cinema 4d V4.02.1-R4
-

Sympton:
- Crashing during render (often very early on and especially when using multiple GPUs).
- Display would become unresponsive and then BSOD yielding - watchdog violation
- Random crashes
- Strangely octane bench would run fine

Testing:
- memtest: ok
- hard drives: chkdsk, samsung magician etc
- removed CPU overclock
- nvidia drivers: 417.35, 417.71,419.17 + some of the 3xx drivers as well (always using DDU)
- removed each GPU and tested individually to make sure there was no issue on the cards. Once they were all cleared I started adding cards. I noticed the problem after adding the second card already but it became more apparent after adding the 3rd.

Solution:
- Apparently this is caused by an issue with the PLX chips on some boards when using multiple GPUs
- MSI Utility v2 - https://github.com/CHEF-KOCH/MSI-utility/releases
- Download the software and run as admin, then uncheck all boxes and only check the boxes next to your GPUs and hit APPLY.
- My system has been running for about 24 hours since then with no issues, before that it would run maybe 45 mins max but usually between 1min-5min.

Hope this helps

[vesta]

hello!
I have the same your config beside only 2 rtx 2080ti and still have BSOD.
The nvidia driver installed is 419.17
I runned MSI fix utility and also disable intel turbo boost utility.
I have a nvlink connecting the two gpu, maybe it could be an issue?

did you have some advice?
thanks a lot!