Troubleshooting Background Reactor on new build with twin RTX 4090s

Flame Hardware Questions
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Hi All,

I’ve just recently moved beyond the Mac world and had Puget set up a new workstation for me- For the most part, so far so good! I have Flame running happily on Rocky Linux with my unsupported “gamer” card 4090 setup and performance in batch is pretty mind blowing so far.

However, I still have one major hangup: Flame will not activate the secondary GPU for Background Reactor.

I’m pretty sure the issue is related to the PCI-e lane widths not matching between the 2 cards. I expected that my ASUS Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE motherboard would cover this with 7 x16 slots, but with these massive cards it became necessary to put the 2nd one into a slot that ends up deprecated to x8 lane width.

One idea that occurred to me is to simply downgrade the primary GPU to x8 lane width so the 2 cards match. Does anyone know of a way I can accomplish this? With the BIOS I’ve had no success but I am curious about a command line solution. I’ve been able to find some references to people using setpci for similar tasks but I’m not very good in bash yet and I’m wondering if anyone happens to know more about this.

Thanks in advance!
Nick

2

give up on BG Reactor. It sucks… but this is also why it is easiest to stick with validated systems, or else ADSK can just deflect.

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Do the lights dim when you turn that thing on?

If you can’t get BG Reactor working, you could always stick it in an older pc and use it as a Burn node!

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What is the speed like for 4090 in a burn node vs RTX 4500 Ada or similar? Does it work well as burn node?

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No idea about the 4090, but, I just ran 3 tests with the same Lenovo P8 and 3 different GPUs…

Lenovo P8 Threadripper PRO 7975WX 32c, 128 GB RAM, Highpoint 7540 x8 980 Pros

RTX A4500 = 4:43

RTX A5500 = 4:14

RTX 5000 Ada = 2:54

The 4090 is faster than the RTX 5000 Ada. But it’s unsupported.

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Thanks, awesome! Is Burn less sensitive with issues than Flame typically?

How are you liking the high point how much difference does that make in speed?