Crosshair IV Extreme Hydra chip not detected
 

Hi guys,
For some reason Win 7 doesn't detect the hydra chip on my CH IV extreme.
It doesn't show up in the device list.
I've been looking at the bios but there doesn't seem to be a setting which would disable the hydra.
Defective board? That would be strange as all the rest is working ok.
Any thoughts?

Have you tried it with a different OS ?

Tried a reinstall of win 7 (64-bit) but still no change. Tried WinXP (32-bit) but no change.

Tried with stock bios settings ?

Yep tried that as well.

mmm I put the Extreme board last saturday on an existing Win7 install, didn't have any issues Pascal... Pm Massman and see if he has any problems... (he's got the sample at the moment)

You are in for a treat, HT clocks galore !!

Ok, problem solved.:woot:
Apparently you can only get the hydra chip visible in the device manager if you use 2 cards. Here's what I did:

* Installed a 5870 in PCIE1 and an 5750 in PCIE4. I think that any 2 cards should work provided that it's possible.
If you download the latest drivers here you'll see that there's a pdf in the zip file which explains which combinations are possible:
http://www.lucidlogix.com/driverdownloads-driver3.html
* Win 7 detected both cards. Then did a reboot and launched the Hydra driver installation package. This time instead of refusing to install and saying no hyra hardware, it went nicely through the process.
* I then checked the device manager and lo and behold : Hydra 200 shows up.

Weirdest installation process ever. Especially as I tried before (with one card) to add the device manually. I managed but it kept saying it wasn't working right even though Hydra software would then install.

So for some reason you can only install the software if two cards are used, not sure if it will work if you use slots 1 and 3 (normal crossfire slots).

The manual only vaguely hints to this in this paragraph:
"Install at least one VGA card on the slot 2, 4 or 5 when you use Hydralogix."
An additional comment saying: only then can you install the software, would have saved me from having visions of an RMA.

Anywho, hope this helps others.

that should have been in the documentation somewhere, at the same time it's like looking for the SLI tab after you installed the NVIDIA drivers when you only have 1 card in the system ;)

Touché.

Or like looking for the crossfire tab with one ATI card:-p
Nevertheless even with one card you can still install the Nvidia or ATI drivers.

The matrix as presented in the previously noted pdf (see link), which shows which cards can be combined would also have been usefull in the manual.

But that is all probably due to the fact that it's still a new product.

they don't want to say it, but they're using the early birds and enthusiasts for beta testing, but this has always been the case with the latest gear, no matter what brand or product
internal testing with hundreds of people never exposes the same issues as releasing it to millions