Thanks for the feedback.  I reached out to TiN earlier today and he confirmed the same results.  I'm not entirely certain this matters but with four GPUs on the board, the first one on the PCIe bus (the one the BIOS video is accessible on) shows up as GPU #2 in the Nvidia control panel.  Fire Strike seems to run fine as well as other DX11 programs but DX12 programs simply freeze with a white screen and a hard system crash.  This configuration works on my ASUS board (Z390 with 9900k @ 5.3GHz) that utilizes some sort of a PCIe switch to present 8x to each card.  I'm out on travel this week but have a new board on order that offers the same infrastructure for the X299 chipset...I will report back!
 
-Charles

I believe that has been a bug for awhile now. Pretty sure that isn't the cause of the issue.

Good to know!  I tried throwing in a PCIe 4x card into the mix to make all all slots clock down to 8x but no change in the outcome of the benchmark.  Does anybody know how to get diagnostic data from the driver?  It doesn't dump anything useful to the typical Windows event log that I've seen.
 
-Charles
 

Nope.

@ karrickca
 
will it work with only 3 cards ?

I haven't tried it with 3 however I don't see any reason why it wouldn't.  Seems to me that the most important piece in the equation is the motherboard and PCIe configuration.  I have an EK 4-way distribution terminal connecting my cards so I can't pop one out easily to test it.  Give it a shot and let us know!
 
-Charles

karrickca, what motherboard are you on?

Can you disable PCI lanes through dipswitches? I use to use my Rampage board dipswitches to install 4 cards with distroblocks, then test each card individually.

Of course, if you don’t have dipswitches, that is fairly hard to do lol.

The board I'm currently using is the EVGA X299 Dark with a 7980XE. The driver patch works however it won't run any DX12 based applications, it just hard freezes with a white screen when initializing the GPUs. I don't know if there are any jumpers for individual PCIe slots but it would be neat to know if 2 or 3 cards would work when 4 will not. I can tell you that all 4 GPUs work fine on my ASUS WS Z390 Pro with a 9900k. When I get back from this business trip I'm going to test out the ASUS X299 Sage/10G board. Both the ASUS boards have PLX switches that preset more lanes than are actually available to the CPU, not sure if this is part of the fix. I think EK has blanks for their terminals, I will look into that.

-Charles

https://www.evga.com/support/manuals/files/151-SX-E299.pdf

Scroll to page 14 & 15. #30 is your PCI dipswitches. Turn off all the lanes you want to, and test Card’s individually without ever removing them. Just plug the display cable into the card you want to be primary.

It may require reinstalling the drivers occasionally, but you can test everything without removing anything.

You can also individually test each and every card, and see which one produces the best scores.

This will also remove heat from the loop as you disable cards, because they won’t be generating any extra heat to dissipate.

Nice! I'll give that a try. As long as I disable SLI before changing anything it should be pretty straightforward.