Prepare to have your mind blown. I know mine is.

I purchased a bunch of pcie 1x extension cables through ebay. Modded them myself, and shorted connections A1+B17 with some solid wiring.

I occasionally combine two cables together to double their lengths. This works pretty well in general.

I have been wracking my brain for days trying to figure out why certain combos of cards didn't work in my MSI 890FXA-GD70 mobo.

It turns out that a specific cable... when used as a "doubling" cable on card number 0/1 (first card)... will show MOST of the booting sequence in linuxcoin v0.2a...

I mean I can see the post screen, the boot sequence of black and white screen/text... and then when loading the desktop everything hangs...

If I change that one cable out for another, the desktop loads fine.

If I use that cable in the 2nd - Nth card, the desktop loads fine.

Why on earth would an extension cable stop only the desktop from booting when used in card slot number 1?

Answer me this and you get 1 BTC.

Extra info:
- I have tried xfx, diamond and sapphire cards with the same cable... same result.