I solved the mystery. It is the skein algorithm that drives my power consumption way up.

Believe it or not, it ran pretty well right off the bat (I was prepared to do a lot of troubleshooting). Just needed to dial in the power to each card. I’m planning on building more rigs once the workshop I’m building is finished. I will definitely make them more uniform in the future.

Thank you for the advice! That explains why Afterburner is so laggy.

I’m having fits getting my overclocking settings to load properly on a boot, but that’s for another thread. So yesterday I finally got my rig all dialed in (2 1080ti, 2 1080, 1 1070, 3 1060, 2 580, 1 570) and my power meter says I’m pulling roughly 660 watts from each supply (2 supplies). That got me comfortable enough to order the 12 card today. I check my power meters from time to time as a check to make sure I’m mining. I just checked them and I was pulling 950 Watts per PS! So I remote logged in to the computer and checked the overclock settings. Opened Afterburn from the tray for the nVidias, all checked out fine. Open Sapphire Trixx for the ATIs, all checked fine. Reopened the power monitor and low and behold I’m back down to 660 per PS. The ATIs were the ones causing me power issues, so my hypothesis is that Trixx needs to stay open?

OK, this is all making sense now. Thank you so much for the help.

I bought two of these Seasonic PSUs: https://www.amazon.com/Seasonic-SSR-1300GD-ATX12V-Supply-PS-1300GD9/dp/B0787HCJY1/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1518131077&sr=1-2&keywords=seasonic+1300w

I'm trying to understand the dangerous business of powering the risers. I have read thread after thread about this, and kind of understand what I can and can't do. However, one question I haven't come across is the following: in the peripheral section of this power supply there are 6 6-pin connections. I have 6 pin risers. Are there M/M 6 pin cables I can buy and safely power the risers? I'd like to stay away from SATA if I can.