My guess is the board needs specific slots filled.
Do the standard stuff, one PCI-E 1x riser in PCI-E 16x slot.
Add second PCI-E riser in 2nd 16x slot etc
what i tried until now
1 riser in PCIe 1 - failed
1 riser in PCIe 1/2 -failed
1 riser in PCIe 1/2/3 - failed
etc
---------- next test
1 riser in x1 near cpu -failed
risers in all x1 - failed
and so on
basically i tried every combination until i got tired of trying just to see if i could get it to boot with a riser but all failed
i bought a $38 usb cable to test if the cable of the riser is the problem but failed as well
so either all the risers are faulty or the board just wonāt work with the risers due to being unable to set GEN1 in the bios, which is my guess
You need to place the first USB risers in the BIG slots x16 or it wont work, I mentioned this above
BIG slots = PCIe in my explanation above
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Digged around a little moreā¦
This isnāt the exact motherboard but you might get some hints in here.
I havenāt encountered an issue before needing to short the pins to get my GPUs to workā¦
as the post is from 2011 i think that is for not powered risers
Just trying to help 
i know 
and i really appreciate it
i am about ready to order a different board , tired of all the testing
and reading the post on the link you posted it all seems to come to being able to set Gen1/2 in the motherboard bios
thinking of the one that guy used in the amazon wishlist post
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So i tried the shortening of the pin from the bitcointalk post and it made no difference
Seems the board really does not work with the riser due to being unable to set GEN for the PCI slots
Does anyone know if this a good combination and will all slots work so i can run 7 rx480?
MSI Gaming Z97 GAMING 5 LGA 1150 Intel Z97 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Core i3-4170 Haswell Dual-Core 3.7 GHz LGA 1150 54W BX80646I34170 Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4400
here is a screen from what i was writing earlier with the dev3 actually not present but producing sol
so it was the motherboard that wouldnāt work with the risers
The new board MSI Gaming Z97 GAMING 5 boots up without any problem
But now lol how else could it be 4 of the 6 risers are defective
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