Issue with R6970 Crossfire

[Timber1900]

Hey Guys,

I'm sure you're all sick of seeing this kind of post, but I haven't found anything that's super relevant to my situation.

I used to have this issue where my crossfire setup didn't properly clock - that is, one card was at 940 MHz and the second was only at idle, 250. I'd get a message that ATIMPAG.sys stopped responding, sometimes followed up by a bluescreen. With a bit of finagling I managed to fix this (mainly by installing 12.3 but without CCC).

Now I'm running Catalyst 12.6 and I'm using Afterburner to monitor my cards - both are running at the same clock speed and are between 75-80 degrees (well within operating parameters). After a few minutes of playing, the game will freeze. I can alt+tab out, end process, and go on with my life, with no BSOD.

I get this issue with DayZ and Battlefield 3.

Anyone have some advice?

Thanks,

-P

 

[manofthem]

Have you disabled ULPS in the registry? Fixes a lot of those kinds of problems with crossfire

 

[Timber1900]

Have you disabled ULPS in the registry? Fixes a lot of those kinds of problems with crossfire

Oooooh Ooooh!!! How do I do this?!

http://www.overclock.net/t/1088266/ulps-gui-config-utility-enable-disable <- Can I use this?

 

[manofthem]

Should work fine, haven't done it that way myself though, did it manually in reg

 

[Darkleoco]

Had the same problem myself with my 6950's but disabling ULPS sorted me out quick.

 

[mypg0306]

Download Sapphire Trixx and tick "disable ULPS" in the setting tab.

 

[Timber1900]

It didn't work

I got an error that says the display driver stopped working. Last time I fixed this, I manually uninstalled the drivers through Device Manager and used Driver Sweeper to take of the rest. Took out one card, installed the drivers, and installed the second card again. This seems to fix it for a few days or weeks before it starts to happen again.

Any other recommendations?

Cheers

 

[manofthem]

Did you try manually disabling ulps? Have you tested each card individually to rule out any problem with a specific card? If you're overclocking (both CPU and gpus), go back to stock and try again. You can also try not running any MSI AB and see if it affects anything

To uninstall the driver, you shouldn't have to take out the card before a reinstall.

 

[Timber1900]

This is going to sound silly but it's probably the solution.

Both cards are the lightning series. So they come factory overclocked to 940 MHz at the core. I brought it down to 880 MHz and they seem stable - I didn't crash at all while playing BF3.

I never really thought this was case - I imagined the cards were perfectly fine running at 940, especially since I rarely ever had any problems with them when I first got them.

Hopefully this fixes it, but if not you'll hear from me.

Thanks for all the help guys!

 

[mypg0306]

Maybe you need to increase the voltage?

 

[Timber1900]

Maybe you need to increase the voltage?

What software can I use for that? And by what amount?

 

[mypg0306]

Your card is compatible with MSI AB. You may try to set the power slide to +20 in AMD Overdrive to see how it work first.

 

[manofthem]

This is going to sound silly but it's probably the solution.

Both cards are the lightning series. So they come factory overclocked to 940 MHz at the core. I brought it down to 880 MHz and they seem stable - I didn't crash at all while playing BF3.

I never really thought this was case - I imagined the cards were perfectly fine running at 940, especially since I rarely ever had any problems with them when I first got them.

Hopefully this fixes it, but if not you'll hear from me.

Thanks for all the help guys!

You shouldn't have to down clock your cards to get them to work without crashing. If that's the case, or if you have to raise voltage to get them working at the factory speeds, I would return/RMA them. That's a hassle you shouldn't have to deal with.

 

[Timber1900]

I've RMA'd one of them before, thinking that was the problem. Now that I've experienced this across three cards I'm sure it's not that.

I just got the same error - The Display driver wasn't responding but it recovered.

Anything else I can try?

 

[Timber1900]

I'm gonna try this -> http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/forum/threadview/2832654624706695152/

Wish me luck :x

 

[manofthem]

Does it happen in every game or just bf3?

Id say test one card at a time for a while and ensure each is running without issue.

 

[Timber1900]

It's happened in Day-Z. And I've tried each card independently. Especially when I was RMAing with MSI.

 

[Timber1900]

So I've gone through every version of catalyst, flashed my bios on my motherboard, disabled ULPS...

Still experiencing some instability. But here's the deal. I do something, change some control, and it works fine for an hour or so. Then it crashes, until I do something else.

Thoughts?

 

[purecain]

Sounds like a psu issue... Imo...

 

[mypg0306]

Maybe you need to reinstall Windows.

 

[Tatty_Two]

My guess is thats it is your PSU, lets start with 2 stock clocked 6970's that will max out at around a 570W draw, add to that the additional draw from the Lightening overclock and you may be talking upto a 650W max draw, then when you start factoring in CPU TDP, your 4 drives, ram etc etc and you may well be hitting over 800W, now the PSU may well handle that but it may flux after time and that may well be what is causing your occasional issues.

This may well support the fact that when you reduced the clock speeds of the two cards to 880Mhz you found it at least temprarily solved your issues..... dunno really, just my thoughts.

 

[cadaveca]

I have found that any driver after 12.3 with 6-series can be problematic. 12.1 and 12.2 as well. 11.11c is very very good.

You do not need new drivers to get game fixes any more, you simply use the latest CAP with pre-existing drivers.

If there are notations in reliability monitor or system logs to driver crashes, I would be testing each card individually. You say you RMA'd one card, but have two..perhaps the second card in the problem card?