5870 Crossfire Issues

[doctr_nick]

Hey guys! So I just recently got another 5870 to do crossfire, and am having some issues. Keep in mind that I'm running Sapphire cards which I have flashed with the unlocked ASUS voltage tweak bios.

When I first put the two cards together, my old one (which I will call "card1") was the one on top and connected to the monitor (I'm on an ASUS P6T by the way). When I fired up 3DMark Vantage to test everything out I initially got a strange garbled screen. Not like artifacting, but almost like the two cards weren't synching together or something. In test1 I could see the guy on the jet ski perfectly fine, but the water texture was stretched the entire height of the screen and would flash in and out. The funny part is, I could fire up Crysis and there would be no display issues at all.

Initially I was running Cat9.12. So I thought, hey maybe its a driver issue. I used driver cleaner and switched over to 9.12hotfix and after firing up vantage, I was pleasantly surprised to see everything working properly....so I thought.

Naturally I wanted to overclock the cards so I loaded up Afterburner. After clocking the cards to 925/1300 and running vantage (I did test each card separately before hand to ensure stability at those clocks) I noticed that the on screen display would show my top card (card1) hitting 90C and sporadically ramping its clocks from 925/1300 down to 650/900. The bottom card was cool as a cucumber and running happily at the correct speeds. I also noticed that the top card (which for some reason is referred to as GPU2 in Afterburner) was put at 100% load, while the other card was jumping from 60 to 90% load. There was also a noticeable stutter in the benchmark everytime the top card dropped it's clocks - so I know that the clocks were indeed being adjusted.

My next step was to try switching the order of the cards. Interestingly, I had no display corruption issues during vantage when using Cat9.12. I tried both 9.12 and the 9.12hotfix drivers for comparison. The corruption issue was seemingly solved; however, I noticed that my overall score was sitting much lower (P26,000 vs P27,000) and that according to Afterburner, both cards were running at 54C and had nearly equal GPU load (around 90%).

It's a strange issue and I'm just not certain what to make of it. Could it be that the composit engine of my old card is bad? But if that were the case, why the difference in performance when switching the cards?

 

[shevanel]

what is your cpu?

hell, whats the rest of the system too?


what res are you gaming at?

try a diff xfire bridge too? are you using 1 bridge or 2 bridges?

 

[TotalChaos]

Certain apps dont perform as well or worse in CrossFire. also if there is any other bottleneck the additional performance gain will not be seen. To see if there is a performance gain re run Vantage with AA and AF enabled with 1 card then with 2 and compare those results.

1 recommend trying 2 CF bridges if you have them

What Power supply are you using also?

 

[erocker]

I would put the original bios' back on the cards. You don't need an "unlocked" bios to use Afterburner anyways.

 

[bpgt64]

Afterburner hasn't been working(at least not on my cards), I also have twin HD 5870s from Sapphire Tech. I am waiting for the driver issues to get sorted out first.

 

[doctr_nick]

Yeah. Sorry about the system specs. I've been browsing these forums for about 4 years now and finally decided to sign up a little while ago. I filled everything out and then realized I hadn't marked the field that asks if you want to share your specs as "yes". Should be working now.


I can tell you that I've tried running one bridge, and am currently running 2 and still have the exact same issue as described in the OP.

I know that you can use Afterburner to clock the cards higher than the normal CCC limits, but I found that when doing that, I would have a weird issue where I would have everything working fine for one benchmark run, but if I restarted the system or changed the card's fan speeds, the overall performance would just drop. I could run the cards at 1000/1300 and still get a lower Performance Score in Vantage than default clocks. The only way to fix it was to uninstall Afterburner and reset the drivers to Factory Defaults in CCC.

 

[bpgt64]

Vantage is a terrible indicator of performance simpley because it gives an unfair advantage to Nvidia users. This is my opinion, which I am entitled to, not trying to derail the thread so much as state that Vantage isn't a good way set a marker for performance. I would use Furmark tbh.

I mainly ask for this because it will be what I am using to compare myself to your scores as well

 

[erocker]

Hmmmm! Well, first thing is to check if you have all the necessary chipset drivers installed with two cards in there. Often, you'll have to put the disk back in after you install two cards due to it needing some sort of PCI-E filter/NB filter driver. If that doesn't work or if that's been done already, try testing each card individually. One of the cards could just be a bum. I did have problems with the 9.12 hotfix driver and my 2nd card crapping out on me. I had to do a complete uninstall, registry and everything in order to get things working correctly again. If you want to try wiping all the previous drivers, etc. I made this guide: http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=52502

 

[doctr_nick]

Vantage is a terrible indicator of performance simpley because it gives an unfair advantage to Nvidia users. This is my opinion, which I am entitled to, not trying to derail the thread so much as state that Vantage isn't a good way set a marker for performance. I would use Furmark tbh.

Well it's not so much about measuring performance for the sake of comparing it to nvidia cards. It's just that Vantage is used so widely across many hardware sites that it's one of the few things that can be used to get a quick comparison without the need of having to match settings, ect. I've tested out Crysis using the built in benchmark and notice similar issues when alternating the order of the cards, minus the corruption that I sometimes get in Vantage.

My issue is that I can't figure out why having my cards set up in one order leads to:
1) Better performance - but occassional corruption when running Vantage
2) GPU2 being used at 100% throughout the benchmark (according to Afterburner)
3) GPU2 consequently running at 90C and dropping it's clocks down to 650/900
4) GPU1 (the bottom card not connected to the monitor) running at expected temps and keeping it's clocks

While switching the cards leads to:
1) Lesser performance - not just in Vantage, but also in Crysis (52fps vs 62fps, 1680x1050 All Very High, 8x AA
2) Both cards showing similar GPU utilization under load, and similar temps

I don't know. It's a weird issue.

 

[doctr_nick]

Hmmmm! Well, first thing is to check if you have all the necessary chipset drivers installed with two cards in there. Often, you'll have to put the disk back in after you install two cards due to it needing some sort of PCI-E filter/NB filter driver. If that doesn't work or if that's been done already, try testing each card individually. One of the cards could just be a bum. I did have problems with the 9.12 hotfix driver and my 2nd card crapping out on me. I had to do a complete uninstall, registry and everything in order to get things working correctly again. If you want to try wiping all the previous drivers, etc. I made this guide: http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=52502

Yeah, I'm not so sure about the PCI-E filter/NB filter being my issue- I'll look into it though. It's just weird that changing the order of the cards changes the performance. I mean, these are supposed to be identical cards. And they are. I mean I flashed them with the exact same bios.

I've tested both cards independantly and both are identical in terms of benchmarking. Maybe a re-format is indeed in order....ugh

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[bpgt64]

" Maybe a re-format is indeed in order....ugh"

Thats what I did when i swapped from twin Nvidia's to HD5 series cards. Sometimes it just helps.

I mostleys experience the grey line issues people have been talking about, but it comes and it goes.

 

[TotalChaos]

I mostleys experience the grey line issues people have been talking about, but it comes and it goes.

You may find something here regarding the grey lines

http://www.ngohq.com/news/17176-workarounds-for-radeon-hd-5000-series-vertical-stripes-issue.html

 

[bpgt64]

I rolled back to the WHQL certified drivers and came up with this...
http://www.ozone3d.net/benchmarks/score.php?id=84b5ed9fab23e8ff354fe0df475907bd
for the Furmark

 

[nascasho]

Just so you feel better and get less comments about changing drivers, the water and texture freak out in Vantage with Crossfire enabled is a common problem. It comes and goes randomly. I did the same thing and freaked out when I first saw that, I thought it was memory related , then power, then motherboard related. After I noticed more and more people started to post they had this problem I knew right away it wasn't hardware related, it was driver.

Sad thing is I swapped PSU's, piggy backed PSU's, and even swapped boards like an idiot and was able to replicate the issue every single time.

Your score shows and tells me your cards are running just fine, so I wouldn't worry about it.