5870m xfire disabled.

[huntdawn]

5870m xfire disabled

Hi guys,

I have an alienware m17x R2.

I recently installed a secondary 5870M but the xfire is disabled. I can see the 2nd vga through the device manager but that's all.

CCC also displays the secondary adapter as disabled.

Tried lots of stuff to make this work. Unistalled and reinstalled the drivers many times but it made no difference.

I also updated all the other drivers for the motherboard, nothing changed. The motherboard's BIOS is also the latest i can get from DELL, same for the VBIOS of the primary vga.

The secondary vga will not let me flash it with that VBIOS, it returns a 'FLN01' error or something like that.

My power adapter is the 240W so i know that is not the problem.

The only thing I haven't tried yet, is to restore the laptop to factory state and do everything all over again.

Any suggestions would be very helpful.

Cheers.

 

[BiggieShady]

Hi guys,

I have an alienware m17x R2.

I recently installed a secondary 5870M but the xfire is disabled. I can see the 2nd vga through the device manager but that's all.

I suppose this means you did the upgrade yourself?

If yes, I suppose you remembered to connect xfire bridge (long blue-purple flat connector - in the video @6 min). I know it's not likely thing to miss but just checking.

CCC also displays the secondary adapter as disabled.

Tried lots of stuff to make this work. Unistalled and reinstalled the drivers many times but it made no difference.

I also updated all the other drivers for the motherboard, nothing changed. The motherboard's BIOS is also the latest i can get from DELL, same for the VBIOS of the primary vga.

Is there an option to enable crossfire from the CCC if it's not enabled by default?
Also, when updating AMD drivers it's recommended to do uninstall, use driver sweeper app (and maybe ccleaner for registry), boot with default windows vga drivers then install new AMD drivers.

 

[huntdawn]

Yes, the vgas are connected with the xfire cable.

Maybe I should try again unistall all drivers and use driver sweeper and ccleaner and see what happens, but still I am not very confident that it work...let's see.

Cheers

 

[huntdawn]

5870m xfire disabled [SOLVED]

After spending about 21 *net* hours trying by swapping cards, installing drivers, removing drivers, reinstalling drivers, removing heat sinks, replacing heatsinks and all the the related stuff for which you dear reader are already jealous about, I managed to make this work.

I went through many forum posts in different forums, but the main thing I was finding was always something around 'uninstall drivers-clean with driver sweeper-reinstall drivers', which from what I found out in the end, it might help but it won't fix the 'real root' if that's what causes the problems.


So, after spending 3 afternoons attempting all the configurations possible, I decided to extract the bios from my primary card and flash it to the secondary one. Then I re-booted and I installed latest AMD drivers, no driver sweeper no nothing, and finally not BSODs.
The crossfire was automatically enabled and I verified this through the CCC and also through Windows (Dedicated amount of memory for graphics).


So my advice to all the people out there that thought about giving up trying to enable the crossfire in an originally single card Alienware is:

1) Extract the VBIOS from your *always* working primary card using GPU-Z.

2) Create a Win98 bootable flashdrive and then just copy there the VBIOS you extracted.
(http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=57750)

3) Boot from flashdrive and type: atiflash -f -p1 [biosfilename]

4) Wait for it to finish and restart.

5) Install latest drivers


After all the time I spent with this, I am pretty confident that it doesn't matter how many times you try to uninstall the drivers, use driver sweeper, reinstall drivers, clean the machine for temp files etc..etc..it really doesn't matter if the cards have different VBIOS which is very probable when you buy the card from another user to upgrade your originally single vga laptop.
If you don't do that, you will probably end up with the secondary vga disabled with no chance for crossfire enabling and some nice BSODs when attempting to install the latest drivers.

I hope this helps.

Cheers