Overclocked X1900 CrossFire and FEAR:EP/CoH

[NU(GFX)T]

I am using ATITool_0.25b14 to overclock my X1900CrossFire setup. Its working great. But it has issues with namely three games.

FEAR:Extraction Point, Company of Heroes, and Medieval 2 Total War. It either refuses to launch and locks up or shows static vertical bright blue/yellow stripes on screen and fails to load up.

All my other games including those heavy on GPU run fine with OC clocks, including many hours of playing Oblivion/Call of Juarez and running 3D06 loops with no problems.

I tried lowering the clocks but it seems that even a small increase in clocks using ATITool and CrossFire is a no go. I think its most likely because of the way those games I mentioned above start communicating with graphics subsystem or how they collect information on grahics hardware. Something here is not compatible with ATiTool I guess. Anyone experiencing the same thing?

W1zzard could you please look into this and see where's the culprit? Thanks again for the great application. I can never thank you enough for creating ATiTool.

I am using X1900 Crossfire and DFI CFX-3200-DR for s939. latest drivers.

Cheers.

 

[NU(GFX)T]

Odd thing is only those three games have the locking up problem among all the games I have installed and checked at OCed speeds.

Right after executing CoH system locks up and displays vertically positioned colored stripes. I cant think of any explanation why is it that only these few titles act up like this!?

 

[Urlyin]

Nu you can try to enable both TXCLK and PCIE Common Clock in the BIOS under PCIE setup( disabled by default), also up the GFX0 & GFX1 Slot power up to 130 along with 10% Extra Current for GFX1 & 2... may help stabilize your issues as well as updating to ATITool .26

 

[NU(GFX)T]

Nu you can try to enable both TXCLK and PCIE Common Clock in the BIOS under PCIE setup( disabled by default), also up the GFX0 & GFX1 Slot power up to 130 along with 10% Extra Current for GFX1 & 2... may help stabilize your issues as well as updating to ATITool .26

Thanks for the tips Urlyin I will recheck those options. I think I have them set to on after taking a note off one of the Happy_Games posts at DFI-street. Maybe they have changed back to off or lower values for some reason.

Also I had no luck with ATITool .26 in CrossFire because the slave card didnt stick to its overclocked values when entering 3D games and reverted back to defualt non overclocked 3D speeds, might have very well been something I did wrong though. I'll try the latest version one more time. The latest ATITool version that allowed keeping the slave cards overclocked speeds in 3D applications was 0.25b14.


Urlyin if you have access to a CrossFire setup could you check out those games and see if they load up successfully when you got both cards overclocked using ATITooL? Also anyone with a CrossFire setup willing to help and test this out at their maximum stable OC for both cards?

 

[Urlyin]

Thanks for the tips Urlyin I will recheck those options. I think I have them set to on after taking a note off one of the Happy_Games posts at DFI-street. Maybe they have changed back to off or lower values for some reason.

Also I had no luck with ATITool .26 in CrossFire because the slave card didnt stick to its overclocked values when entering 3D games and reverted back to defualt non overclocked 3D speeds, might have very well been something I did wrong though. I'll try the latest version one more time. The latest ATITool version that allowed keeping the slave cards overclocked speeds in 3D applications was 0.25b14.


Urlyin if you have access to a CrossFire setup could you check out those games and see if they load up successfully when you got both cards overclocked using ATITooL? Also anyone with a CrossFire setup willing to help and test this out at their maximum stable OC for both cards?

Nu I have the same mobo and CF w/ 1900 too .. I have been playing Fear but not oc'ed cf .. I have installed COH but haven't played it yet.. are you using profiles .. or do you manually setup the clocks from a saved setting? I test some and let you know my results

 

[NU(GFX)T]

I have made a few profiles (six of them iirc) that I load up one by one alternatively for each card. First 3 profiles that I load up raise the voltages gradually till I reach the highest I need for my max OC then I have three more profiles wich all have the max V with different clocks. Agian I load those last three prfiles to gradually raise the clocks to my maximum stable oc.Finally I run the cube to warm up and its ready to go.

I just tried version .026 and same happens for me, one of the cards loses its OC when I run 3D applications. You can tell by looking at RivaTuner's hardware monitoring history or simply by looking at performance numbers of the application you are running, for instance CoH built-in performance test numbers. Thats why I am using 0.25b14. I might be doing something wrong that is causing the .026 not to hold OCs in CrossFire mode but I dont seem to be able to track down the wrong turn I am making along the way.


I checked the bios and TXCLK and PCIE Common Clock were enabled. Also I had GFX0 & GFX1 Slot power up to 130 and the Extra Current for GFX1 & 2 enabled. I increased the GFX slot power up to 140 and CoH loaded up but kept on locking up after rendering a few frames of its internal performance test (the built in benchmark). As I was already at 140 for GFX powerup option I didnt go above that and restored that value back to 130.


Thanks for taking time and testing FEAR:Extraction point/Company of Heroes. If youre using .026 could you double check and see if both cards are keeping the overclocked values all the way into the 3D applications/games?

 

[Urlyin]

Quick question NU.. this only occurs when you over clock the vid cards and are you overclocking the mobo too? I'm not running .026 but I will check that out as well this weekend ..

 

[NU(GFX)T]

Yes the lock-ups/failing to load/vertical stripes occur only when overclocking vid cards using ATITool 0.25b14 and only in those three games I mentioned above. All other games and benchmarks run fine. Mobo HTT frequency is at 270/HTT multiplier at 3.

 

[Urlyin]

try to post your settings in the BIOS, see if we can see anything there and I'll install the .026 to see if I get the same issues...

 

[NU(GFX)T]

You thinking of stability issues?Its orthos/3D stable but here you go anyway.2x1GMem-A64X2-latest bios version.
GenieBios:270-3-10-high-5-5-10-norm-D-A-1.55-101.4%-2.76-1.85-1.34-1.34-1.34-A
DRAMConfig:200-E-3-3-7-3-Ax6-3120-E-D-D-D-Decrese150-level6-Ax5-256-A-16-7-4
PCIEConfig:16-16-64-64-D-D-E-E-E-0-0-130-130-25-Ex4-Dx3-E-E-D-D

 

[Urlyin]

the only I can sugggest you try in the BIOS is changing the HT Bus NMOS and PMOS to 31 each ... I run my HT Bus receiver impedance at 16 .. I'm running at 314x9 with a 175 opty... I found it to be alot more stable with the higher NMOS and PMOS settings and helped my memory a great deal by going higher on the Impedance but I'm running 2 1gb sticks... save your current settings in the BIOS before you make changes... let you know once I run the games oc'd .. I do want to see if there is an issue with the slave card and .026 so I can work with W1zz if there is ...

 

[NU(GFX)T]

Cool, so we gonna have the .026 slave card issue fixed! That is if you guys confirm that there is an issue in the first place.

Thanks for the suggestion I had them at 25 for a while. I will try out the value 31 and see how it works. 2x1GB sticks of ram here too,I think I mentioned that in my last post.

 

[Urlyin]

Cool, so we gonna have the .026 slave card issue fixed! That is if you guys confirm that there is an issue in the first place.

Thanks for the suggestion I had them at 25 for a while. I will try out the value 31 and see how it works. 2x1GB sticks of ram here too,I think I mentioned that in my last post.

Yes you did mentioned that you had 2x1gb... I have a good memory but it's short ... any who I did play FEAR for at least two hours last night at 735/846 on both cards running .025 pre16... using Systool I verified that the slave did not change ... I'll try the .026 later this evening once I finish my honey do list ...

 

[Urlyin]

Nu ... I can still play FEAR and do not have any crashes or errors like you .. hopefully the BIOS settings helped ... but I see that there is a issue with the slave card .. it acts like 2d/3d clocks if you tab out of the 3d app you're using but I did notice that it did not run at the clocks I had set... even though I tried a couple of cats I did notice some different clocks and it appeared to be worse if I didn't stop the ati driver...

with .026 playing FEAR the slave looks like it's constantly switching

but going back to 6.4 cats the core clocks dropped to 641 on the slave and also was bouncing and when tabing out it dropped to 2d clocks as well

but again it's playable but there appears to still be issue and maybe part of it is w1zz is using the ATI drivers as part of the ATITool overclocking..

 

[NU(GFX)T]

Here is a picture of RT monitoring history and ATT X1000 overclocking tab settings using ATiTool .026. X1900CF/CAT6.12

From left to right first one is when I was adjusting clocks using ATiTool second one is when I ran CoH and third one is after exiting CoH. You can see that the slave card clocks back to its default 3D speeds (XTX) when runing a 3D application. Also it is defaulting back to 2D upon exiting 3D apps contrary to what the X1000 overclocking tab settings suggest. On the flip side master card kept sticking to overclocked speeds when running CoH and also when I exited back to desktop, in other words it obeyed the X1Koverclocking tab settings.

It doesnt crash for me using the .026 version either but its not holding the slave card OC so it doesnt really matter if it crashes or not. It crashes using the 0.25b14 version Urlyin and on FEAR:EP not FEAR. As I mentioned earlier I had to use the 0.25b14 version because it was the latest beta version I could download that would hold the slave cards OC when running games. (on myX1900CF setup dont know about other cards.X1950 for example might do fine in CF with ATiTool .026 I have no idea)

I assume version .026 might solve my problem if it gets fixed and runs the slave at OC speeds properly.

PS I had ATiTool running in the background and didnt close it before launching CoH.

 

[Urlyin]

Well I guess either way it would appear as though you are not the only one having the issue with the slave... at least you can come away with that, but I had thought I was using .025 beta16 pre8 without an issue... guess not

 

[NU(GFX)T]

Well I guess either way it would appear as though you are not the only one having the issue with the slave... at least you can come away with that, but I had thought I was using .025 beta16 pre8 without an issue... guess not

So you think you can work out this bug with W1zzard as you said earlier?

Thanks for testing out different versions, much appreciated.

 

[Urlyin]

So you think you can work out this bug with W1zzard as you said earlier?

Thanks for testing out different versions, much appreciated.

He's at CES in Vegas right now and I'm sure once he gets back he'll look into it, I pointed him to the thread so I know he's aware of it, if not before now...