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Diving Into Crossfire 7970

T

tinate

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 2, 2010
Messages
323
So I recently purchased a second 7970 after the big sales and wanted to check in with more experienced people than myself if some of the behavior I'm seeing is normal.

Things I've learned:
-Crossfire only works in Fullscreen mode. I had no idea.
-Disable all instances of EnableULPS.

Things I'm unclear about:
-Both my 7970 have pretty crappy ASIC quality, 69% and 73%. I've read somewhere that the stronger ASIC should be GPU1. Is that true or does it not matter?
-Is it true that I can't get as strong overclocks in crossfire?
-I'm getting system freezes from time to time since I've added this second 7970. I can't ctrl+alt+del out and must restart. At times, the freeze still allows the background music of the game I'm playing to continue. I'm not sure if this is a driver issue or not? Any advice on this?
 
Audio issues always make me ask this first: you using HDMI for audio? Or have you disabled it?

Always worth checking for conflicts with mobo audio or if you've got a card or whatever.
 
jackstar7 said:
Audio issues always make me ask this first: you using HDMI for audio? Or have you disabled it?

Always worth checking for conflicts with mobo audio or if you've got a card or whatever.
Click to expand...

No HDMI on the cards. I'm using HD-DVI into my main 27" monitor and HDMI from the IGP to my second 24" monitor.
 
Hmm reboot your PC with your secondary monitor off and play. See if it crashes still.
 
martinje said:
Hmm reboot your PC with your secondary monitor off and play. See if it crashes still.
Click to expand...

I will try that. Honestly i've been very dissapointed in the number of problems i've had connecting the second monitor to the IGP. Of course, I do it that way because the AMD driver won't downclock the GPU if there are two monitors attached to it. I don't quite understand why that is either.
 
tinate said:
I will try that. Honestly i've been very dissapointed in the number of problems i've had connecting the second monitor to the IGP. Of course, I do it that way because the AMD driver won't downclock the GPU if there are two monitors attached to it. I don't quite understand why that is either.
Click to expand...

It won't downlock to the lowest state, but it will stay at a lower than full 3D state.

You can leave ULPS enabled. It works fine for me (although can cause an issue with not reporting all parameters to monitoring software if you use that a bunch).
 
Tried with 1 monitor and with the second monitor plugged in the 7970. Still have driver crashes. I was able to recover from one of them...
 
aah, the wonderous world of crossfired 7970's.

only working in fullscreen? check.
have to disable ULPS for a somewhat stable system? check.
hardlocking your computer? check, check.
hdmi audio screwing you over? check.
drivers randomly crashing (and sometimes recovering)? also check.

Welcome to my world :D

A few tips 'n trics from my book:

- don't be overly enthousiastic when dragging windows from one monitor to the other (especially the ones that are actually using the gpu like media players and games). Allow a second or 2 before releasing the window on the other monitor or amd's driver might shit itself and die.

- be careful with borderless windowed mode. (especially when you switch alot between game and secondary monitor)

- amd doesn't like rendering a game on one and a video (like youtube) on the other. Try to avoid it.
 
Disabled Xfire and got the same crash. Now I've taken off the bridge and am running off only the new GPU. Let's see what happens...

Edit: Froze like this as well... Maybe I should try to reinstall drivers.
 
Last edited:
tinate said:
Things I'm unclear about:
Click to expand...
-Both my 7970 have pretty crappy ASIC quality, 69% and 73%. I've read somewhere that the stronger ASIC should be GPU1. Is that true or does it not matter?
Click to expand...

That's subjective. It shouldn't matter who should or shouldn't be GPU1. They should be synced. That includes the weaker card getting overheated and start to throttle the other will slow itself down to compensate.
-Is it true that I can't get as strong overclocks in crossfire?
Click to expand...
It varies from hardware to hardware. You got some good GPUs you will have a good overclock. Poor GPUs you will have poor overclocks.
-I'm getting system freezes from time to time since I've added this second 7970. I can't ctrl+alt+del out and must restart. At times, the freeze still allows the background music of the game I'm playing to continue. I'm not sure if this is a driver issue or not? Any advice on this?
Click to expand...

I had this when I first got my 7970s. I had to reformat and install the RC11 drivers again and it was resolved. I also had the black screen issue too. That was also resolved when I reformatted.
 
Yea I'm at a loss with these freezes. Has anyone tried the 13.6 beta drivers?
 
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