2x HD4870 Crossfire, not working?

[SeanBest]

Setup is in my sig. I triple checked my motherboard pins, connections, and everything. The card is setup correctly in the mother board. Hardware profiles sees both cards as ATI Radeon 4800 series cards. CCC sees both and will allow me to auto tune both in the Overdrive section. When I run a game with Crossfire enabled only one of the cards actually gets any amount of load. During Crysis the first card (it has [Syncmaster] next to it because I'm using a Samsung Syncmaster monitor) will have like 96-98% load and card 2 will jump between 0-4% every once in awhile. I ran several Crysis benchmarking tests and noticed no change in fps. I tried to run a 3dmark06 test, but the free trial won't allow much, and it fails at some point anyways. Any suggestions?

[SeanBest]

Bump. Anyone got any suggestions?

[DaPoets]

Crysis sucks balls for more than 1 GPU so you are wasting your time benching in crossfire with it. They did a terrible job writing the code for the game for future hardware. 3DMark06 is pretty much the same way. Run 3Dmark03 and compare your scores to others in the OCForums rankings in the 3D benching team section. Oddly enough, I play City of Heroes a good amount now and it uses all 4 GPUs when Crysis doesn't even come close to it. You can also push some games by chosing 8x AA and this will put more work on your video requirements and thus force more GPU's to be used.

[Badbonji]

But still there should be a difference, and no load on the 2nd card doesn't look to good.

[AsusLover]

Make sure the Xfire bridge is securely in place. Also what drivers are you using?

[SeanBest]

Both dongles are secure and just updated to 8.8 from 8.7. Still nothing, cards came with 8.6 and nothing has changed with all 3 drivers. Did fresh install and used Drivercleaner with all, drivers work fine, just with only one card.

[Evilsizer]

try it with just one dongle in place....

[AsusLover]

I agree remove one of the dongles, the newer cards only require one of them.

[deathman20]

Crysis sucks balls for more than 1 GPU so you are wasting your time benching in crossfire with it. They did a terrible job writing the code for the game for future hardware. 3DMark06 is pretty much the same way. Run 3Dmark03 and compare your scores to others in the OCForums rankings in the 3D benching team section. Oddly enough, I play City of Heroes a good amount now and it uses all 4 GPUs when Crysis doesn't even come close to it. You can also push some games by chosing 8x AA and this will put more work on your video requirements and thus force more GPU's to be used.

Thats wrong. Crysis does more then fine with multiple GPU's. It has since release of the 4k line of cards. 3DMark06 is similar it uses it but the score doesn't reflect it nicely due to the way the CPU is included into the score, Vantage works wonderfully with it showing the ~ increase you can get.

You also don't need to crank up 8x AA to play a game to get full use of the GPU. If the game can utlize multiple GPU's then it will be used, if there is a Vsync or something else that slows it down then sure cranking up the settings in the game if you maxed out resolution is the only way to get more use out of it.



As well yes the dongles, it does only require one. I've run 1 and 2 no difference on my system. Make sure you have the latest bios for your motherboard possible, just incase its causing issues. Make sure that your getting the proper PCI-E speeds on your cards. If need be try and see if you can use the 8.6 Hotfix, or 8.8 Beta (8.52) driver to see if that might solve it as well. I know my cards where semi screwy for a bit til I found out that the latest driver or even official driver isn't always the best.

As well is the second GPU slowing down when in 2D Idle mode? Like will it go from the 3D clocks to 2D clocks. If its not it might be a driver issue of the driver not being installed for the second card which would cause the issues of it not being used.

[xtkxhom3r]

hmm i dont know where i read this i think it was in a thread in Xtremesystems

a guy was CF 2 cards dont remember if they were 4870's or x2's

he ran them with only one dongle and one of the cards ****ed up and when he tried rma'ing them they didnt validate the rma because you required to use both dongles so it was a user error not a card defect

so i wouldnt really recommend you only use one dongle but dont quote me on this its just something i read lol iv never ran CF personally....ill try to find the thread

[deathman20]

hmm i dont know where i read this i think it was in a thread in Xtremesystems

a guy was CF 2 cards dont remember if they were 4870's or x2's

he ran them with only one dongle and one of the cards ****ed up and when he tried rma'ing them they didnt validate the rma because you required to use both dongles so it was a user error not a card defect

so i wouldnt really recommend you only use one dongle but dont quote me on this its just something i read lol iv never ran CF personally....ill try to find the thread

One reason behind that it only needs one is if you use 3 cards. You'll only have 1 bridge talking to each card. The center one will use 2 of them but its just transmitting data to 2 different cards. Yet 2 doesn't seem to hurt but some have had wierd effects using 2 when playing games, and using only 1 fixes it. So its a toss up, between cards, manufactures, bios's on the cards, motherboards, drivers and OS's.

[xtkxhom3r]

One reason behind that it only needs one is if you use 3 cards. You'll only have 1 bridge talking to each card. The center one will use 2 of them but its just transmitting data to 2 different cards. Yet 2 doesn't seem to hurt but some have had wierd effects using 2 when playing games, and using only 1 fixes it. So its a toss up, between cards, manufactures, bios's on the cards, motherboards, drivers and OS's.

oh ok....well i tried looking for the thread but i dont think xtremesystems is up atm... but thanks for the info bro you learn something every day haha

[El<(')>Maxi]

Dual monitors? Try it with only one ;)

[SeanBest]

Nope just one 22" Samsung monitor. Tried with one dongle, on change, went back to using 2. tried several drivers, using 8.8 atm, no change. Rechecked the pins on the motherboard and their fine, rechecked the power cable to the pci-e slot, its ok, evey tried a different cable and different modular spot on the PSU and no change.

[Evilsizer]

the I45 has a set of jumpers between the 2 pcie slots. did you check the manual on how the jumpers need to be set?

[SeanBest]

Yes, moved both sets of jumpers down (the red ones) and moved the one black one over, checked it yet again as I messed with my RAM, which you Evilsizer, also posted on. So yea I did check all the jumpers and power cables...all good.

[Evilsizer]

ok well now im going to have to say its highly a bios issue given the other problems. like i said in that thread bout buggy bios's. im losing a bit of track for some reaons but i do think someone asked if you updated the bios, i just cant seem to see it right now, in either thread.

[SeanBest]

Yeah i updated the BIOS when I first got the board, only update was from 7/10/2008, nothing more recent I've found.

[Evilsizer]

then im not sure of the issue with the CF setup then.. :x

[DaPoets]

What scores are you hitting in 3DMark03?

[Alien432]

I just set my up Xfire last night but there both VisionTek cards. I hooked up both dongles. Notice on back side of dongle there is a cf1 and a cf2 designation put the cf1 end on the primary card and the cf2 on the secondary card. I'm using 8.6 drivers that come on CD.

[SeanBest]

0000000000h never sawy back of dongles, gotta check that. If that's it, first I'm gonna suckerpunch myself then kiss you...unless your a dude...then I'll just hug you maybe, but either way thanks!

By cf1 and cf2 you mean the J1A and J2A labels? Taht's all I got on the back on mine.

[SeanBest]

Damn, nothing...was already like that...GPU-Z says Crossfire is disabled but available, I've been told a lot to disregard GPU-Z as it's buggy, but have seen several posts in vista and xp showing crossfire enabled with dual 4870s so I believe it be true especially since it isn't enabled obviously!

[SeanBest]

Ok, I think my Crossfire might have been working all along guys...I just ran 2 instances of GPU-Z while playing cod4 maxed out 1680x1050. With Crossfire disabled in CCC only 1 card showed any load and I got an average of about 120fps or so, hard to judge just playing by myself in a server so I could test quickly. I then turned Crossfire on and set in game max fps to 250 and was bumping 250 over and over then raised to 500 and was hitting 350 at times with an average of about 190. So even though GPU-Z says it's not enabled I guess it is? Crysis shows no improvement over 1 card using Crossfire, but I've ehard a lot of people say that's because Crysis sucks with ATI. I tried the same scenario with UT3 and got similar results. so maybe it is working?!

[Evilsizer]

yea really weird the sean, glad you got it figured out at least...

[SeanBest]

Hopefully. I just flashed my first 4870 to the new voltage and 795/1100 bios, worked good on first card, second one a no go...dead now, gonna try flashing back and retry it. When I took it out and just hooked up my one that did flash correctly, it was using 8.6 drivers even though I updated to 8.8, for some reason updating to 8.8 actually didn't work when using 2 cards, so I'm gonna update them seperately after I get them both flashed...will psot results.

[deathman20]

Crysis shows no improvement over 1 card using Crossfire, but I've ehard a lot of people say that's because Crysis sucks with ATI. I tried the same scenario with UT3 and got similar results. so maybe it is working?!

Alot of people say ATI sucks with Crysis because it has the nVidia slapped all over it. Still even the 4870's in CF do get boosts, there are plenty of BM's around here showing it. Mine worked out of the box after I got my drivers to install properly, which was a PITA itself to get the second card reconized but after that no issues.

Just wondering is this on a new OS install or still using the old OS from older cards? Not saying that might be the problem but just curious is all.

[SeanBest]

Brand new build, only ati 8.6 drivers and up installed.