e/Radeon HD 6970 Crossfire freeze crash in BF3 ONLY while flying!

Hey all, I'm new to this forum but I've searched many overclocking and PC forums on the internet to trace this issue. Please forgive me if somehow I missed the answer. I HAVE researched.

My problem:

I have 2 Sapphire HD 6970's in Crossfire. Cards seem to run great, great overclockers (wanted 6950's but didn't want to roll the dice on getting a non-unlockable card). Can go to 950/1450 all day stable on stock voltage. I OC'd them through Afterburner. I load up BF3 and can play hours straight with no problems with or without custom fan profiles overclocked or stock. I don't have any FPS problems... get over 80FPS at the lowest on Ultra (but with MSAA 2x). However, after flying in jets for maybe 20 mins on Operation Firestorm, the game freezes. It locks up. I ctrl+alt+delete and get into task manager to have windows say "BF3 has stopped working." Upon re-entering the game it will do the same thing, though much faster. My room is very cool right now... probably 60 degrees in the basement and my Rosewill Blackhawk is pretty good with airflow. GPU idles at 38-41C for card 1 and 35-38C for card 2 and with no fan profile tops out at 81C and like 69C for the second. With Afterburner custom fan profiles, the cards never get more than 50% fan and 65C.

I've tried many different settings to rectify this. I've reinstalled the game. I'm using the new non-beta drivers released 10/31 with the cat4 profiles. When installing them, I used ATI uninstaller utility to sweep my old drivers. I've only used this driver since getting the second card.

It seems to do this on stock as well as OC. I've upped available voltage, I've disabled ULPS in the registry. I've switched the 2 cards order physically. I've fooled around with the different OC settings. I have a 2500k with 8gb ram, only one 500gb hard drive, win7 64 bit, and a single blu-ray drive. Computer OC's fine and should be good on power with my Cooler Master QuietPower 1000W.

I've run GPU benchmarks and played some other games and no problems. BF3 used to crash sometimes loading right after a compuer restart but the install repair fixed this problem. I run the game at 1080p. I have no answers.

I've read that DX11 sound acceleration can have a problem, and might make sense with the droning noise that the jets emit from the game. I figured maybe the utilities were conflicting with this... I've tried turning off Afterburner and still the same problem. I use the MotionInJoy drivers so I can fly with my ps3 controller, but once the problem has occured, even turning that off will still cause it to lock up.

I'm worried that perhaps my VRM on my first bought card is not being cooled properly, like a ramsink isn't on right or contacting the memory. Too bad this card doesn't have a listed VRM prob, or GPU-Z just doesn't recognize it. Could this be my problem? I think this because I know flying on that game increases sight distance a lot and puts strain on the memory, but I have two 2gb cards here. I've also heard of problems with memory leak concerning crossfire and that the system needs a big block allocated for virtual memory. I've only got 8gigs of G.Skill Ripjaw 1833 memory. Could this be a problem?

Sorry for the long disjointed post, but I'm at a loss here and I feel like I've tried most of what I can think of to troubleshoot this. I was eventually planning on getting a couple Accelero Xtreme II's for the cards, but after all the money spent, another 170 bucks is a little steep right now.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Battlefield 3 currently has several issues associated with crossfire. Its strange that just jets are causing issues when you're able to play the game for extended periods of time when not using jets. I've currently been working on resolving issues related to my setup (4870 crossfire, dual monitor). I was running into crashes, input lag, and overall game stuttering. The final working solution for me was to use 11.10 drivers, remove CAP4 (run with no CAP), and to disable my second monitor when playing BF3. You might want to try out some of those ideas to see if they fix your issue. Also, have you tried disabling crossfire to see if that fixes your issues? That would let you narrow it down to being crossfire caused or not. I hope that EA/DICE and AMD fix the issued related to crossfire.

Thanks for the advice. I just deleted and sweeped all drivers and reinstalled 11.10 and caps 4. So far not overclocked with crossfire enabled I was able to play for over an hour without it crashing. I did this without fan profiles, letting the cards naturally getting into the 70s. I'm hoping this is a good fix. Now ulps is enabled because I haven't messed with any drivers. I know I can't oc with afterburner without this off. I'm wondering if having that off allowed vrm to get too hot. I'm going to try just setting ccc to 950/1450 and let afterburner set fan profiles. If that works ill leave it. I don't have a need now to up MHz more through BIOS because I'm not going to notice it in games I play and don't want to use another 100 or more Watts just for benchmark scores.

Jayrod1980 said:

Thanks for the advice. I just deleted and sweeped all drivers and reinstalled 11.10 and caps 4. So far not overclocked with crossfire enabled I was able to play for over an hour without it crashing. I did this without fan profiles, letting the cards naturally getting into the 70s. I'm hoping this is a good fix. Now ulps is enabled because I haven't messed with any drivers. I know I can't oc with afterburner without this off. I'm wondering if having that off allowed vrm to get too hot. I'm going to try just setting ccc to 950/1450 and let afterburner set fan profiles. If that works ill leave it. I don't have a need now to up MHz more through BIOS because I'm not going to notice it in games I play and don't want to use another 100 or more Watts just for benchmark scores.

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Do you still have CAP4 installed? Because having CAP4 installed was causing problems for me. I agree with not needing to OC to play games with your setup. If you're having stability problems, an OC is just another variable in play that makes diagnosing the issue more difficult.

Wont deleting caps decrease performance? I was kicking myself after buying two of these cards because I didn't know that there were any 6950s that could unlock, but there still are. After having problems with just using crossfire (or sli for that matter) without changing BIOS or oc or any of that, I'm actually glad I just ponied up the money for the better cards out of the box. Couldn't imagine having additional problems.

Jayrod1980 said:

Wont deleting caps decrease performance? I was kicking myself after buying two of these cards because I didn't know that there were any 6950s that could unlock, but there still are. After having problems with just using crossfire (or sli for that matter) without changing BIOS or oc or any of that, I'm actually glad I just ponied up the money for the better cards out of the box. Couldn't imagine having additional problems.

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I thought the same thing about removing CAP. It might just be because I have older cards, but removing the CAP helped me out quite a bit (actually, it solved all my problems). Might as well try it to see if it helps you, its not like reinstalling it is difficult.

Well I removed CAPS and it didn't seem to change anything. I think after everything that its too hard to crossfire and overclock my cards on the stock solution. I noticed my first card oc'd well alone but would crash at times when it got over 75. The problem isn't the gpu, but rather the vrm and ram getting too hot I think. I'm rather bummed that 2 weeks after buying my cards that sapphire releases a nice cool beefed up dual fan card that replaces mine. Not worth rma these because of the cost of exchange. Ill just leave them stock until I pony up the money for good aftermarket cooling.