HD5970's in crossfire causing CPU to run at 100%

ey guys, so i've been playing around with my pc its about 5 years old and im trying to mod it to run current games with respectable results.

specs:
asus p6t x58
i7 930 @2.8 oc'd to 4.0
win7 ulti 64bit
20gb kingston hyperx ddr3 1600 ram
250gb samsung ssd
v1000 coolermaster 1000w psu
2 x HD5970's

now my problem is i originally only had one 5970 and since picked up another cheap. i installed it, added the xfire bridge and started it up. it take about 10minutes to boot into windows. once in windows my cpu is at a constant 100% and it crazy slow all round. in processes not one process is eating up the cpu its quite a few spread out and adding up. i cant work it out.

please help

Quadfire CFx is likely an (not the) issue. Terrible scaling, not enough vram... scrap those cards and get a single card.

Well that's not overly helpful. I have these cards and I would like to utilize them.

Can anyone else shed any light on this?

Lol, sorry.. just a terrible solution is all. Woeful efficiency. Vram limited if not horsepower limited out of the gate. Neat to play with, surely, but will choke on modern.titles at a reasonable res for a couple reasons as listed above.

Did you install the drivers again? Try a different version of the drivers?

Yea fresh drivers but it's choking the CPU before I even boot into Windows. it's not the pci-e lanes as have tested both card by them self in all 3 lanes the 4x and 2 16x.

Well, if you can afford to, start from scratch with a new OS install? Drastic, surely. Last ditch, probably.

BUMP for the braintrust...

Solved with a bios flash and another full driver sweep and install

I have a similar problem when I am trying to crossfire HD5970 with HD5870. I tried with both Catalyst 13.8 and 14.4 drivers. Since these new drivers are supposed to fix frame time issues, I am hoping to get a real crossfire power of triple crossfire using HD5970+HD5870 instead of a fake crossfire power with older drivers. However, at this moment I can only use these frame time fix drivers only for dual crossfire (either one HD5970 or 2xHD5870). I am using Core i7 920, Asus Rampage III Extreme, and Corsair's memories.

Since PC Perspective site showed that 13.8 driver did not work well for triple crossfireX, I thought that the problem of not being able to do HD5970+HD5870 was the immature frame time fix driver (13.8 was the first of this kind). But even with the newest 14.4 driver, I still can't run triple crossfire at all. Maybe AMD does not have much intentions to fix triple or quad crossfire for older cards. But you seem to fix the issue. Can you tell me which bios and drivers you used to fix your problem?

By the way, dual crossfire of 2xHD5870 with the 14.4 driver can run most of the newest games with mid settings (without much AA) at 1080p very well.

I can't stand not having AA or 'much' AA at 1080p... Looks terrible to me. If you run games 'as they should be'. You will be vram limited with those 1GB cards.

Time to upgrade to a more simple solution IMO.

Actually I do have a new rig (core i7 3770K, Asus Maximus, and 2xTitan SLI. I can change the OS between W8.1, W7, and Linux) for a 1440p display. However, I do want to use my older systems just for fun. I also connect my second old system (core i2 q9650 with either gt9800 or gtx460 on Windows XP) to the 1440p display just for running old games that I can get from GOG.com (I switch two computers by a KVM box). Sometimes older systems can run very well the old games that I cannot run with newer systems. I am just trying to use older systems just for the sake of fun. For instance it is very interesting to see if frame time fix drivers really changed the smoothness of running games. In a way I did not get a real crossfire power of HD5970/5870 with older drivers (In many ways AMD failed on us. I am not happy about it at all). I want to see the real horse power of these older cards.

I don't think the frametime thing trickled down to the 5 series... it also wasn't neutered in horsepower/FPS either... frametimes caused the hitching.