270x crossfire hardly using second card

I got a used second 270x today for a good price. its the same exact as my current (Sapphire DualX r9 270x) and I even updated the bios on it. when I tested it out just now in BF4 im kinda disappointed. hardly any improvement if any. when I looked in CCC it showed the primary card at very high load around 75-95% but it showed my secondary card at 10-20% sometimes dropping to 0. when I checked my cpu useage it was at only about 30% and RAM was like 40%. I was running on ultra 1080p and getting 45-75 fps and vsync off. is crossfire really that much of a waiste of money or is there something wrong?

so I decided to try with cpu hyperthreading off. tried it in mantle. then tried it in mantle with hyperthreading off.

hyperthreading off made the CPU usage jump to about 55% and didn't change much else ingame. made the secondary card only work around 10% and primary was pegged at 99%

switchin to use mantle really made it different. I had a lot higher fps but it was VERY jaggedy. would be very inconsistent and would drop between 140fps down to 35fps constantly and be very hard to play. the secondary card did start working tho and it was about %75-90 and primary was alittle above whatever it was at. defiantly not going to work out for me tho. cpu usage was down to around 20% usage.

with both mandle and hyperthreading off it was even worse. cpu usage was still 50% and both cards were working slightly harder. gameplay was even worse than before.

when using same settings as before the new card, I seem to be able to increase my resolution scale to about 135% and stay minimum fps over 60 where I could only use 105% scale. seems the second card is doing some. just not a lot



I originally got this card so I can use 2 extra smaller monitors in addition to my main monitor ill use as the center. hopefully it will be good for that as it doesn't seem to be worth otherwise.

what drivers are you using?

I'm having a similar problem and I just had to reinstall windows and use a newer driver

using the latest 14.11.2

hmm yea same here.
I'm working on a few problems tonite and i'll see if an older driver yields more performance or if I find a fix.

edit:

ok last night I installed 14.9 and had some improvement.

GPU1 would run 99% with kombuster and GPU wouldn't go higher than 48%
NOW on 14.9

GPU1 runs at 80% while GPU 2 runs at 99%

its an improvement but its odd. I first thought it was an issue of running 2 different cards but they ran fine before together so I donno. progress was made so I guess I should be happy with that

I went back to 14.9 and didn't help but somereason was crashing a lot in BF4. went back to the beta. my framerate was all jaggedy even with vsync on. with it off an low settings and getting 180fps was just as bad. was almost unplayabe. decided to say 'screw this' and leaving it disabled. running on almost ultra settings with AA off getting 60+ consistently and not jaggedy.

I ordered the 2 20" monitors for the sides. was thinking if I can run them at a lower resolution than my center 27" that they will be under a comparable load. but ive never done a multi-monitor setup. does it require Crossfire to get 3 monitors to work good together? or do you just extend the screen without crossfire?

this is my 3rd Crossfire system and my last. never had them have any good results. my CPU was the bottleneck in the previous 2 but now im just thinking Crossfire is a hunk of crap setup. I never did a benchmark comparision, guess ill give it a try