I bought a sapphire radeon 290 (reference design) to replace my geforce 760, seemed to run pretty well. I saw an ebay listing for an identical card and thought I should grab it since an identical card would be best for crossfire. It's turned out to be the most trouble I've ever had with a piece of hardware since the non-plug n play days. Here are just some of the things that have gone wrong:
Blue screens specifying an ati dll/.sys file failing
Micro-stuttering on most games
Screen-tearing with vsync on with most games
Lighting/shadows flickering on gta v and far cry 4
Trying to change graphics options crashes gta v
Random blank screen, ctrl+alt+del either does nothing, or I get a logonui.exe failure
Numerous times I've had to do a hard reset because I couldn't alt-tab to get control back
Displayport to hdmi adapter randomly blanks out/reports display as non-pnp display which kills eyefinity because that makes it think it's a 640x480 display
Cards are flashed with identical bios revision. My specs are:
Asrock z97 extreme4 (mentions sli and crossfire in the manual so it must support it
Antec hcgm 850w bronze power supply
i5 4690k @4.4ghz (going back to default clock speed doesn't change anything)
The temps on the cards seem to be fine, I have the fan set to kick in to make them run no higher that 70c.
Tried DDU to properly install drivers, install one card, then reset and install other card, etc
The only thing I can think of is that the motherboard drops the pci express speed down to 8x when running in crossfire, maybe this is causing problems... or perhaps my power supply? But it's crossfire certified, and a single radeon 290 only requires a 500w supply (though for some reason sapphire reference cards claim 700w, that doesn't make sense though)
This is probably the most trouble I've ever had with a single piece of hardware. I'm thinking of selling them at a loss and just getting a single geforce 980.
Blue screens specifying an ati dll/.sys file failing
Micro-stuttering on most games
Screen-tearing with vsync on with most games
Lighting/shadows flickering on gta v and far cry 4
Trying to change graphics options crashes gta v
Random blank screen, ctrl+alt+del either does nothing, or I get a logonui.exe failure
Numerous times I've had to do a hard reset because I couldn't alt-tab to get control back
Displayport to hdmi adapter randomly blanks out/reports display as non-pnp display which kills eyefinity because that makes it think it's a 640x480 display
Cards are flashed with identical bios revision. My specs are:
Asrock z97 extreme4 (mentions sli and crossfire in the manual so it must support it
Antec hcgm 850w bronze power supply
i5 4690k @4.4ghz (going back to default clock speed doesn't change anything)
The temps on the cards seem to be fine, I have the fan set to kick in to make them run no higher that 70c.
Tried DDU to properly install drivers, install one card, then reset and install other card, etc
The only thing I can think of is that the motherboard drops the pci express speed down to 8x when running in crossfire, maybe this is causing problems... or perhaps my power supply? But it's crossfire certified, and a single radeon 290 only requires a 500w supply (though for some reason sapphire reference cards claim 700w, that doesn't make sense though)
This is probably the most trouble I've ever had with a single piece of hardware. I'm thinking of selling them at a loss and just getting a single geforce 980.