Degraded performance with Triple crossfire 5870's

Hey guys, kinda bummed out, but I just got my third 5870 yesterday, slapped it in.

I ran into a plethora of problems getting it to work. For some unknown reason I couldn't install the CCC, it kept failing under win 7 64bit. After about 20 reboots and attempts, the little windows 7 center alerted me that there was a known problem with Visual C++ and I had to update to a hotfix (from 2008??) so go figure, Ive been installing ATI drivers for about a year now and never had this problem before.

So now its working, and let me tell you that its pretty lame how close the cards sit to each other (the bottom two) because they block each others fans, making the cards about 10c+ hotter than they typically run.

I started up some games and to be honest, it seems that I am actually experiencing lower frame rates, BFBC 2 seems choppy, Metro 2033 isnt any better when dx11 is enabled, Borderlands is great, but it always has been, Flight Sim X is the same.

Am I doing something wrong?

have you started from scratch with your drivers since you had this issue??? and what version of the drivers are you running?

Yes I uninstalled all ati related items with driver cleaner, and installed 10.7 drivers.

try reinstalling the 10.7 iv heard some people are haing problems with the installer and usaly 1 reinstall works or try the good ol 10.4 drivers lots of people love that version.

you can also try taking out one of the original cards and leave in the new one and see if the proformance is as good as the 2 originals... maybe its a bad card.

I disabled A.I. in the ATI catalyst and the screens filckered, displayed a message about "A display has been changed Catalyst is re-configuring your system" It took like 5 minutes with a progress bar then whammo....everything works amazingly now, super fast FPS, I love it!

I had similar issues,

1) use older cats
2) check in BIOS .. are all the settings correct .. i.e. are the PCIEx bandwidths set to 8/8/8 or 8/8/4 or something that is bottlenecking you ?
3) buy some watercooling and be awesome

hope you fixes it

Exempt said:

I disabled A.I.

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Glad you got it working, but not sure if having 2/3 of your cards as paperweights is a real solution. Being that disabling Catalyst AI disables Crossfire of any kind.

GotNoRice said:

Glad you got it working, but not sure if having 2/3 of your cards as paperweights is a real solution. Being that disabling Catalyst AI disables Crossfire of any kind.

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I've read in some forums that it says it disables it, but in AMD's own forum the moderators say different. When I disable mine, it still reports Crossfire as active with all 3 cards, and there is no way the stellar performance is only a single card operating.

From what I take, I think that any multi GPU coded game, automatically is using available GPU's regardless of A.I. status. I mean seriously, the games I play are running better than they ever have, better than my dual crossfire setup, and absolutely everything is maxed.

From what I take, I think that any multi GPU coded game, automatically is using available GPU's regardless of A.I. status. I mean seriously, the games I play are running better than they ever have, better than my dual crossfire setup, and absolutely everything is maxed.

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Yeah I think thats actually correct. When I boot up SC 2 my 2nd card stays at 0%. I have crossfire enabled though.

decoste007xt said:

Yeah I think thats actually correct. When I boot up SC 2 my 2nd card stays at 0%. I have crossfire enabled though.

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I had a customer who's 4890's reported the same thing. 1 said 100% usage and the other said 0%. I think that crossfire is not being used though, because the 1 card was at like 80c and the other was at like 45c. He also was using windows 7 64 bit pro.

I just got off the phone with ATI/AMD . Man the first guy was cool and easy to work with , then they transferred me to the ATI engineering level 3 department, and this guy who barely spoke english was so RUDE it was ridiculous.

I said I had tried some suggestions that were posted by ATI moderators in the ATI.com forums, and he said, "If they tell you to pour gasoline in your computer and light it, does that make it a fact?" I was like ummmmmmm, but it's in *your* forums.

Then he told me that my motherboard the Asus Rampage Extreme III (after telling me that I was pronouncing it incorrectly and that's why he couldn't find it in their systems, I was saying Rampage extreme three, he said, " NO it's i-i-i"!)
he says my motherboard is an "old and not so great motherboard" That is does not have 3-4 PCIe slots that run at x16 on ALL the slots, that only one slot is x16 and the rest are x8 so therefore all cards are scaled down to x8.

I asked what motherboards have all x16 PCIe slots and he said he didn't know but there are "a lot available". I tried googling specs on the top motherboards that I am aware of and couldn't find one.

I was completely shocked at how unprofessional this guy was, and how quickly he was to pass the responsibility to "Windows related problems".

They took my contact info, asked me to send them some system files and logs, and that engineering will "assemble a duplicate system with the same components as me, and attempt to duplicate the problems in the same games". I just thought, "wow".

wow that is horrible man... hey just do what works test some settings and run them through vantage and see what the score diffrence is and use whats best

I thought Snobby rude tech support was a thing of the past..im glad there are still some rude support people out there...I like to get my heart pumping and color in my cheeks when looking for a solution from an insecure, inept phone tech
He was proly just jealous that your computer was faster and sexier than his

Ok I successfully am running quad Crossfire with 4x 5870's, geez it was an absolute NIGHTMARE getting them to work properly and have them span across three LCD's. Everytime I enabled the third LCD I would get a BSOD with no error identified.

I had originally installed the 2gb 5870 as the primary (makes the most sense right?) it only has the mini display adapter ports, then the other 3x 5870s below it. However I could never get it to work this way properly, so I placed it in the second PCIe slot and now everything works correctly, but as someone stated earlier, yes it basically becomes a 1gb card due to scaling, no matter anyways though.

I cant get 3dmark06 to finish, I think it's a LCD resolution problem on the Dell 30", the computer seems to be running, I can hear sounds, but the screen is black right after the artic test 2.

Same thing happens with 3d mark Vantage, it goes black but I when I hit manual shutdown on the computer, I hear windows shutdown sound, so I know it's not frozen or locked up. Really weird.

Could be driver issue, I used to get black screens for my GTX295 last year when it first came out, but later releases fixed it.

Is each card stable by their own? If so then it is probably just drivers.

Badbonji said:

Could be driver issue, I used to get black screens for my GTX295 last year when it first came out, but later releases fixed it.

Is each card stable by their own? If so then it is probably just drivers.

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Each card is stable on its own, I'm not even sure if running quad crossfire is even remotely reasonable to be very honest though. Even at three 5870's the FPS is ridiculously awesome, adding a fourth made no noticeable increase except in noise, all fans on the cards run at full and still hover around 65c the entire time, in a room that holds the ambeint temp at 67c, it's a little loud for my taste as well. I did notice a pretty decent increase from dual crossfire to triple, but none in triple to quad. At least as far as gaming, not talking about benchmarking.