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Black screen with Crossfire

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Advent

Registered
Joined
Sep 21, 2010
Location
Columbus, OH
Hello,

Cliffnotes version: when I enable crossfire, screen goes black, does not come back on until manual reboot that disables crossfire. Endless loop.


I got my 2nd 5970 today so I naturally wanted to enable crossfire.

First thing I did was run the Heaven benchmark on my single card to verify it's stability. It handled the benchmark like a champ.

Secondly, I unplugged my original 5970 and plugged in the new one. I then ran the same test on the new card. The new card performed slightly better, but I attributed it to background processes that were not running.

Anyhow. I shut down my PC, put the old card in the 2nd slot on my motherboard and attached the Crossfire bridge. PC booted fine and I got into Windows. Opened up CCC and enabled crossfire by checking the box. Screen went blank and the noise sounded for "hardware disconnected". The screen stays blank and does not go to Windows or anything else for that matter.

After doing a hard reset using the reset button, everything loads up fine and I get back into Windows easily. The only problem is that now when I go to CCC, the box for Crossfire is unchecked again and I have to go through the same process.

I'm not sure how I can test to see what the deal is. I tried swapping the VGA cable to the bottom card and tried all the different ports, still no picture. I also swapped out the Crossfire bridge and tried two other bridges that I had (both ATI CF Bridges). Same thing happens.

Any ideas as to how I can test this to narrow down what the issue may be?

I appreciate any help that you can give, I'm getting back into the "game" with benchmarking and I'd really like to be able to run two 5970s with my new i7 980x.

Thanks all.
 
After another round, I'd like to note that the monitor does not go to the "no signal detected" screen. It essentially goes into standby mode, the same as if my PC was asleep.

Edit: Read that people in the past have had problems with the amount of RAM in their machine. As I have 12GB, I'll reduce it to 6GB and see if that allows me to run crossfire properly.
 
Last edited:
Oddly enough, I fixed the problem by reducing my RAM to 6gb as opposed to 12gb.

Strange.
 
So I'm not sure why, but I reformatted and the problem is occurring once again. I'm not sure why it's doing it, but it's very annoying.
 
Turns out it was a driver issue.

How did you solve the issue?
I've got the same motherboard, cpu, op, ram as yours, and two 5970. When I enable o disabled crossfire I get a black screen. The crossfire corrupts my system. No problem when it's running one gpu (after a clean install). I changed the catalyst drivers but no avail.

Regards
 
What powersupply(psu) do you have?
Did you check the voltages on the 12/5 volt rails with a dmm?

Well, my asus rampage III extreme is 1005 bios version.
The psu is a thermaltake tr2 1000w.
I didn't check the voltages, I have no dmm. Playing crysis, for instance, msi afterburner showed the same usage in the four gpu's (and I got more fps than a single 5970, of course)

Regards

My specs: win 7 64 ultimate, asus rampage III extreme, thermaltake tr2 1000w, 12 gb ram kingston hx 1800, i7 980X, xfx 5970 black edition x2, 3x24" asus monitor
 
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