5870 X-Fire Issues

Hi Guys,

I have an older R2 that I haven't been using because crossfire never seems to work. Device manager recognizes the second card, the card has been tested to be fine, but it doesn't how up in Hardware Monitor. It shows up in hwinfo, but without the normal information breakdown. And lastly, it hows up in gpu-z, but never goes about 100mhz. It simply isn't used. CCC knows it is there and lets me tell it to enable crossfire. I have tried reinstalling windows. Used just about every driver from dell to the 12.1. Motherboard and cards were replaced by dell at one point. I've seen countless threads about similar problems, but the solutions never seem to work for me.

Thanks for any help in advance.

Mak

 

Did you flash the Dell vbios on the cards?

 

yup. A10 bios on the mb also

 

FWIW.. my 2nd card details do not show up in HWINFO either.. but the card does work fine.

 

Mak - Have you tried changing the clock speeds manually? I have found that sometimes the AMD cards get "stuck" for lack of a better word and tweaking the GPU BCLK just a little will make things start working properly again. I had this happen to me more than once on the 5870 CF with an old R2 and on 6970M CF in an old M18x and each time it seemed to make the cards behave properly again.

Coincidentally, I just saw another post this morning that made me think of suggesting this in your situation. I had forgotten about this trick until I read the other post, so it's lucky I did.
Here is a link to the post I am referring to: [FIXED] Radeon 6990M core clock stuck at 100MHz

You can use RBE to mod your own vBIOS and simply change the clock speeds by a little bit. For me, I was able to re-flash to the original vBIOS later and it continued working properly for a good while. If vBIOS editing and flashing is not something you are comfortable with, try using the AMD GPU Clock Tool to force your 5870 cards to run at the correct speeds and voltage. That used to work for me on the 5870 CrossFire setup. It was not permanent like the vBIOS mod, but it worked just as well to get the cards "unstuck."

I will send you a PM with information that I got from another NBR member way back in April that has some other performance tips that worked extremely well for me with the R2. I don't want to copy and paste the info into this thread because that would be against forum rules.

 

Ok, I have it solved. For those who might find this thread, this is what I have done (And there are similar complaints out there on the net with ambiguous solutions). The post about the stuck 6970's fixed it, but only after I disabled ULPS in the registry.

So, if you are having a similar problem as mine, disable UPLS first. Then use a gpu overclocking app (i used Trixx - I presume afterburner might give similar results). All I had to do was overclock it 1mhz and then the other card woke up. Set it back to default clock, and still works fine.

Thank you for your time and help guys.

 

Thanks Mak - glad you're part of the Alienware Community. +1 Rep buddy

 

Just to add some info, When Ulps is active, the second card doesn't show up in any monitoring program becouse when on 2D state it is disabled in order to reduce power consumption.

With Ulps active if you want to get reading from secondary card, open for example your browser, the card will then show up on HWinfo or whatever other monitoring program.

 

Thanks CptX. That may be true, but the problem I was having (and others based on my searches) was that the 2nd card, despite being installed and recognized by CCC, wouldn't engage or show up in hwinfo under any conditions. It remained present but dormant no matter what. When everything is working as it should, what you said seems correct. My solution got it now to the point that it is recognized in hwinfo when active. I can finally game again!