Anyone here having an...

m17x with CF 5870, where there is NO screen rolling seen on Heaven, 3D Mark Vantage, Crysis or HL2 in full screen mode ?

 

Is this what you're talking about?

YouTube - M17X-R2 Cross Fire distortions

If so, go here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/489656-m17x-r2-cf-distortions.html

If not, please explain in more detail.

 

Well, after a long day of research on various boards, driver re-installs, OS re-installs, it seems flickering increases during bright scenes, especially in scenes with HDR, and therefore decreasing the Gamma on CCC reduces the flickering to some extent. I tested it out on 3d Mark Vantage and Crysis and I can see that flickering does reduce, but not go away completely.

People have also mentioned that cards generally have an internal Gamma setting. (I am not sure how to get to that). And if there is a mismatch, between the cards, then that leads to Screen Rolling and flickering.

On the Crysis 'New Game' intro I get extreme screen rolling whenever the white fade in/fade out sequences happen.

Some boards also mentioned that decreasing the voltage on the cards will reduce the flickering, however i was unable to test that.

At this point I also had another question, what is the best utility to make overclocking or voltage changes to mobility 5800 cards. I tried downloading certain AMD tools, however they were not compatible with Windows 7 64 bit.

I am also currently running factory Dell drivers.

 

I tried playing with gamma and didn't see an improvement.
After all possible software tweaks (BIOS updates, drivers, etc), re-seating the cards and cables,... the only thing I can think of is that this is some kind EM interference affecting the CF cable and/or connectors.
But the possibility of an internal gamma mismatch between the cards is very interesting.

 

EM could be a possibility, Since bright light would account for more power being pulled through the board causing such an effect.

Come to think of it, it almost seems like one of the card is not able to respond at high brigthness levels, causing a roll. I'm not too sure of this, its just a theory. Is it possible to switch the primary and secondary cards to check this ?

 

AFAIK - no, to switch the cards we need to flash them with the proper vbios (primary, slave). A strange thing is that after I got the secondary +CF replaced, the problem was fixed,...till recently
That makes me think that your suggestion is correct - something changes in the secondary GPU sync. Maybe we could try and reflash the secondary's Vbios anyway?

 

Can the re-flashing be done through the BIOS ? or is there a utility for it ?.

Yesterday I was using MSI afterburner to look at the clock speeds and utilization of my set up. On the MSI utility there are 4 graphs,

GPU1 utilization
GPU2 utilization
GPU2 mem Clock
GPU2 Core Clock

I looked around but couldn't fine GPU1 mem Clock and GPU1 core clock.

I wanted to see crossfire in action. So I played portal, first on full screen and then in windowed mode.

Both GPU utilizations were at 100% in full screen mode. Now, in windowed mode I was expecting to see only GPU1 fire, but instead GPU1 idle and GPU 2 was firing.

From the information screen, they show GPU1 is being the master and GPU2 as the slave.

Does MSI just randomly name the cards GPU1 and GPU2 or is there something going on here :-/.

And one last thing, I see drops in Core and Mem clock from time to time, is this normal ? Shouldn't it always be runnig at 700/1000 ? Here is a the screenshot.

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/1637/picix.png.

From the screenshot it seems the game, in windowed mode is running on GPU2 which is basically the secondary one.