M17x R2 7970m CrossfireX Ultimate Installation and Tweaking Guide

Go 4 it

 

pffff ..... you know that will lower my budget another 250 pounds...

well i am really thinking of it. as i told you guys the problems are the psu (i wont carry the dual 240w mod, its huge!! ) and the crossfire microshutering.

PS. by the way, anyon has thoufght about modifying the dual 240w psu mod? i mean make it more compact. i was thinking about it the other day and i came up with the idea that the whole ampere and watt meters are not needed. because the reason stamatis uses them is to see wich psu each time is the one used so you can unplug it and make the power flow through both. But what i think is that if you dont use meters (and dont know which psu is working) then simply you can just unplug first the one psu, plug it in, then the other and plug it again. this way you will surely spread the charge.

 

Well, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible... but I still want to try it on stock PSU.
I also think i just received my first thermal shutdown. The GPU approached 80C during an overclock experiment and the machine shut down, but the PSU didn't trip so...

 

So the rumors that 80c are the gpu thermal limit are right? That seems low...

 

Seems like it... Huh, well, it did take a pretty hefty OC (950/1400) to get it up to the 80's so it's not so bad i suppose. Not for my purposes anyway.

 

wanna go hardcore ?

look this

330 Watt power supply for Alienware M17x » imsolidstate

good luck

 

But that mod doesn't work. Yes the r2 sees the psu as a 240w but it shuts down when ocand crossfire are present.

So the only sure working mod is the double 240w one that stamatis did BUT I am thinking how to make it portable.

Also I can't understand why someone can't simply take two 240w psus, cut the jack from one of them and connect each cable in pararrel to the others jack. Theoretically it should work and then the only thing we would have to carry is the two 240w power bricks that would have 2 cables to plug to the wall and from the other end 2 cables that connect and become one with a jack at the end. You could also tape the psus together and the cables so actually you would just have one thick power brick.

 

Yea but if you get to 80c with one card just imagine in crossfire... Where the total heat of the laptop would rise much

 

It is possible as Whap-a-Chow has done the dual PSU mod with one AC in and one DC out with no amp meters. I PM'd him some time ago on T|I.

And one more thing........ the cards are in the hizzouse!!!!

 

Damn ... I keep staring at these cards lying on my table. I have some other stuff to take care of but I want to test them out!!!

 

Actually, no Each component (CPU / GPU1 / GPU2) is on its own cooling system (own heatpipes, own heatsink, own fan). In crossfire it won't matter, they don't affect each other, and I don't plan to OC in crossfire.

Fok ja. Kom ons kyk 'n paar liefde.

 

Lmao!

Screw it... as Tony Stark once said, "Get ready for a major remodel fellas. We're back in hardware mode"

 

Nice... go on install them and tell us !

 

ITS ALIIIIVVVVE!!!!

I'm glad to report both cards are alive and well. I did a hasty job with the pasting though just to get it up and running asap. I just wanted to check if the cards are working as there was a bit of thermal paste around the vRAM chips.

Did a 3Dmark11 run now results are here. CPU @ 24/24/24/24, TDP/TDC set to 80/72. Physics seems low for the CPU settings. Cards are at stock clocks and are idling around 28c.... thats just crazy

I'm sure if I run Crysis 3 or Bioshock Infinite it will shutdown though.

 

Wow..congratutz awesome score. Was that done on a single 240w psu?

 

Thanks Yeah a single 240W. 3Dmark11 isnt as power hungry as the new games though.

 

awesome!

someone made a post about the dual 240w psu with 1 ac in. it is possibly because both psu are the same, so the same current flows between the 2 psu. my question is how is the load on each of the psu?

 

Whap-a-Chow did that mod. I'm not sure about the details but he mentioned he used a power regulator.

I ran 3Dmark11 again with stock GPU clocks and bumped the CPU to 25/25/25/25 with 90/82 TDP/TDC, Score is now 9757, so it seems the XM is bottlenecking these cards in 3Dmark11 at least. Not by much if I compare it to the M18x results. I checked T|I's review and stock 7970M's scored 9803 with a 2920XM. That was with 12.11 drivers, I'm using 13.4

edit: I cant seem to find anyone else that's using this BIOS version.

 

This is beautiful, I'm so jelly. Try 3dmark 2013 Fire Strike. I'm really curious about the combined score there.
Are the cards undervolted any?

 

3Dmark 2013 Firestrike coming up

No, cards still running stock volts and stock clocks. SVL7 confirmed that the vBIOS I've got loaded is infact the P270WM (RJTECH) so looks like my screen is safe

I'm getting some blue screens randomly though. On the blue screen it complained about the ATi driver so I've just re-installed that. I'm using the same Windows and driver install as the 5870M's so that may be why. I dropped the XM TDP/TDC to 45/37 to run the games since that's what all the chips below the XM run at and I've never got a hard shutdown yet. I'm not sure if the BSODs are related to the power issue cos no one has mentioned a blue screen before a PSU trip shut down. BSOD's were in Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinite. Crysis 3 ran fine on very high and was averaging about +- 35fps.

edit: sorry Crysis 3 wasn't 35fps, it was actually all over the place. I'll run it again and check. Is there a standardised benchmark for it?

3Dmark13 Firestrike results - 25x across all cores 90/82 TDP/TDC, stock GPU's

 

bsod's could be because of psu trip and the machine switching to battery and 2d clocks and crashing. Use the undervolted vbioses
That firestrike test looks pretty good. We'll be somewhat CPU bound in some games, but it will still destroy in others.

Don't forget to install Catalyst Application Profiles

 

Forgot the CAPS!!! Thanks man!

Battery isn't connected You can see the "No battery detected" icon on my screen print. Actually Power/Touch panel is still sitting loose on top of the loose keyboard Still have to do a proper paste job...

Ran Crysis 3 again on the first level which is pretty intense. Graphics on very high, fxaa and framerate is around 36-50fps if I follow Psycho. Average I would guess at 38fps. No shutdown... but I am reducing CPU to stock when running the games.

 

Aha, cool, then it most likely needs a driver reinstall and the CAPS installed. Sounds great. If you haven't had any shutdowns so far, then i think it's more unlikely that you'd have any when you undervolt

 

Yeah this is looking very promising

I don't have Metro to test with tho. That would have been an ideal comparison and since most guys experienced shutdowns with that game. I'll install the CAPS and then run a Tomb Raider bench since that's built in.

 

Don't forget to make sure the game is updated to the latest patches. It seemed to be optimized immensely better compared to first versions.

Also: Edit your sig

 

Thanks for reminding me about my sig

TR benchmark

Min: 1.1
Max: 62.3
Avg: 58.9

I don't know whats going on with the min fps but its running really smooth. This is on the Ultra setting.

 

TR Bench is badly optimized imo, I had this happen on other machines as well. The average says it all Awesome.
So how do you feel about the vaunted impossibility to run 7970m crossfire in m17x-r2? Do some actual gaming instead of benches, to see how it goes

 

Nospheratou you wont see clearly wether the cpu is bottenecking the cards in 3d mark and other synthetic benches. Only in real games.

Benches are made to use all the 8 threads of a 920xm but no game comes this close.

Try a game with included benchmark.

Its nice to see that maybethe 330w psu or the 2x240w may not be needed after all.

 

Just to see what I told you that in real games the 920xm cpu doesn't bottleneck these babies try running the tomb raider bench with locked multi of 20 in all cores . I think that you will see that the results will be similar if not the same with the one you made with 25 multi (wasn't that the one you used?)

If indeed that's the case then that means that our CPUs will cover us for some years until a game CPU demanding as a synthetic benchmark will come.

 

Yep. Just keep upgrading the graphics cards

 

You are getting this wrong guys. As I told you the synthetic benchmarks are made to test gpu separately (gpu score) then the CPU separately (CPU score) and finally a mixed score (using both CPU and gpu) and then it adds all these scores and gives a final one.
The way benches are made , in order to be future proof with new hardware (CPUs and gpus ) they will use the maximum of whatever you run them on. So if you take your two 7970m with the current score of ~9700 that you got in 3dmark 11 , and hypothetically you add a future CPU (let's call it i9 that runs at 5ghz ) then the score you would get in 3dmark 11 would be like 15000 from 9700 that you have now, AND THAT NOT because your cards were bottlenecked, the gpu score of the bench will be the same, But because the CPU score will have raised dramatically because of the super fast CPU.

What I mean is that you can't really understand if a CPU is bottle necking in a bench. Only in real games as their need for CPU power is standar, is specific. The synth benches don't have specific CPU needs but are made to raise their CPU needs to the maximum nomater what CPU you run them at and how fast that CPU is.

 

lol.. i9

idk why people are too hung up on benchmarks.

i use games to measure the load on the cpu and gpu. thats how i found out my cpu was bottlenecking my gpu in guild wars 2.

 

Interesting results.
So this means the 2x 7970m each around 100w and the cpu at default(no o/c) 45w can easily be squeezed with the 240w psu. Actually i have heard somewhere the 240 can go more with about 5-10% tolerance.
I guess then the moral of the story here is that if you keep your cpu default clocks with no o/c then the r2 can accomodate the 7970m's in crossfire stable with default psu.
Nospheratu can you post your temps on cpu and gpu's during crysis 1,2 and 3 if available. I recall crysis 1 really pushes your system to its knees and told me i had to repaste again CPU cause it would crash my system after 5-10 min playing.
Furthermore, can you extract gpu bios with gpuz and post d/l link as it could come in handy for future upgrade.

Thnx bro & keep the info coming

 

Did more testing and found out that the BSOD happens when I'm running in fullscreen and I alt-tab out of the game or in the case of Bioshock, it crashes to the desktop. Bioshock used to crash at loading screen on my 5870M's too. BSOD's complain about atikmdag.sys

Another thing is the primary card is running 0.975v and the secondary 1.000v on 3D clocks which is weird but could explain why I've not gotten a hard shutdown yet on the 240W.

 

Whoa. This gets interesting.
So there are number of reasons for your bsod . Maybe the undervolting of the one card is not right. (For beginning I would raise this cards voltage to the nornal and do all my tests like that so I can see if I have any probs, if it is stable then move on undervolting and testing )

Maybe the bsod is drivers issue. I have seen that hapening.
Try removing all ati drivers and reinstall clean.

Finaly the worst case senario is that bsod is power shortage. Try disabling turboboost in throttlestop and lock your cpu in the lowest multi. So it uses min voltage. Run the games again to see if you still get bsod

Ps. I had an issue with dota on a customers pc with nvidia card and win 7. Whenever he alttabed windows stuck. Maybe yiu have a similar problem with the specific game

 

Thanks for the tips AlienHack.

I'm planning on flashing both cards to the stock P270WM vBIOS tonight and maybe the Dell version as well so I'll provide feedback once done.

I've cleaned drivers to the best of my ability with no change. I used AMD's driver un-install utility as well as ATiman and no difference.

It doenst seem to be a power shortage as I can play Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, NFS Most Wanted (2013) at absolute max settings and run 3Dmark11 and 3Dmark13 with no BSODs whatsoever. As soon as I alt-tab instant BSOD. It complains about atikmdag.sys

My theory is that the card is having a problem switching to the 2nd performance profile. I'll have to try a couple of youtube video's to confirm. If this is the case hopefully the new vBIOS will help.

Its not a specific game per se, although I can pretty much guarantee a BSOD with Bioshock as that game crashes to the desktop from the load screen all the time. Any game I alt-tab from I get the BSOD.

Another piece of the puzzle is that I don't get the BSOD if I disable crossfire. I can then alt-tab to my hearts content.

edit: I think a clean install of windows may be in order as well but after reading up on how thorough the ATIman uninstaller is, I have my doubts.

 

Hmmm switching to desktop i.e alt+ tab whilst gaming changes the voltage on the cards. Could be an incompatibility occuring due to the different bios's on each card? More testing required. Good luck nospheratu.

 

You could try this: FIX BSOD ATI Blue screen on atikmdag.sys solved fix - Guru3D.com Forums Supposedly it was a bad file in CCC causing the issues.

I'd suggest running both cards at the same voltage if they can take it, 0.975 seems pretty stable for most 7970m users. If you suspect it may be undervolting instability either disable ULPS or lower core clocks to 825, but I REALLY doubt it's the case (happens some time though, I could run metro: LL at 0.95V stock clocks but not league of legends...)

Other than that, I can't wait to get a second card

 

That's a good point. I cant see what the voltage is on the 2nd performance state. The normal desktop performance state is the same for both cards at 0.825v if I remember correctly. Its only on the 3D performance state that the volts differ.

I tried that fix as well as a few others and no luck

Yeah I'm going to flash a few vBIOS's tonight, hopefully one of them fixes the issue. Thats the only problem right now the alt-tab BSOD. Everything else seems to be running smooth.

 

Well, come to think of it, I also had a few BSOD's in bioshock and EXTREME instability in Bioshock... when using just one card.. as well as when using nVidia SLI. Alt-tabbing sometimes froze my whole computer.
Maybe it's not on your end, mate

 

Yeah Bioshock isn't the best example to test with. I wasn't even able to run RadeonPro to monitor fps as it wouldn't start unless I disabled RadeonPro. This was when I was running my 5870M's.

I'll stick with TR, Crysis 3 and NFS for now. Hope to get this sorted soon so I get to the real power optimization testing.

 

I cant beleive that we are so close to an r2 running 2x 7970 crossfire stable with a simple single 240w psu.

If the bsod when alt tabing go away with the vbios flash then OMG its stable with 2 x 7970.

Then please go ahead and try slowly ocing the 920xm . Maybe it will still be stable.

Do u have turbo boost on at the moment ?

 

Hmmm... somethings definitely weird here.

Yeah turbo boost is on. Totally stock CPU. But check this out... I mentioned previously card 1 is running with 0.975v and card 2 is running at 1.000v on 3D clocks. I did a checksum on both cards vBIOS and both are the same... its possible with a minor change. So I dumped the vBIOS from the first card and tried flashing it to the 2nd card and ATIflash tells me the vBIOS I'm trying to flash is already programmed on the card...strange. I force the flash anyway.

Boot into Windows expecting card 2nd card to have 0.975v on 3D clocks... and GPU Shark says its still the same I think maybe there's a cache that its reading from so I boot up HWinfo and run a quick Furmark fullscreen to get both cards loaded. Exit. Check what the vddc max on both cards are.... card 1 is 0.975v and card 2 is 1.000v. No change???

I do the same with dumping card 2's vBIOS and flashing it to card one...exact same result. What the ?? Then I think maybe the 2nd card is pencil modded somehow to give it an additional 0.025v... but thats not possible since at idle state the voltage is same for both cards at 0.825v.

I tried SVL7's 0.975v undervolt vBIOS on the 2nd card and GPU Shark cant read anything from the card. Well it can read some header info but that's from the previous P270WM vBIOS...

I think I'm just going to re-install Windows and hopefully things start making sense.

 

Before you do that, create an overclocked CCC preset with +5Mhz core for each card, and open the file generated in the C:\Users\{yourusername}\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\Profiles location.
Open the xml file and look for "CoreVoltage" fields. (this is in case you aren't already doing this stuff).

I'm guess the second card gets somehow overriden in software. If not, you could try TriXX of MSI Afterburner(?) to lower the voltage. Afterburner always crashes for me unfortunately on this laptop.
I still think it's just a software thing.

If afterburner does work for you:

Try unlocking unofficial overclocking mode. To unlock AB do the following steps:

1) Uninstall any other GPU overclocking software you have like Trixx or GPU Tweak.
2) Make sure AB is not running.
3) Open up the Afterburner.cfg file (located in Program Files/MSI Afterburner) and edit these two lines near the bottom of the file to look like this:

UnofficialOverclockingEULA = I confirm that I am aware of unofficial overclocking limitations and fully understand that MSI will not provide me any support on it
UnofficialOverclockingMode = 2

4) Save and close the file.
5) Start AB up, go to Settings, and make sure to check the box next to "Unlock Voltage Control" and "Unlock Voltage Monitoring" for both cards.

Give that a shot and see if it works.

 

Thanks sangemaru. Afterburner does lock my system up. I've activated Overdrive using afterburner and the -xcl parameter though so I'll give the ccc profile a shot now.

 

Trixx is working great on the r2 . Afterburner crashes on me too.
So try either ccc unlocked
Or you can try trixx and also change the volts through it.

 

Just tried and I've only got one entry for CoreVoltageTarget.

Property name="Want_0" value="825"
Property name="Want_1" value="975"

I'm assuming that's for both cards?

edit: yeah something's definitely fubar with this installation... I think Ran TR benchmark now with the overdrive settings and only the first card registered the oc.

Second card no difference in clocks, still the stock clocks... yet it was running in xfire. In CCC xfire is enabled but on the Overdrive tab I can only choose one card...

 

Thats why I said use trixx. You can choose each card seperately and choose her volts or speed

 

whats the load under the gpu and cpu whilst playing crysis 3 and tomb raider and the fps?

 

A possible suggestion, but what gaming voltage reading do you get Nospheratu when you install only one card in the notebook, and then try the other?