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    finally crossfire, i think

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by nkarno, Jan 5, 2014.

  1. nkarno

    nkarno Notebook Guru

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    It took 6 weeks from the time the ebay auction was complete until the time the card got here but I finally have a second 5870m!
    I bought one of the two cards alienhack was selling- so it was coming from Greece and he sent it registered mail so that added like a month to the damn shipment. He said it didn't come with heat sink or crossfire cable, I guess in greek this also means xbracket but I took the bracket off the 460m and it seems to fit.

    Anyway it is all installed. The system boots, catalyst is set for crossfire enable, I can switch between the two cards in GPU-z but one card maxes out at 71c in 3dmark and the other never goes above 50c
    Also I noticed in the sensor tab of GPU-z, one card reports memory usage (dedicated and dynamic) and the other card does not report these fields at all.

    As soon as I saw the system booted with the cards I used ATIFlash to replace the rom on the second card. They both have the same bios version and all- but how do I know crossfire is really working as intended? Is there a specific render test or something to see? Also is it normal that one card would get so much hotter than the other? The problem with GPU-z is that both card dropdowns are just ATI 5800 series. It does not tell you which card you are looking at. I suspect it was my prime card getting to 71c which is ok from my previous testing and threads here.....
     
    nkarno, Jan 5, 2014
    #1
  2. J.Dre

    J.Dre Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    From what I remember, this was common for Crossfire.
     
    J.Dre, Jan 5, 2014
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  3. Akimitsui

    Akimitsui Notebook Evangelist

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    Yes, the "ATI 5800 series" is normal and nothing to worry about, even in my desktop where I have dual R9 270x's it just shows up as "R9 200 series." As for test's I have never done them before so I don't really know how to check properly. What I generally do is just load up a game that runs extremely well on AMD cards like Tomb Raider, Battlefield, etc, run it with a single card and then in crossfire. If there is a general performance boost in fps without any glitching on the screen then that's how I deem that crossfire is working.

    PS. It doesn't have to be an AMD-specific game, just try any recent game really.
     
    Akimitsui, Jan 6, 2014
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  4. Tsunade_Hime

    Tsunade_Hime such bacon. wow

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    You'll find sometimes with the latest ATI drivers, it'll say FirePro M7820.
     
    Tsunade_Hime, Jan 6, 2014
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  5. Alienware-L_Porras

    Alienware-L_Porras Company Representative

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    They all say X000 series :p
    It is like air, you can't see it but you know it's there haha. There could be some sort of benchmark that can help with the testing but I can't recall anything that specifically works for that.
     
    Alienware-L_Porras, Jan 7, 2014
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