m17x r2 xfire 5870's Screen Flickering / Jumping Issue

Hey Guys, I just bought a m17x r2 from a forum member recently, and all of a sudden last night it started screen flickering and being all jittery when playing several games. I've tried about 4 games and all do the same thing.

After researching for several hours last night, I've read that you need to update your BIOS (but I'm already on the A10), make sure the crossfire cable is securely attached (which it is), and make sure that I'm running the latest dell 5870 vBios (which I am). After checking all of those things....it still persists!

Then I decided to completely remove the 11.6 driver that I am using, and then clean it with driver sweeper, ccleaner, etc..and then re-install it. Still no improvement. I've basically done everything that I can think of shy of re-installing the OS. I've even reflashed the BIOS and vBios just to make sure they didn't get screwed up somehow.

Most of the time the games run completely fine, but when it does start to flicker, the FPS drop to about half (which makes me think that it somehow loses connection to the slave GPU via the crossfire cable) and then when within a few seconds, it stops and regains it's full FPS it was at before the screen flickering.

So, since my r2 is out of warranty...what the heck am I going to do about this? I can't afford new GPU's, motherboards, etc.....so any help would be MUCH appreciated!

Thanks in advance for all of your help!

EDIT: After reading a bit more on it, I'm thinking that maybe the crossfire cable is faulty? It's happened quite often apparently. How do I get my hands on one of those? Does Dell even sell them?

 

I had the same exact problem as you, and the only way I could fix mine was revert back to the original dell-alienware drivers from their website. As soon as I try to update to 11.6 I go back to screen flickering. I haven't noticed much loss in FPS in games anyway and I would rather have stable drivers without the screen flicker. Hope this helps.

 

thanks I'll give it a try. I'm also in contact with Dell support (well the original owner is anyway) b/c he has had problems with multiple GPU's that they sent out and he is trying to get new cards for me. Hopefully Dell steps up and gives the cards to me! I can't afford to buy a new card!

 

Ok I reverted back to the Dell vBios and the latest Dell driver but still flickering! I turn off the crossfire and everything works fine without problems....Any other suggestions out there? Any methods of getting Dell to replace my 2nd GPU or crossfire cable? Thanks!

 

I had similar problems and there is something that you may want to try that alleviated the symptom for me:

Revert your brightness and color display settings to the original or default settings.

For some reason the 2nd GPU renders images etc with the default settings, leading to a flickering phenomena.

This helped me. Try it.

What games are you having issues with? This alleviated my flickering with Fallout New Vegas and The Witcher 2.

 

I think that they are the default settings (according to CCC anyway)... Unless you are thinking of another way to revert them that I'm not thinking about??

 

sorry for late reply, you have to go into the display settings in Windows 7, not through CCC.

 

gottcha. I actually ended up convincing Dell that they needed to give me new cards even though they were technally out of warranty. I just got new 5870's in the mail 2 days ago and installed them and everything is now working fine except for now it's showing that directcompute (I think it's a part of directx 11) is not checked in GPU-z and I cannot play games using DX11?? See this thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/596181-directcompute-not-enabled.html