Are you Satisfeid with your AMD 7970m Crossfire?

I see allot of complaints that the AMD 7970m Crossfire is disastrous and something to avoid. I also see a few people reporting it is working well. I would like to have a poll to see if you are satisfied with your 7970m Crossfire purchase.

I have had my M18X R2 for >1 month now. For specs it has an AMD 7970m Crossfire, 12 gb Ram, 2 x .5 tb 7200RPM Hard Drives, and the Base Ivy Bridge CPU. It has had a few minor issues like the menu flickers in Skyrim and Fire fox was causing a system hard freeze occasionally. Skyrim I can live with until its hopefully fixed, and I fixed fire fox by turning off hardware acceleration. But every other game works well on max settings and good FPS in Crossfire. I regularly play Diablo 3, Star Craft 2, Tropic 4, Skyrim, Modern Warfare 3, Civ 5, L4D2, Dirt 3, and Need For Speed. I do not overclock my cards and I only benchmarked to be sure it was functioning properly.

I am very happy with my purchase and feel that for the price it is a better option than the 680 SLI. There are glitches with the cards but it is not a deal breaker. It appears to be common for both AMD and Nvidia to have bugs that need to be fixed with new hardware releases. I do think AMD and Dell are working to fix the reported problems and it can only get better.

Please vote in the poll to help people decide if the 7970s are good or something to avoid. This is my first post and I apologize if this has been posted before but I did not see any similar posts with a poll.

 

I am happy with it... Just frustrates me how stupid they have been with drivers...

 

After replacing my 7970m's for a texture flickering problem which slowly got worse, I am happy. I'll have to monitor them to make sure the problem doesn't return.

In games, this beast screams! And for the price that I paid, it makes me giddy

 

texture flickering? can you elaborate of the issue? and what games you had it with?

 

I'm beyond happy with my 7970's. They keep up with the 680 benchmarks I've seen so far, and considering the price difference, it was a steal! I'm having no major issues, they are powerful beasts of cards.

Skryim is the only game that has problems, and the problems are characteristic of driver issues, and will likely be fixed in the future.

I got lucky and a lot of people had been through a lot of trouble finding the better drivers by the time my cards appeared, so I went straight to decent drivers (desktop 12.7b and now I'm running dell official), but I haven't had of the major problems they report. Perhaps they got a bad batch, I don't know, and they have the right and reason to curse AMD or Dell, but not me. I'm very happy with my purchase, I would do it again, every time.

I'm not red for life, but having these cards doesn't make me feel like paying the nvidia premium anytime soon. It must make a huge difference getting these cards a month later than those early adopters who were seemingly ignored for quite some time. I feel bad for them, and it has affected my opinion of AMD. However, I never adopt new technology quite that fast, so this will likely never affect a purchase decision but rather advice to friends who may want to adopt early.

 

hey dukefluk ..how much did u get ur rig for?

 

The laptop was around 2600 with the alienware $50 code and the 250 off website promotion plus tax. Also had a deal with my credit card for 5% back on dell purchases.

 

Satisfied with the raw performance, particularly for the price. Very disappointed with the abysmal driver support. Although I am seemingly lucky and don't have problems with freezing and locking up, just seems to be the typical poor Crossfire performance in some games.

I would say, if I could afford it, I'd likely be paying for the upgrade to 680Ms because the driver support from AMD is just that terrible. They stung me with my M17 as well (that was crossfire 3870Ms), one driver release introduced a bug where the system would crash the second time I loaded up a game, and whenever I contacted AMD they just said to contact AW. (Others with 3870M crossfire, including in other systems, reported the same bug.)

 

hey dukefluk...thts a gr8 deal bro....I was watching the problems with 7970M Xfire and got a little impatient.....I had cut down on my other specs a little though ....

I did order my M18x for 2.8K inclusive of taxes with following :-

10% discount coupon- 300$
5%- Affiliate program discount e-card
50$- coupon
1% on credit card cash back

3rd Generation Intel Core i7-3610QM (6MB Cache)
6GB DDR3 at 1600MHz
18.4 inch (467.36 mm) WLED WideFHD (1080p) display (1920 X 1080)
Dual 2GB GDDR5 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680M - SLI Enabled
750GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit Service Pack 1, English, w/Media
Slot-Loading Dual Layer DVD Burner (DVD+-RW, CD-RW)
Killer Wireless-N 1103 a/g/n 3x3 MIMO for Gaming and Video and Bluetooth 4.0
1 Year Limited Warranty

 

For me, I saw it in Alan Wake for mountains in the beginning, Max Payne 3 with missing/flickering decals & graffiti here and there, and most noticeably in Heaven 3.0 when whole roof tops would disappear and reappear.

To elaborate, textures would turn black and then reappear, or textures would disappear/reappear constantly.

 

Got my systems working fine love them so much I got 2 but so far I love it for price I occasionally think of getting 680m or simply getting a desktop to replace my sager and one m18x for smaller m17x but I love the build of the m18x and the power and portability lol

@ arestado you had 580 sli and you replaced it for 670 superclocked is it better than sli solution?
also is crossfire better than your 580 or 670?
Thx

 

When I had 4 and then later just 3 GTX 580's, they were a lot more powerful than my 2 670s. Yet I sold the 580s and my 3 30" dell monitors (one is still for sale actually) and got the 2 670s and a 27" 3D monitor. Downsized, but made some extra cash and got rid of the headache that was surround gaming at 2560X1600 times 3.

 

Very nice. I am going to try this. I am almost happy with the 12.7b drivers provided they wont freeze me when browsing.

Some games like F1 2011 and Arma 2, throttle around too much on CF which annoys me so I end up running off 1 card.
If these things can be fixed ill be a happy chappy.

 

No... very disappointed. Seems nothing has changed with AMD as far as crummy drivers and buggy hardware are concerned. I had high hopes they would do things right with 7970M... I guess skunks don't ever change their stripes. The impressive performance potential and lower price of the 7970M are not enough for me to overlook their lack of regard for customer experience and their responsibility to produce good drivers. Considering this is their flagship mobile GPU, I think it speaks volumes about what a sorry outfit they have become over the past couple of years. Maybe I have set the bar too high on expectations, but I don't think so.

 

Mr. Fox, RMA them if you can - it DID fix the graphical glitches I was having.

 

Arestavo - I'm not ruling out RMA as an option, but I'm traveling too much at the moment to do that. I will consider my options in a few weeks when my schedule permits.

The good news is that with the new vBIOS and 12.7b hotfix driver I am no longer having the serious issues that were a huge impediment to using my system. I have not experienced the pinstriped screen problem since updating the firmware and driver. I am no longer having random system freezes on the desktop. I am no longer having problems with BSOD when streaming YouTube videos. So, things are definitely looking up. I still have some issues with Adobe CS3 applications freezing, several games still do not work correctly, so until all of these issues are resolved I will continue to be dissatisfied with the 7970M CrossFire product because I not giving any credit for "almost" fixed.

I do still wonder if vRAM overheating is an issue, but my new thermal pads and paste are at home, about 2,000 miles from where I am now. I will try that before looking into GPU replacement because I would prefer correcting the issues with the functionality of the parts I already have if there is a chance that is possible. If that does not correct the problem, I will consider these cards defective. Some of the issues I am still seeing suggest problems with the vRAM chips, but I want to rule out a thermal issue first.

Replacing a pair of defective GPU modules with non-defective parts will still leave the matter of lackluster AMD driver support, and until that changes it will be difficult for me to say that I am satisfied with the product. It's also difficult for me to be satisfied knowing that AMD lacked concern for customer experience to such an extent that they released a product with essentially no driver support. When AMD Tech Support told me (verbally and in writing) there was no driver available with proper support for the 7970 GPU chipset after it had been on the market for 30+ days, it really damaged my perception of AMD as a company. They'll need to convince me they care by releasing high quality drivers on a frequent and regular basis that demonstrate they are paying attention to the end user experience.

 

Me.Fox is 12.7b better?

 

I have found the desktop 12.7 betas to be better than the Dell and AMD 12.6s.

 

Are they stable? i was getting random system hangs on desktop with them. Should i update vBios?

 

Im in the middle of yes & no. So far Ive been getting lockups (solid orange screen) and random bsod. When its working properly in games I am very happy with its performance though. Im still pissed about proper driver support. I used to have 12.6 then freshly installed dells driver yesterday idk if it makes a difference, but I will see.

 

Guys, I was having a whole lot more serious issues with freezing and BSOD that were eliminated almost entirely by removing a dozen or so of the last Windows Updates. Whether it was the Windows Updates specifically, or the manner in which those updates cause problems with the known-buggy AMD drivers I cannot say. Try using System Restore to get rid of the updates installed from July 1 to present and see if your systems become more stable like it did for me. Doing this made a huge improvement for me. It may be just one Windows Update, but I don't have time to fiddle with installing them one by one to identify which patch is the offender. Change your Windows Update settings to only notify you when updates are available, but let you choose whether or not to download and install them, otherwise the problems will return after they automatically reinstall themselves.

I have posted this more than once, so I am making this a colored bold large font in hopes that it does not get overlooked.

 

What I am wondering is, how a 'large' company like AMD make such powerful hardware and not being able to test it before they release it to the market. They let us and 'other companies' like Dell to figure out how to make them functional and after 2 months of seeing people of this forum struggling in fixing something or the other and those cards start working at maybe 80% of our expectation.

I know if there is no hardware issue and a proper driver fix, there is high potential and they can perform way beyond our believes... AMD should spend more time in doing something all the way to the end before rushing and getting into trouble again and again.

 

Desktop 12.7 betas are stable for me, and this is how I make sure everything runs right:

(Preface - need Driver Sweeper or Driver Fusion and CCleaner installed)

1. Uninstall AMD CAP, reboot.
2. Express uninstall all AMD software, reboot.
3. Hit F8 constantly to get the prompt to load safe mode. Load safe mode.
4. Use Driver Sweeper or Driver Fusion to scan for and then uninstall all AMD. Reboot.
5. After loading into windows, run CCleaner and do a registry scan. Remove all errors found, do again and again until clear of all errors. Reboot.
6. Now install Desktop 12.7 betas. Only install Driver, CCP, and install manager. If a yellow warning instead of a green check mark at the end of the installation is shown, right click on the desktop to make sure CCP installed. If not, repeat steps without rebooting. Reboot.
7. Install AMD CAP 12.7. Reboot.
8. Enjoy!

 

I was getting a green mark after install, so i guess i was making it right (the same as you described above). Can you try to Run Firefox with Photoshop cs5 or cs6 and leave them just opened for 2-5 hours.

 

I could install firefox, but I don't have photoshop. Is it free or is there a trial version to use with the test you are describing?

 

Mr Fox, nice work pin-pointing the date of the windows update.

I have since found that, turning off " Use Hardware Acceleration when possible" in Firebox is working for me with stopping the black and white pinstripe freezes. I'm on the 12.7b now, 2 days no freezing... its looking good...touch wood.

Has anyone had any luck reducing microstuttering? I'm assuming (since this is my first CF setup) thats why games like ARMA 2 feel laggy as hell at 60fps.
Anyone have any tricks ?

 

Not sure if this will help anyone but I just got my M18x R2 from Dell about a week ago and so far, I can play Witcher 2, Skyrim, BF3, with crossfire enabled all on ultra without any problems other than occassional stuttering on Skyrim. The only initial issue I had was with the 12.6 display driver from AMD. Everytime I attempted to install it, the screen would go black and become totally unresponsive. Tried it three times and no luck... so I went straight to the 12.7b from the factory display drivers and no problems since except for the screen going black every once in a while when I try to use paypal on steam? Maybe the early 7970m's are a bit defective as it seems like people who wait or get replacements are having more success with them.

 

@TBoneSan - glad to hear things are looking up... finally. I haven't used FireFox for a very long time and do not have it installed on my system, but I do have Adobe CS3 and there are some known issues with the current AMD drivers and Adobe apps. That is significantly improved with 12.7b hotfix. Not fixed completely, but improvement is a good thing.

Fatal442 - I think your observation about defects in the early GPUs is starting to look like the reality of the situation.

Funny you should mention an issue using PayPal on Steam. I haven't used PayPal on Steam, but the last 3 purchases (in the past 10 days) I made on Steam had issues with my system locking up when entering the shopping cart. I had to do a forced shutdown more that once. I pressed FN+F7 and loaded the Intel HD graphics and completed the transactions without freezing. This is very odd behavior, but it does seem related to the GPU or some type of a conflict with the display driver.

 

I agree with the defective hardware conclusion, as I've suggested in a few posts now, but I wanted to chime in to say I've made several Steam purchases (non using paypal, however) and haven't had any issues at all. I use chrome, not firefox, however.

 

Me, too... I really like Chrome a lot. I stopped using FireFox about a year ago. The issues I had with Steam purchases just recently were encountered while using the Steam Client, not a web browser.

 

Good point, I didn't even think about that, I actually made all of my purchases through the steam client. The fact that I use Chrome is actually irrelevant

 

It happend to me using EA Origin too when I tried to purchase one of the BF3 Expansion packs which is strange and would suggest the problem has something to do with Paypal rather than a certain browser.

As for the defective cards, I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that Clevo had to return a few of the early shipments to AMD because they were found defective. A bunch of those defective cards could've easily made it into Alienware shipments and laptops as well.

 

I have no problems with my 7970M crossfire now that I am running 12.7 beta and removed DisplayLink software for my external USB display. The latest drivers bumped my 3DMark11 score to 10400 from 10250. I'm running stock clocks and I have no plans to overclock.

 

Still having problem running skyrim and Civ 5, lots of flickers. also running 12.7.

 

Ditto on Skyrim... it's so bad that I don't even bother trying to play it any more. I don't have Civ 5.

 

Glad your not having problems If you can get a solid pair of working 7970m's theres a lot to like about them and with more proper driver solutions hopefully on the way, they should become even more powerful.

Its unfortunate that so many people are having all these problems. If AMD had released less buggy hardware with better drivers, I think they could've crushed Nvidia based on the very high price point of the 680m and small difference performance wise.

 

I was under the impression skyrim runs so well with 7970, i was looking forward to play with some of those high texture mods, turns out my single nvidia 580 runs better . I am waiting to buy the nvidia 680 as upgrades. Can you still return your 7970m , mr fox?

 

I think you are only allowed 21 days for returns...

 

Yes, if you'd like to return your notebook you have 21 days to do so. Get in touch with Dell support (over the phone would probably be your best bet) they'll send you a box and you can return the system to them for full credit. However, I do believe you would have to pay the return shipping and a restocking fee as well.

Returning Dell

 

Do you always have to pay the restocking fees if it has some defects to the body as well as some hardware?

 

At this point I am terribly frustrated with 7970M CrossFire problems, but still committed to trying to get them working correctly. I'm getting closer to the point of surrender, but there is a sliver of hope that is pushing me to keep trying right now, LOL. (I'm kind of a weirdo that way, but I don't like the idea of giving up easily when it comes to computers.) I am confident that Dell/Alienware is going to take care of valued customers that have malfunctioning 7970M CrossFire setups if we cannot get them to function as intended.

If the product you purchased is defective, there should be no restocking fees because you will most likely receive an exchange for replacement of the defective parts versus a refund.

 

i love my current set up with the 7970m's did have some flickering issues with skyrim and BF3 with the out of the box drivers , but followed Mr foxs advice with a fresh install of windows with 12.7b drivers and now i am over the moon with the xFire set up , was playing BF3 last night for 3 hours straight cards never went above 65 degrees and my FPS never dropped below 85 on ultra !

Skyrim on the other hand maxed out dropped to 40-45 FPS in big areas with very little GPU use

 

SchneebalL, glad to hear your system is working so well. The 7970M CF setup is awesome when it works as it should.

For Skyrim, I posted some advice in another thread that should help. Here is what I posted:

 

Thanks again Mr Fox your a credit to this site !

 

Thanks to everyone who has posted about issues with 7970m's, or lack thereof, it is really helpful to those of us who are configuring a new m18x.

 

Thank you for the compliment. +1 Rep. I do what I can.

Collaboration is one of the awesome things about this community.

 

Still very dissatisfied with these video cards... they are just not a good product from my perspective.

Bumping this thread back to the top so more people can cast their votes. So far, 37% failure rate in customer satisfaction with 7970M CrossFire. Too bad those who are on their second set don't get to vote a second time.

 

I think that the power the 7970m in crossfire is amazing over the 6990m crossfire performance. I love the m18x R2 the power is amazing. Sadly I realized that for $3500 i want using my system as it should be used. In the time I had it it stayed at my desk connected to my monitor speakers mouse and keyboard...so pretty much a desktop. I decided to return it for full refund and build a desktop with 670 680 and sli it in the future for 1500. I think driver issue needs to be solved to make 7970 shine but they still need work only problem I experience was diablo 3. I think in the future when I see a good deal for am m18x with an xm or m17x ill pick it up....I still have my gf m18x R2 at my disposal and I can always trade with her.

Quick question is a evga gtx 590 better than crossfire 7970m on a 24 inch 1080 120hz 3d? I don't use 3d
But someone has for sale a rig with one for 1k
also has gtx 680m sli been proven to be better drivers aside?

 

I think going NVIDIA is always going to be a better option if good driver support it important. Based on my experience, even 580M SLI is better than 7970M CF. Not as powerful, but it works "the way it's meant to be played" and did so consistently. The last CrossFire system I had that worked properly was 5870M. I had about as many issues with 6970M and 6990M CrossFire malfunctioning as I am having with 7970M CrossFire. From what I have seen posted here at NBR, 680M and 7970M are close to equal in terms of performance, but 680M seems to have far fewer functionality problems. That seems to be pretty much the status quo.

 

My 6990m crossfire on my sager never gave me problems.
Is it true you can't overclock 680m at the moment?
Was reading a desktop article about nvidia not really supporting the whole Oc thing and the company has to follow specific guidelines