***M18x - AMD Crossfire (Driver Questions, Performance, Problems) Discussion Thread***

As according to the roadmap these are just mid-entry level chips (the lowest one is new while the 8800 is a rebrand) the new 8900M series will be released in Q2.

 

Quick question, if I were to upgrade my M18xR1 x2 6990m CF to x2 7970m CF, the support plates that came with the 6990m's will not fit the 7970m's?

 

I believe they do.

 

Ah I see, so I can use the support plates from my old 6990m's for the new 7970m's. Great.

What about the thermal pads? Do I need to buy a new sheet or can I reuse the old ones from my 6990m?

 

Use the same pads. No need to replace them if they are in good condition. The 7970M heat sinks are larger and more effective than those for the 6990M, so you might want to buy a pair of them. They are only around $25 each directly from Dell/Alienware and come with the necessary pads and TIM pre-applied. They also include new support plates, so you will not need to re-use the old ones. This would allow you to leave the old 6990M GPU/heat sink assemblies intact. If you plan to sell them, they would be worth more. If you plan to keep them, swapping out GPU assemblies is super fast and easy with assemblies to pop in and out.

 

Thanks for that, so technically I have everything (else) I need if I were to buy just the naked 7970m's.
I do not overclock or game that much, so I probably would be OK with the thinner heatsinks. Unfortunately Dell UK are an absolute ripoff compared to their US counterparts so I probably would lose money on buying the new 7970m heatsinks and selling the 6990m+heatsinks together.

One last question (I should really include all of these in one post...), does the MUX switching work in the R1 under 7970m CF?

 

The M18x R1 works with 7970M CF the same or better than it does with 6990M CF. There is no loss in functionality and it is totally compatible, including graphics switching. The back plates are a bear to get off the GPU. They have an adhesive insulator/gasket that sticks way better than it needs to. You can use a hair dryer to warm them up and that helps get them to turn loose. Otherwise, pulling them off cold will bend them up pretty badly. The back plates are inexpensive. I think you can buy them on eBay for next to nothing, but I have not looked for a long time. If you re-use the old ones, be sure to confirm the plate does not short against anything on the PCB. (That is what the adhesive insulator gasket is for.)

 

Anyone else seen blue screens on boot right after login on 7970Ms on the M18XR2? I am on the dell installed version of Windows 7, 16GB of RAM, Mushkin enhanced Chronos Deluxe 240GB SSD for boot and 2x480 in raid 0 for data and a 750 and 320GB hard disk.

I have tried 12.9-12.11 drivers and all versions except the ones on the dell site are causing BSOD.

 

I think every 7970m user has had to deal with BSOD at some point.
Driver versions that worked without a hitch for me were the dells drivers, 12.7beta and 12.8 official release. All the newer drivers give me problems in some way shape or form. I'm on 12.11 beta 11 now and I had to do some heavy backyard sh#t to get them to work.

 

Eventually it boots, but it takes multiple tries usually. This version is better than any of the previous releases or betas except for Dell's "cooked" version

 

Try booting without the power cord plugged in - apparently that stops the BSOD.
Also try getting CCC to not start on windows boot.

 

Sorry for such an amature question but....what do you mean by Dell's cooked drivers?

I bought my m18 back in June and i have the 7970's and have NEVER changed my drivers. All i play is Crysis 2 (hundreds of hours), my dell driver seems to be ok, but i do get the "display driver has failed to respond" every once in a while.

I have never had a gaming laptop before, and i have never updated a driver cause i am not sure how to...i have read and re-read all the how to's....some say to boot into safe mode and use a driver cleaner, some dont do that cause of possible registry errors...some say just install over top of old drivers...i can get kinda intimedating. So i have just kept my dell drivers.

But i keep hearing such good things about the 12.11 beta's......i mean its been 2 maybe 3 months now....why no official version....i haven't even seen an article saying their close to an official release. Where coming up on the launch of new cards, aren't we.

Sorry guys for what some of ya might call a stupid question....but i am trying to learn.....thanks

 

What I mean by that is that the version that is on the Dell Website has been modified by Dell.

If performance is OK with the drivers you have and you don't have issues, don't upgrade. I took the chance because of the performance gains for several of the newer games that were listed in each release notes. To be fair, I do spend most of my time playing LoL, WoW, Starcraft II, Diablo III, and Battlefield 3. I also play a few other games and usually pick up a new title or two every month.

 

Hi

I recently purchased the m18x r2 with hd 7970 crossfire, i was wondering how to utilize the HDMI in. I found the button on the pc and when i click it it asks me to plug in the HDMI device, which i did (its a HD video camcorder, with HDMI) all that happened was that the question about plugging in the device went away, nothing else.

How do i proceed? is the hdmi kind of like a TV where i can view what ever on the screen that is plugged in on a different channel, or do i actually get access to the device through windows.

The desire is to use the HD-Video-Cam for live streaming and/or as a high quality substitute for a webcam.

I did have some problems with the HDMI out being laggy when hooking it up to a TV, but upgraded to Catalyst 12.11b11 and that seemed to fix the output issue.

hoping for an answer.

Thank you

 

The HDMI in (at least on the M18X R1) is not an input in the true sense of the word. It is more of a bypass that switches video and audio from your computer to whatever is plugged in. For example, if you have a game console plugged in, you're basically using your M18x as a very expensive and small TV/speaker system, but this data gets routed straight to the display and speakers, none of it passes through the system, so you can't record or stream or get that data into your computer at all.

 

Just with regards to your TV output being laggy. Make sure you turn off any extra processing your TV may do. Eg. My Bravia does MotionFlow. Turn all that rubbish off and try and get your TV running a standard 60Hz

 

Are the driver and other issues essentially ironed out at this point? Or are people still having issues?

 

I'm having pretty massive problems with Far Cry 3 at the moment. Has anyone been able to get this game running smoothly on a 6990M Crossfire setup? I can't seem to get it to go over 60 FPS without dropping everything to LOW. As soon as I hit MEDIUM or HIGH, the framerate drops to 50fps, which is fine, but as soon as anything happens on screen, the framerate starts to swing wildly between 25 and 50. Currently I have the settings on Very HIGH and it doesn't seem to make any difference at all if I tweak individual settings.

SOMETIMES the second GPU seems to give up entirely and my entire game shuts down to a rather non-fluid 25 FPS constantly. Other games (like Borderlands 2 for example) seem to run fine.

I've completely reinstalled Windws 8 Pro x64 yesterday and installed the latest 12.11 beta 11 drivers and 12.11 CAP 2. My system was overheating, so I cleaned out the fans and now it is running within acceptable temperature ranges.

 

Do you get the same poor performance running Far Cry 3 under Windows 7? I mention this because it may be that it is just not a good game to run under Windows 8.

I am finding Windows 8 to slightly degrade system performance in a few areas, even though overall it is a fairly decent OS. It is not a huge performance hit. It is enough for me to notice and document it, but slight enough that the average user might not recognize it because they only do average tasks. I have found benchmark scores are lower and my drive read/write speeds are slightly lower. (I am dual booting Windows 7/8 on separate partitions on the same SSD RAID0 setup, so it is fairly easy to compare the two.) The drive speeds are generally slightly lower across all drives and partitions. CPU performance is also slightly hindered under Windows 8. So, it is CPU and GPU benchmarks and drive benchmarks that are lower across the board. Hopefully, Windows 8 SP1 will address these shortcomings.

 

Have you tried with Vsync off? Vsync seems to give too much stutter and I get much better performance with it off.
Not only that, but I think Farcry 3 is a hog to run, with everything on at 2xAA one of my CPU cores is usually hitting100% so I'm thinking that its perhaps a CPU bottleneck for many users.
Regardless, even at around +60fps the small stutters are enough to turn me off. The fluidity I've come to expect from my system over the past few months just isn't there with this game.

 

I have had Vsync off, on and even on the dreaded 2-frames mode. At the moment I'm running a custom settings profile with Post FX and Shadows set to either medium or low with SSAO activated instead of HDAO. The game runs better, but it still likes to take a dive from 55 to 25 fps quite frequently. I haven't checked to see what this game does to my CPU, so I have no info regarding that. Maybe I'll take a look at that later.

Either way, it seems like this game is just another in a long line of half-baked PC titles rushed out the door. I don't even think Nvidia users are having a great time with this one either...

 

Yeah, you're right on that!

 

It's very rare that a PC title nowadays is fully optimized, reason being two-fold: PCs are upgradeable (and laptops are easily bought/sold), and piracy on PC games is much higher than on consoles. If we had the same level of software optimization which PS3 games get, for example, we'd easily be able to run a game on a GTX 260m at maximum settings.

 

I've just installed (per Remote Desktop, no less!) Windows 7 in a separate VHD and configured it as a second boot, now downloading driver packages. I will try this particular game from within Win 7 and see if it works better. I'm only hoping I don't have to install two copies of Farcry

 

My dual boot install was successful.
There was no contest, Windows 7 beat Windows 8 hands down. Same exact video drivers (12.11 beta 11 + CAP 2), FC3 running in dx11 mode + Ultra ran much smoother and more consistently under Win 7. Even on top of a radio tower my system managed a fairly steady 50+ FPS, where Win8 managed, at best, 40FPS and at worst (when looking in the direction of open water) 15 FPS. With Win 7 it didn't matter which direction I looked, everything ran the same.

I'm wiping my boot partition and putting a fresh copy of Win 7 on. Shame... I really wanted to like Windows 8. Maybe they'll fix it. Or maybe I'll just throw it in a VM and stare at it like some kind of curiosity or a zoo animal, poking and prodding it, pondering it's reason for existence...

 

I have the same problems like You with my m18xR1. I get the same score at 3dMark. I tried everything You did and still can see some slowdowns at graphic even if FRAPS shows 60fps all the time. Have You found a solution for the issue?

 

So, when did this problem begin? Just in the past few days? Trying using Windows System Restore to go back to a date that you know for certain it ran correctly.

May not be related, but it would be an interesting coincidence based on timing...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m18x/703198-fubar-windows-update.html

...and, it would not surprise me to see it happen.

 

you are very lucky... I can't get my CrossX to work with FarCry3 and I'm struggling with 30fps (all high settings). Looks like Skyrim again .
Drivers: 12.11 Beta 11 and Cap 12.11 Cap 2.

 

I have a m18x with 2 7970Ms, using the latest beta video drivers I have used the following to get it to work with the least amount of problems:
- Use the Optimized settings for graphic options (Should be able to play at max with my setup but it crashes more often when I do).
- Drop to DX9 as DX11 seems to crash way to often
- Add MaxFPS="45" to the FC3 config file (after ShowFPS using the same format as the other strings)
- Lock the config file after you have adjusted the settings to what you want so the game doesn't remove your changes.
- Though the latest beta drivers have a crossfire profile for FC3 I find just turning off CF lowers the crash rate for me.

There are a few threads on the Farcry3 forums about this with tips to get this to work. Even with these settings I have the following problems:
- Game crashes during multi-player map load and after multi-player end results often
- After a multi-player game I will usually have a VERY LOW FPS (4-15)during the between match lobby but it is back to normal when the next game loads. (This makes it impossible to setup loadouts between matches. Reload the game if you want to change a loadout, have multiple loadouts for each gun to be able to counter some of the cheese setups people use)
- After fiddling with the tattoo options for multi-player, the game will usually crash when saving the changes.
- Sometimes when harvesting an animal in single-player the game will crash. Save often.

EDIT: I just want to throw out there that I have tried several different drivers and the best so far have been the latest beta 12.11 .net ones)

 

While I would like to see an official driver from dell (It had been over 6MO and still nothing) I am using the latest AMD beta driver (With .net) with little to no issues. Most of the problems I have come across have been with the game or application itself and not the drivers specifically. Overall I am Super happy with my 2x7970Ms. While sometimes I wish I had gone for the NVIDIA cards, the premium price was not worth "peace of mind" regarding drivers since they perform about the same. I do wish that I could have a straight up version of windows without all the alienware "tweaks" as historically I do not trust OEM tinkering with windows... at all. I am also finding that for the most part, I can run all games just about maxxed out with a single card and see little gain when using CF. The most notible difference with CF is framerates are generally stable at a single number and are less prone to variation (i,e,: They stay at at 60 with vsync and never dip regardless of whatever tomfoolery is on the screen at that time). While this is pretty much the most expensive computer I have ever owned, it has been very solid thus far and I do not regret my purchase.

 

It seems like the complaints in the forum have slowed down compared to what they were. It was pretty crazy for about the first 5 months. Some people (as noted above) are very happy with it. But, it still seems like the majority of the GPU issues posted about in our Community have something to do with 7970M versus 680M. There still appears to be a somewhat inconsistent end user experience from one system to the next with 7970M CF. It is still a bit more prone to not work as well with new game releases because AMD does not stay as engaged with game developers as NVIDIA does, but that is status quo with AMD, not specific to 7970M CF. It's still less expensive, and many people find that to be the most attractive quality.

 

Yes Mr. Fox, specially with that themn DPC latency on the Nvidia Drivers!!!

 

is just one gpu under full load and the other just there to help it a bit. i ran some tests on msi kombuster just quick. and 1 gpu is 99% and the other one sits around 1 %


and overclocking it to some peoples stable clocks at like 950 / 1325. does tearing on the windows screen

 

You have to change the settings for the software you are using to conduct tests. On Nvidia it's like this: Go to the NVIDIA panel - Manage 3d settings - Program settings - Choose the program you're going to run - Change SLI rendering mode from Automatic to Force alternate frame rendering 1.

Edit - just saw you have AMD - refer to this site:

http://www.geeks3d.com/20101209/tip...-crossfire-support-for-opengl-applications/2/

 

He's talking about AMD cards though so the Nvidia thing won't work for him. I have 7970's in xfire but I've never bothered checking to see what percentage of use they're getting. My bet is Mr. Fox knows the answer, maybe pm him if he doesn't pop in here with an answer in the near term.

 

I'm jumping ship as soon as I can. AMD was doing a good job, but they still haven't gotten their driver situation under control. Additionally, my Crossfire likes to disable itself randomly without warning (especially if I connect to my laptop via Remote Desktop while I'm away from home). The hardware is nice, and generally AMD gets their game together a few months after a game has been released, but by that point, I've already lost interest. I remember how much of a horror story Skyrim was. Last night I installed it again out of curiosity, everything works fine, 60 FPS solid on ULTRA settings and the GPUs were barely breaking a sweat, the fans were barely on. Doesn't matter a single bit, though, because I've lost interest in Skyrim. We will see optimal performance in FarCry 3 in 3-6 months, but nobody will be playing by then and will have moved on to the next game that runs like a catastrophe on AMD GPUs.

When I had 2 Nvidia GTX 460s in SLI on my previous computer I never had these problems. Plus I had Physx and games would run solidly on release day.

BTW: What's the difference between the normal drivers and the drivers with .NET support?

 

I corrected my post accordingly, it's a program issue for SLI/CFX setups. I'm assuming Kombuster is an OpenGL application, hope it's not making an a** out of "u" and "me" heh

 

What programs and games is it happening in ?

 

I moved your "Quick question on crossfire" to the appropriate thread for that. Please see the opening post for a description of the purpose for this thread.

What you are experiencing with Kombustor is normal. It can do that with NVIDIA cards as well if you don't have the right driver tweaks.

Running Kombustor benchmark tests are OK, but avoid running burn-in or stress tests with Kombustor or Furmark. Doing so can ruin your video cards.

 

While that is typical, it is not ideal. The NVIDIA cards behave the same way on standard settings and you have to manually select AFR1 as pointed out by Radi324. The trouble is, you do not have that type of granular control using the resources provided by AMD. You should see both video cards running at 85% utilization or higher for them to live up to their full potential. This is a driver/software problem, not a hardware problem.

Radeon Pro can help a great deal on CrossFire systems. It adds some configuration functionality that is lacking in CCC similar to what NVIDIA users have in the Control Panel. The most effective way I found with AMD is to try different AMD profiles with games and benchmarks there were not intended for. Through the process of elimination it is often possible to find one that works well with another game or benchmark. At that point, all you need to do is associate that Radeon Pro profile with the additional executable so that it uses the profile at launch. It can be time consuming trial and error, but it is definitely worth it when the results turn out great.

 

12.11 NOW WORKS WITHOUT BSOD!

This actually seems to work for me! After months of tinkering with 12.9, 12.10 and 12.11 and not getting any of them to work, this simple solution seems to do the trick. The part about not letting CCC start isnt necessary. All I did was to install 12.11 beta on top on my 12.8 (no uninstall, driversweeper or anything like that) and with powercord unplugged, then I rebooted and I waited for it to completely start up to the desktop before plugging in the powercord again. No BSODs as of yet.

This simple solution yet AMD isnt able to fix the root cause of the problem (what ever it may be). Silly, really.

 

Great news Skain,
That seemed to work for me on occasions. Sadly it isn't always the ticket but usually does the trick.
AMD drivers with these GPUs are frustrating aren't they

 

well i figured it out my gpus are running fine kombuster is just outtawack i think. on other tests both gpus were tested and are working lol.

on a side note no problems with overclocking anymore. flickering goes away once i start up a game or test and stays away. kinda annoying but cant reallly do anything aobut it.

newest driver seems ok for me sept it dont like firefox sometimes when i open it i get bsod.wich is kinda odd but im using google chrome now wich i like anyways. fire fox is a prefferance tho lol

 

I get the same flickering with most OCs until I play a game, then it somehow settles downs. With firefox, try disabling hardware acceleration in the options if you happen to want to use it again.

 

not letting overclock now after doing a clean driver install. on msi 2.3.0. maybe ill try a earlier version. newesest drivers to. lol its not like a new to overclock anyways. but it would be nice i had it overclocking when my drivers wearnt cleaned out now there just set at zero







edit. got rid of my bsod tho lol

 

I'd just like to point something out from my limited experience, and that's coming from Nvidia hardware. Flickering issues plagued my system as well, until I realised that I had left the forcing of AFR1 enabled on my system. Turned it off, and all flickering issues disappeared. If there's an equivalent on an AMD system, then that may be the problem, and not actually the drivers themselves. Most applications, especially browsers, do not support SLI/CFX. Sorry if this is not related or anything, just trying to help! Good to hear you solved your BSOD though

 

That's a good suggestion, Radi324. AMD does not have the same level of granular control in CCC that we do in the NVIDIA Control Panel. But, if CCC is set to use the wrong profile (CAP) for the application it would be the equivalent of what you are referring to with manually setting AFR1 or AFR2. The easiest way to do this with both NVIDIA and AMD is to reset the Control Panel to system defaults, and that removes any guesswork about it. The default settings work best for most applications.

 

its only showing me temps on one card???? anyone else experiancing this?

crossfire is working properly. i tried open monitor shows both
gpuz shows both


recomendations on a good monitor? or are those the most commonly used ones?

 

Yes, that's common. Use HWiNFO64 instead. It is a lot more useful overall. Not only will it feed information for on-screen display to MSI Afterburner for CPU and other information, has great fan controls as well.

I think you will find information in the opening posts of these threads very useful:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...sink-7970m-crossfire-upgrade.html#post8568526

HOW TO: Monitoring CPU and GPU Temperatures In-Game/In-Benchmark with On-Screen Display (you can use the latest version of HWiNFO64)

 

HWiNFO64 is brilliant stuff but crashes my computer when it launches sometimes, have you had any similar experiences?