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

did a 3D mark 11

got P6492

is this normal?

AMD Radeon HD 6970M / 6990M video card 3DMark 11 benchmark test score
Name

Description

Processor
Processor
Get it! Intel Core i7-2860QM Processor
Processor clock
797 MHz
Physical / logical processors
1 / 8
# of cores
4
Graphics Card
Graphics Card
Get it! AMD Radeon HD 6970M / 6990M
Vendor
Dell Computer Corporation
# of cards
2
SLI / CrossFire
On
Memory
4096 MB
Core clock
100 MHz
Memory clock
150 MHz
Driver name
Driver version
8.930.0.0
Driver status
FM Approved
General
Operating system
64-bit Windows 7 (6.1.7601)
Motherboard
Alienware M18xR1
Memory
16384 MB
Module 1
4096 MB Nanya Technology 9 @ 800 MHz
Module 2
4096 MB Nanya Technology 9 @ 800 MHz
Module 3
4096 MB Nanya Technology 9 @ 800 MHz
Module 4
4096 MB Nanya Technology 9 @ 800 MHz

Detailed scores
3DMark Score
P6694
Graphics Score
6725
Physics Score
7549
Combined Score
5564
GraphicsTest1
31.99 FPS
GraphicsTest2
32.88 FPS
GraphicsTest3
41.5 FPS
GraphicsTest4
19.6 FPS
PhysicsTest
23.97 FPS
CombinedTest
25.88 FPS

i see some guy getting score of 8000!! with everyhting 10 FPS faster then me

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m18x/601148-6990m-crossfire-guide-3.html

actuly it's MR FOX

 

I got:

P6396 3DMarks

Specs in sig.

P.S. I think this chart is pretty cool:

 

FYI, Mr. Fox is overclocking more or less everything to its max on those kinda runs and he will also be using a modded vbios and modded bios to achieve those kind of figures....typically, scores in the region of 8k are only achievable by heavy overclocking, so dont fret.

 

That is a cool chart. Is that something new in the Futuremark benchmark results? If not, where did that come from, bro?

 

Unfortunately I'm not sure... I just clicked around the results page... I think the link had something to do with "PC Health" or some such nonsense

 

OK, I went back and checked, and yes... click on the "Tips for Improving Your Score" button and you will see that. Thanks for posting it. I probably never would have seen it otherwise. This will help answer the "does this seem too low" question that we see on the forum all the time.

 

Hi all!

I don't know if I'm in the right thread...

I got a strange issue on startup sometimes when I come back from job.

I click on start button and before the Chrome Red AlienHead I got a black screen with a little white dash on top-left corner. I have to wait about 4 mins until my computer boot. Is that a known issue? I'm afraid that it's not windows because it is before the Alienhead...

 

Hi Joce21, sounds like your computer is stalling for some reason right after POST. Usually this is the point where the machine scans for a bootable OS. Do you have anything plugged in like a USB stick, memory card or a CD?

Go into your BIOS (F2 at the Red AlienHead) and check your boot order. Make sure your system boots from your HDD first. Do you have a RAID? If so, you have to tell it to boot from the RAID.

If everything is set properly and unplugging your USB devices doesn't solve anything, try running a disk check over your boot disk (Right-click the disk, choose properties, tools, check disk for errors. You will have to schedule it to run at next boot.)

 

good advice, locust76

 

noob question, how can I be sure that both of my 6990m's are running when I play a game?

 

gatorkea,

You can get GPU-Z and open two instance of this software and check if your cards are used in games or you can get RadeonPro and activate CFX settings so you can see the % load inside games.

locust76,

Thank you for your advice! I'll check this out.

 

Thank you , joce21 I will give that a try

 

I'm having brightness issues. It's all max brightness but it randomly dims and then becomes bright again. What's going on!?

Driver version: 8.93-111205a-132079C-ATI

catalyst: 12.1

Thank you

 

After getting my new M18x last week and after doing a bit of benchamrking. I go and start the games that I like to play and I have black line going down the side if the screen on a intermitant basis. Also my screen flickers but not like a normal flicker it pulls the image on the screen to the right and then goes back.

When Xfire is disabled there is no issue. An thoughts any one?

 

I have a weird issue lately, when I boot without being pluged in, my crossfire will be Disabled, but when I boot when pluged in, it boots with crossfire enabled, anyone know why it does this? or is just the battery that is being lame.

 

Have you thought of checking your power settings in control panel for running on battery? - I am not 100% but maybe if you have "on battery" set to power save or something other than "high performance", that might affect things....just something to look into first before looking into other avenues...AMD PowerPlay can be a royal pain...

 

Yeah, its on high performance on everything, but i presume it Might be the AMD power play crap at work here. Ever since I re-installed my drivers that thing has been present.

 

Just my 2 cents How about unchecking powerplay, apply, then checking powerplay on and apply again?
Had an issue yesterday where I was not happy with the way my games were running. Ran 3Dmark11 and came up with 3800
Remembered powerplay because of Stevie's post. Powerplay WAS checked on but obviously it wasn't. 2 days before I had been operating on the intergrated videocard, so suspect that had something to do with it.

 

Thank you, it was actually PowerPlay, I disabled it and crossfire will be On even after rebooting on Battery mode, the hell with this thing huh, I swear, everytime one upgrades the AMD drivers its like an Odyssey.

 

Might have guessed it was PowerPlay - what a useless peice of junk on a performance gaming laptop LOL....

 

I experienced issues with PowerPlay with 6970M and 6990M CrossFire. Both are very powerful video cards, but when PowerPlay decides to act up it can be very frustrating.

 

Time for a 3rd set of 6970s?

Spoiler

 

Totally agree.

 

Bummer. I went through 2 sets of 6970M CF and 1 6990M CF setup. I understand what you're going through, brother Räy. Sorry, man.

 

Are 6990 CF failing pretty often ?
I am afraid about my, when warranty will end

 

Not quite, the only problem I ever had with mines, was when a stupid tech called me to make me upgrade my A00 bios to the A05, and my fans and temps became bat insane.

 

Just got her back from Depot today due to 6970m issues, looks like she's going right back in.

AMD Radeon HD 6970M / 6990M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2720QM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P3697 3DMarks

However just like last time I still get 45-60fps in Skyrim with Ultra settings. What gives >_<

 

Strange, I have 4k textures/2k, AMD 6970 and my Skyrim never drops from 60 FPS in ultra, and when it does, it drops to 57.

 

Have you tried disabling crossfire and hit apply, then re-enable it and apply. I would also check the PowerPlay settings in CCC to make sure they are on max performance plugged in. You could also check with gpuz to see if the secondary card is getting used while gaming - have a look and see what clocks/temps it gets up to....you might have a dodgy crossfire cable as your cpu score is fine - the gpu score looks like its running on one card and not crossfire.

 

Checked everything except GPU-Z and the actual Cable. The cards also overheat and shut themselves off under load now. The depot tech said they installed a new mainboard, new cards, etc. etc. but I think that's a load of crap. If I wanted to have Dell send me new cards instead of dealing with another depot service, what parts are they supposed to send me to install?

 

@TheMacs - I just went through swapping out a pair of 6990M cards recently but the work was done by an onsite tech; my experience didn't go too well. Here is what I remember them bringing:

1. 6990M cards
2. 6990M Heatsinks; a right and a left; they have different shapes. I had an unfortunate experience when the tech brought out two left side heatsinks. The heatsinks will have the Dell approved TIM (thermal interface material) on them. You can also re-use your current set of heatsinks if you are willing to paste the cards yourself.
3. 6990M insulated / adhesive back brackets with thermal padding for the chips; the heatsinks will screw down to these brackets.
4. Crossfire Cable
5. Systemboard if you or Dell feel you need one. The teardown and rebuild will take a little while but you can do it.

I think your list will be the same but for 6970M cards.

 

Alright, I cracked her open, cleaned everything out, and checked all my connections, they seem to be 100%. Tried updating everything the depot didn't. Tried toggling the Xfire in CCC and this is as good as it's gonna get it seems:

AMD Radeon HD 6970M / 6990M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2720QM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P5748 3DMarks

With a minor overclock in TriXX (725/960)

http://3dmark.com/3dm11/2953754;jsessionid=1f9ealrqnwav3kszbmpjml5z8

Interesting thing, when I turn the overclock on in TriXX, CCC says my clocks on each card are: 725/250 and 680/900. I'm confus.

 

I'm not 100% sure what scores you "should" be seeing (or expecting to see) for your 2720/6970xf setup but have a look at Fox's scores below (taken from when he had a similar setup to yours) - note the overclock 800/1150 and slightly faster cpu coming in at around 6300 for mark11....I reckon you would hit that with a slightly stronger gpu OC. You could always give it a go to see if you come out with comparable scores.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...are-m18x-benchmark-thread-58.html#post7700735

 

The previous set of 6970s I had had the same problem, me and Fox hashed it out back on pages 19-21. Trying to force flash my Vbios is what did the old cards in. Looks like I'll just try to be happy with these until Dell gives in and lets me install new ones myself. To hell with the depot.

I've been playing BF3 with the clocks at 740/1000 and so far no issues or overheating (staying around 76*C) so it looks like I'll keep them there.

 

Hey Guys.

Recently I noticed that my 6990 shows up as 960 shaders and also the texture fillrate at 34.3 and it should be 1120 and 40.0. The clocks on the other hand are 715/900 which seem to be normal for a 6990.

The strange thing is that my second gpu shows up as 1120 shaders, texture fillrate at 40.0 and 715/900 ,which would point that it is in fact the 6990m

I have checked GPUz (nearly all versions), HWiNFO64 and even on Trixx Sapphire but they all show the same thing.

Is it even possible to have a 6970m and 6990m is crossfire? Did my system ship with two different cards? (got it off dell outlet).

any help would be appreciated

 

I don't think Crossfire would work properly if you had two different cards in your system...

You could disable crossfire and benchmark the card to see if it is in line with other 6990Ms...

 

Hey Stevie, I am having on and off problems that seem related to powerplay. Any ideas how to make it behave without having to reset it regularly? This problem arose for the first time 2 weeks ago after having a session on the integrated graphics while on battery.
I guess if push comes to shove I'd reinstall drivers.

 

Sounds like something is wrong with one of your video cards. I recommend calling Alienware Support and getting the bad GPU replaced.

 

Thanks for the reply.

But both of my gpu's are working fine, I think . In bf3 I get 50-70fps with everything on ultra, and on 3dmark11 a score of 7600 with OC at 800/1150
Is that normal for 6990m in crossfire?

 

Definitely seems to be. My scores are topping out at 62XX with 6970M in Xfire and a slight OC. With the 2760 and 6990s I would say that's right about where it should be.

Note Mr.Fox's 3dm11 score with the 2920XM and OCd 580s

 

PowerPlay is quite temperamental - Mr Fox will attest to the same. Although I never really had any major issues when I had AMD cards, Mr Fox had a fair amount of hassle. I think he may have got something sorted to make it behave better, I would ask him.

 

AMD PowerPlay did give me a lot of headaches. I had been an ATI user for years and never had any problems with PowerPlay prior to owning a system with AMD Radeon HD 6900M Series graphics cards. (PowerPlay and CrossFire worked without issue in my first M17x R2 with 5870M CF and it works fine in my current M17x R2 with 4870M CF.)

The most common issue was one of the GPUs would fail to increase clock speeds under load. It would remain in ULPS mode. There are some registry hacks that can reduce the problems. The most common is to change all instances of EnableULPS from 1 to 0 in the Windows registry. This tweak has to be done every time you update drivers. This definitely helped in my situation, but it did not completely cure the problem. I think both 6970M CF and the one 6990M CF setups I had suffered from defective video cards. The second set of 6970M GPUs were far worse than the video cards they replaced. On the second part of GPUs I ended up having to mod the vBIOS to set clock speeds and voltage to 3D modes in all power stepping states to force the second CF setup into functioning properly. This was a temporary fix while waiting for an extended period of time for replacement GPUs to be sent. (They were on backorder for more about a month.)

 

Oke Stevie and Mr.Fox, thanks for the replies. At the moment everything still running as it should.

 

Can anyone lead to why I dont get any readings from the secondary 6990 in the catalyst 12.2 or 11.9? I dont seem to get any temperatures in speedfan either.

I just got a replacement yesterday.

 

Are you positive Crossfire is enabled? Can you run a benchmark and see what your scores are? If you're comfortable with it and able to re-paste, crack open your M18x and make sure everything is plugged in as it should. Dell's support website has some handy guides, and there's also a couple in Mr. Fox's sticky.

 

No Im not very confident with that all or very inclined to do it to a new replacement. But I have noticed that just after a GPU heavy app I do get readings from the catalyst for a few seconds. But the cards are working as they would, as performance goes down when crossfire is disabled and up when its enabled. Really hope its a software issue.

 

*nevermind

 

For the last 3 weeks been getting inconsistent 3Dmark 11 results. normally my score is around 6400, but now it varies between 3800, or this morning 4600. GPU Z sows that both card do not get fully utilized, with this mornings score card 1 showd 100% and #2 97%.
I was running the 12.2 driver, uninstalled it, but after the driversweeper, reg.cleaner stuff it was still showing amd cards in device manager, rather than the vga i was expecting. Anyway to make a long story short, got everything sorted and now on the old 11.9 which always worked okay for me.Hope this sorts out my score though.
Will post whether this did the trick or not, but anybody's thoughts on the subject will be appreciated!

 

Only thing I can think of was that maybe your downloaded file for 12.2 was corrupted...if your scores are normal using 11.9, that kinda rules out a hardware issue. You probably dont want to give 12.2 another go after all that grief anyway but you could try re-installing after a fresh download/sweep/cclean.

Out of curiosity, did (or do) you uninstall the older driver set by control panel/uninstall/express uninstall all OR manually via device manager? - when I had "team red" cards, I always did the former of the two methods which always seemed to work fine for me when updating drivers.

 

Used the controlpanel/uninstall/express uninstall. BUT when I saw I still had amd sitting in the device manager rather than vga, I then uninstalled it from there as well, didn't really like that, but after that VGA appeared again.
Strange is , this 12.2 preview had been working really well for quite a while before I started having problems . see what happens over the next week or so. Bit busy with building a new veranda so no time to mess with the Alien.Have a good weekend Stevie

One thing I just remembered, quite a few people were having probs uninstalling the 12.1 preview , what I just experienced sound like that. Apparently the usual method of uninstall drive sweep reg clean etc didn't work on that driver and another program was used, but can't remember which one, have to search the forums.