MSI Lightning 7970 Xfire, very unstable

[Mr Footlong]

Hi guys.

Really at the end of my tether with this already. I bought a pair of MSI 7970 Lightning cards last week (lovely This Week Offer and my 10% off voucher)and since putting them in I have had no end of hassle and crashing.

My machine is a work machine, so no overclocking is done whatsoever and it has to be totally stable (which it has been for months until this). Asus P8Z68-v/GEN3 board, I7-2600K CPU, 2x4GB Patriot RAM, Coolermaster 1000W PSU.

I had held off buying a graphics card until I was certain that I didn't want a reference 680 or single 4GB 680 and I also had wanted more than 2GB per card so these were spot on. I had been carrying on with a 4870 as I hadn't been gaming at all either.

Cleaned out the ATI drivers, installed the 2 new cards. Xfire enabled and the current 12.4 drivers installed. From this point on I got the monitor occasionally turning off for no reason and nothing but a reset would bring the machine back, the mouse pointer occasionally corrupting, a few atikmpag.sys BSODs and I couldn't leave the machine running for any length of time or leave things unsaved with any confidence.

I reinstalled 7x64 on Sunday night and the stability is no better at all. I did some googling and sound the ULPS registry tools and turned that off in the vague hope that might increase staability and nope. I had about 5 atikmpag.sys BSOD yesterday, 3 black screen for no reason reboots and almost the same again already today. I have lost a ton of work and this can't continue. The system was 1000% stable prior to putting these 2 cards in!

I have been playing Mass Effect 3 on Xfire and I have to say that the machine is at its most stable when gaming!!!!!! Well, apart from 1 bug where if you press escape to go in to the menus or activate any kind of console that brings you out of the action, within say the first minute or so of loading up the game, the menu starts to loads but just freezes and if you try ctrl alt del a few times you then get a black screen with what looks like tiny bits of the taskbar outlining etc but the machine once again, is frozen. If you run around in game for a minute or 2 etc then go in to game menus etc, all is well......

Opinions on where I go with this? I love ATI cards but this has left a really sour taste in my mouth. Stability for work is the main priority and that is crash city as it stands. Do I send these back due to the massive problems I am having and go for Nvidia? I am far from alone from looking over tinterweb regarding atikmpag.sys as just one of the many issues I seem to be experiencing first hand.

OCCT stress tests on the machine pass through error free as they did before I did the upgrade. I say they pass through error-free, that is when atikmpag.sys goesn't bing up or the screens go blank for no reason and refuse to come back as with using the machine at any other point........

Thanks,

Nick.

 

[Mr Footlong]

Just to add, I have been expering certain other graphic-related oddities on general desktop stuff, browsing stuff. Can't explain but you guys knows what I mean. Oddities that you don't get on a healthy graphics setup.

EDIT, didnt need to go far so find some oddities!

 

[ScottiB]

Have you tested the cards separately?

I'd suggest doing that before anything else because, whilst it's very possible that you are suffering driver/crossfire related issues I'd want to be 100% sure that I you haven't got a faulty card.

Also, can you just check that both cards are running with the same default BIOS? This card comes with two switchable BIOSes (micro switch on the card), the second BIOS is designed for extreme overclocking so it may not be fully tested & certified for Crossfire.

 

[Davedree]

try using one just 1 card, and checking that they both work fine in single mode all ok.

Thats the first thing, if they both pass ok on that then need to look into either testing psu, or mucking about with drivers.

 

[Mr Footlong]

Hi. Both cards are on identical BIOSes. I haven't had the time to try without crossfire as I work from home in IT so I can't leave the machine for long periods doing graphics tests during the day. The switches are both in their standard positions.

Work is horribly busy but I will see if I can at least disable crossfire in the software, see if ME3 at least crashes out in the menu thing (as it is the only guaranteed way to make the machine crash on command!), then will yank the second card and run for a while on just the one and see. My concern is what are my rights about returning both of these? I bought them to work as a pair. If both work ok as solo cards but are just rubbish together, I don't want either of them, as muich as it pains me

Thanks.

 

[ScottiB]

That's a case for the reseller. As with a lot of AMD users who had crossfire issues when Battlefield 3 was released, you may find that standard consumer rights won't protect you if the hardware isn't faulty and you'll be given the general "wait for the driver fix" answer.

 

[Surveyor]

My concern is what are my rights about returning both of these? I bought them to work as a pair.

You can return them for a refund under the Distance Selling Regulations as long as you notify OcUK within 7 working days from the day after you received them.

Or alternatively take advantage of OcUK's 14 day satisfaction guarantee.

 

[OptimaLnrg]

@ rights you have 7 days to return without question but OCUK offer and extra 7 days under the 14 day dsr policy.

Do you have caps or w/e it is installed too? I don't really know anything about crossfire..

 

[Mr Footlong]

The thing is that the there are loads of user reports about problems eith Zerocore/ULPS with these and with the problems I am having makes it not fit for my purpose though surely, I bought 2 for the extra performance which they are supposed to give together.

Not faulting your cards at all, they looks like works of art and are amazingly well crafted!

Just managed to disable crossfire in the ATI drivers and reboot just to be surebetween phone calls. The most instant test has passed. Loaded ME3, went straight in to game and pressed escape to load up the menus and worked first time, no crash. Closed ME3, went back in again and repeated the test, worked perfectly.

I will run the setup like this for the rest of the day, as in with both cards still in and with the the bridge ribbon connected but with Xfire disabled in Catalyst and report back on things like the other general desktop stability etc which has been the real killer. Thanks so far guys but I am of the opinion that it isn't my problem that the software isn't up to the job and being that we are months down the line since the 7970's were released, I actually have my doubts about waiting for supposed fixes to what could possibly be underlying core ATI design issues?

 

[Mr Footlong]

Do you have caps or w/e it is installed too? I don't really know anything about crossfire..

The most recent CAPS from the Catalyst DL page were installed in both instances thanks

Thanks for the DSR stuff guys, I had read about that but didn't know how much of a grey are these issues could fall under.

 

[Komedy]

My first port of call would be to check the PSU. You have a brand of PSU that I wouldnt touch if they were giving them away.

 

[Mr Footlong]

My first port of call would be to check the PSU. You have a brand of PSU that I wouldnt touch if they were giving them away.

The machine can memtestx86 all day long, run ALL OCCT tests on a 24/7 loop all day long, hadn't crashed once in all the time that I had built it and since upgrading to these badboys,the machine is heavily unstable mainly in pretty well stress-free (as in no PSU load) desktop mode, not 3D mode. The ME3 crash-on-menu-load-unless-waiting-for-a-while-before crash has gone away as soon as Xfire was disabled and the game was utterly stable apart from that. Thanks for your suggestion but I don't think that is the issue at all CURRENTLY.

 

[ScottiB]

Not faulting your cards at all, they looks like works of art and are amazingly well crafted!

Thank you & I know you weren't. rest assured that I'd be the first to suggest that you RMA anything that I believe to be faulty. No company has a 0% failure rate and it's infantile to suggest otherwise.

I've had a look at our internal FAE (Failure Analysis Engineering) forums which we use to discuss known issues and look for solutions but there is nothing there about MSI 7000 series reference or lightning crossfire issues at the moment.

You could be right about it being a zero core issue so I'll investigate further. If it is Zero Core there may be a way to disable it until a permanent fix is found.

 

[Komedy]

The machine can memtestx86 all day long, run ALL OCCT tests on a 24/7 loop all day long, hadn't crashed once in all the time that I had built it and since upgrading to these badboys,the machine is heavily unstable mainly in pretty well stress-free (as in no PSU load) desktop mode, not 3D mode. The ME3 crash-on-menu-load-unless-waiting-for-a-while-before crash has gone away as soon as Xfire was disabled and the game was utterly stable apart from that. Thanks for your suggestion but I don't think that is the issue at all CURRENTLY.

Would be fair to say the lightenings have different power draw than ur previous. Not being funny but as soon as I read that you had a Coolermaster PSU the alarm bells rang. I dont know ur exact model or age but early Coolermaster PSUs are not worth the box they are in. Yes ur exisiting setup may not have exposed it and dont be under the illusion that the PSU has to be underload before it becomes unstable. I have known PSUs to give bother when in idle state. More recent Coolermasters are less problematic.

If you can, try your cards in another PC or borrow a PSU - might surprise you.

 

[Mr Footlong]

You could be right about it being a zero core issue so I'll investigate further. If it is Zero Core there may be a way to disable it until a permanent fix is found.

I believe that the Zerocore/ULPS stuff are pretty well one and the same. I came across a nicelely made batch tool that allows you to backup the necessary settings, apply the ULPS disable registry fixes, restore the ULPS settings etc if desired. I don't think that the stability, or lack of, was affected one way or another when using this while Crossfire was enabled. You could see it working as after turning ULPS off with the utility and rebooting, both cores reported as running at 500Mhz iirc at desktop, going by Afterburner monitoring at least.

Here you go:

ftp://ftp.achromaticcomputing.com/ulps - I used the 1.1.4 batch file

 

[Mr Footlong]

Would be fair to say the lightenings have different power draws than ur exisiting. Not being funny but as soon as I read that you had a Coolermaster PSU it was enough for me - trash

I understand and thanks but the rails reports are very stable across the board going on the likes of HW monitor, cpu-z, MSI Afterburner (so general monitor programs at least).

Still no crashes since deselecting Crossfire, this is the longest the machine has been stable for at desktop!

 

[pgi947]

Have you tried a fresh windows install?

Had similar stability problems with a single ref 7970, tried absolutely everything to no joy, fresh install of windows 7 + 12.4 WHQL and everything was perfect?

The odd graphical glitches in windows I also had, something to do with my 120hz monitor and the idle clocks being too low, set to 60hz and it was gone. Seemingly manually setting the idle clocks (not sure how to?) too 500mhz rather than 300mhz stops it.

 

[kitch9]

Thank you & I know you weren't. rest assured that I'd be the first to suggest that you RMA anything that I believe to be faulty. No company has a 0% failure rate and it's infantile to suggest otherwise.

I've had a look at our internal FAE (Failure Analysis Engineering) forums which we use to discuss known issues and look for solutions but there is nothing there about MSI 7000 series reference or lightning crossfire issues at the moment.

You could be right about it being a zero core issue so I'll investigate further. If it is Zero Core there may be a way to disable it until a permanent fix is found.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=360881

Here's another thread with similar issues, and I'm getting random BSOD all over the place after adding a second 7850 today.

Not happy.

 

[Mr Footlong]

Have you tried a fresh windows install?

Hi. Original post says that I reinstalled Windows from scratch and I am a real minimalist when it comes to drivers and other guff. Base intel infs, raid drivers, usb3 drivers, sound drivers and the Radeon drivers.

Machine has been 100% stable since simply disabling Crossfire in the Catalyst control centre, not a mutter, burble or fart. Sadly, it is looking like these are going back. Guess I might be pushing it if I ask for the original 10% discount to be applied to whatever I have to get from OCuK to replace these.

Great cards on there own IMO but just won't play ball together .

 

[Mr Paul]

Try something daft like swapping the cards over i.e. top to bottom and bottom to top...

Or Try running with the BIOS switch flipped on each card to the "extreme" setting