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3870 Crossfire.

Rroff said:
Wonder if the PCI-e bus is saturated... try increasing the PCI-e frequency a little bit to say 110 and see if it shows any increase in scores....
Click to expand...

Hi there. I tried this, and this has made no difference at all.

Scougar said:
Firstly... now you have crossfire you NEED to overclock your cpu. The setup benefits from faster clock speeds as it now has the crossfire overhead to deal with and feed info to 2 cards instead of just one.
Click to expand...

I know I need to do this, but I'm running stock cooling at the moment (Please don't frown at me like that!). I tried to clock the CPU to 3gig before and started getting NTFS errors etc so will await a new CPU cooler until I do this again.

Scougar said:
As for the actual problem, it looks like you have a config error or something. What happens if you declock the first card manually (or OC the slower card to gets clocked in-sync). [and yes I know it 'should happen' automatically]
Click to expand...

I Have tried this. I set the slower card to 800/1200 (I was unable to make the faster card downclock) and I actually lost performance for some reason.

Final8y said:
Make you have the Catalyst A.I set to Standard, advanced with multi GPU is a no..no.
Click to expand...

This has always been set to standard.

HeX said:
Have you connected the crossfire bridges between the cards?
Click to expand...

I have tried both bridges and a single bridge - no difference.

I am going to return the slower card, and with the money saved, I intend on buying a better case. I am relatively happy with single card performance. I currently have a Lian-Li PC60 (I think it is) and I am finding my teperatures are very high for all componenets even with a 120mm fan on the front and an 80 on the back (my Lian-Li is of the older type - i know the newer ones take 120mm at the back too).

My intentions were to also buy water cooling to go in the new case, however, my funds are now slightly limited, so I now intend on buying a better CPU cooler as I would like to clock this up as when I did have it clocked to 3gig, there was a significant increase in FPS. Can anyone recommened a decent cooler that will fit my motherboard, baring in mind that i have the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 rev 1 with the HOOOGE heatstinks on the chipset?

The case I am looking at getting is the CoolerMaster 690 as it looks to have some quite serious cooling!

Thanks to all for your help.
 
Standard cooler should be fine for 3Ghz :) (I run standard cooler btw). Not sure why you got NTFS errors!!! Are you using a SATA drives? If you are, try overclocking with the pci-e set to 100 or 101, as I was under the impression things like to corrupt on sata drives with non standard settings?

Something is definately wrong though, it should not perform worse?

Matthew
 
Have you checked the PCI-E Jumper settings on the Motherboard yet? They will more than likely be the source of the problem tbh mate! I may scour the net and see if i can find some for ya as there is always jumpers for the second slot
 
Where in Devon do you live! Lol!

I am running 2 x Seagate sata Drives on the Intel sata ports in RAID 0.

It's not just NTFS errors, it's all sorts of wierd crashes, and when I check TAT the cpu cores are runing at about 75degs C. The other day, I overclocked my cpu to 3gig to compare with a friends pc (he has C2D 6850 clocked at 3gig, radeon 2900xt and gets better scores then me on 3dmark), did a few tests, went back into windows and the whole system performance was stuttery. My mouse was freezing a second for a second or so, every second! Tried last known good config, system restore, scandisk, everything. In the end, I had to reformat which was quite annoying!

When overclocked, the northbridge cooler seems to be getting exceptionally hot, as I say, I think I have a general heat issue in my current case.
 
jrodga2k5 said:
Have you checked the PCI-E Jumper settings on the Motherboard yet? They will more than likely be the source of the problem tbh mate! I may scour the net and see if i can find some for ya as there is always jumpers for the second slot
Click to expand...

There is no PCI-e jumper on the motherboard that I can find, and the manual does not mention 1. I have run GPU-Z and that states that my second PCI-e slot is running at 4x.
 
I am having the same problem with the same cards that I have just installed today. GPUZ shows Crossfire enabled 1 GPU for each of the cards. Is that right? I have a E6300 OC'd to 3.8Ghz on an MSI NEO2 FR board with 2Gb ram only at 960 right now. If anyone has a solution I would appreciate. This has been the toughest build I have ever had!

Thanx,

Daz
 
Yes, single and crossfire get about the same results. Something really stupid happening here. There are no jumpers to configure for this. And the control panel and gpuz say crossfire is enabled. Very strange!
 
Maybe your pci-e slots are not receiving enough power although failure to do so usually results in system instability, maybe it effects performance too im not sure. I know on my dq6 board you have to connect the 4 way power supply cable cable to the pci 12v power connector on the mobo. This supplies extra power to the pci-e slots.
 
Yep, the only thing not connected is the 8 Pin mb cpu power as my supply only has 4 pin. So only have the 4 pin in the 1st 4 pins of the connector
 
EDIT Due to stupidity

Update, it ran on medium must have moved the mousewheel before I ran it. Still have the same problem. only getting 39FPS. This sucks!
 
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