Before I RMA this card back I just need a bit of a sanity check please...
I bought a Gigabyte Z77 G1 Sniper 3 motherboard and 3 x Powercolor 7970 LCS graphics cards from OCUK.
Once built I found the motherboard to be faulty. As it would only ever display any signal to the monitor from the on board graphics card. At that point I was not sure if it was the graphics cards or the motherboard. So I RMAed every thing back to OCUK.
Ended up being charged for the RMA on the graphics cards as they said they where not faulty. Not a big fan on OCUKs RMA system but thats another story.
They found the motherboard to be faulty sent out a new one and returned the graphics cards. I took yesterday off work to build the PC.
All went OK I installed a new version of Window 7 64bit on a new SSD drive. All seemed fine so I let Windows 7 do all its updates so it was the current latest version. After that I installed all the latest motherboard drivers.
Then I figured time to install the ATI Drivers and set up Tri-Fire.
Anyway I could see all 3 7970s recognized in Device Manager. It had all 3 down as Generic Graphics something like that it was normal.
After installing the latest ATI Catalyst Drivers which went fine no problem. I rebooted for the first after installing them. Only to find the PC just hangs at the Windows 7 Starting Logo. I use a G19 Keyboard that goes on and off when Windows 7 starts. It did that but the Window 7 Logo still stayed on the screen it had just frozen.
After a lot of trial and error. I found if I unplug the power to one of the 7970s it would boot into Windows 7 and run perfect with the 2 cards in Crossfire.
My first thought was maybe a bad power cable. So I used the connections off of one of the working cards plugged them into the bad card. Same thing stuck at Windows 7 Logo.
To eliminate the PSU not being able to run 3 cards. Although it ran a 6990 & 6970 no problem. Its a Dark Power 1200 Watt. So it should run 3 x 7970s no problem.
I just plugged in one good graphics card and the bad card. Again it booted only until Windows 7 Starting Logo. If the bad card is plugged in it just will not boot all the way.
Yet any combination of the other 2 is fine. It seems to me that 7970 has some sort of fault.
But before I go through the hassle of RMAing it again. Does anyone have any ideas ? I am not supposed to do anything other than plug them in with Crossfire Bridges on 7970s ?
Just to clarify its only 1 card out of the 3 that seems to be bad. The other 2 are working fine I have them in Crossfire fully working. Ran Heaven Benchmark and played SWOTOR for a good while it ran perfectly.
I bought a Gigabyte Z77 G1 Sniper 3 motherboard and 3 x Powercolor 7970 LCS graphics cards from OCUK.
Once built I found the motherboard to be faulty. As it would only ever display any signal to the monitor from the on board graphics card. At that point I was not sure if it was the graphics cards or the motherboard. So I RMAed every thing back to OCUK.
Ended up being charged for the RMA on the graphics cards as they said they where not faulty. Not a big fan on OCUKs RMA system but thats another story.
They found the motherboard to be faulty sent out a new one and returned the graphics cards. I took yesterday off work to build the PC.
All went OK I installed a new version of Window 7 64bit on a new SSD drive. All seemed fine so I let Windows 7 do all its updates so it was the current latest version. After that I installed all the latest motherboard drivers.
Then I figured time to install the ATI Drivers and set up Tri-Fire.
Anyway I could see all 3 7970s recognized in Device Manager. It had all 3 down as Generic Graphics something like that it was normal.
After installing the latest ATI Catalyst Drivers which went fine no problem. I rebooted for the first after installing them. Only to find the PC just hangs at the Windows 7 Starting Logo. I use a G19 Keyboard that goes on and off when Windows 7 starts. It did that but the Window 7 Logo still stayed on the screen it had just frozen.
After a lot of trial and error. I found if I unplug the power to one of the 7970s it would boot into Windows 7 and run perfect with the 2 cards in Crossfire.
My first thought was maybe a bad power cable. So I used the connections off of one of the working cards plugged them into the bad card. Same thing stuck at Windows 7 Logo.
To eliminate the PSU not being able to run 3 cards. Although it ran a 6990 & 6970 no problem. Its a Dark Power 1200 Watt. So it should run 3 x 7970s no problem.
I just plugged in one good graphics card and the bad card. Again it booted only until Windows 7 Starting Logo. If the bad card is plugged in it just will not boot all the way.
Yet any combination of the other 2 is fine. It seems to me that 7970 has some sort of fault.
But before I go through the hassle of RMAing it again. Does anyone have any ideas ? I am not supposed to do anything other than plug them in with Crossfire Bridges on 7970s ?
Just to clarify its only 1 card out of the 3 that seems to be bad. The other 2 are working fine I have them in Crossfire fully working. Ran Heaven Benchmark and played SWOTOR for a good while it ran perfectly.
