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Cold boot freezing issue with QuadFire

Flanno

Flanno

Flanno

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Joined
18 Jun 2005
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So I replaced my 2 5870's with 2 5970 4GIG cards. Now about 50% of the time I cold boot the PC freezes about 1 second before the Windows 7 login screen appears. At that point the fans on the seconadary card go to 100%. Usually a hard reset sorts it until the next time I do a cold boot and it happens again or at least seems to have a 50% chance of happening again.

It's really strange as both cards are working fine, games play fine, all cores are being used, temps are normal. Checked with afterburner and gpu-z. I thought it was a driver issue, even reinstalled Windows 7, intel chipset drivers, and catalyst drivers, nothing else and as soon as I shutdown and turned the pc back on the issue reoccurred. Tried 10.4 and 10.5 cats. Also made sure to disable powerplay in case it's an issue due to low clocks on bootup. No good. I've also updated my EVGA motherboard bios to the latest version and am not overclocking. I wonder is this something to do with crossfire (maybe not enough voltage to the cards on bootup) or something to do with my PSU

One thing I have noticed is if I run the Heaven benchmark using CCC everything is fine. As soon as I load Afterburner I get major major microstutter. The bench runs for a couple of seconds, then stutters, then sort of speeds up, repeat. Afterburner shows all cores are being maxed and the clock speed on each core is maxed so I don't think it's powerplay slowing down clocks. I wonder could this have somehthing to do with my problem. Of course uninstalling afterburner has no effect on the problem. Just get's rid of the stuttering.

Any advice appreciated
 
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UPDATE :

I have swapped the cards around. Originally I would get to the stage just 1 or 2 seconds before the login screen comes up in Windows 7 and the fan on the bottom card would kick up to 100% and the Windows welcome screen would just stay up. Now what is happing is my motherboard won't post, and the fan on the primary card (used be the bottom card) goes to 100%. So something is causing the card not to initialise and as a result the PC won't boot. However if I simply press the power button the system shuts down, press it again, powers up fine, posts and boots into windows. The problem only occurs if I shutdown again, leave the system for more thne 20 minutes and then powerup. Very strange.

What could be causing this problem does anyone know ? Going to be hard to RMA this card as I got it on an auction site.

Also, I tried displayport and dvi - makes no difference. Something weird is going on for sure. Am starting to think I should have stayed with Nvidia again.
 
Who says quadfire does not work matey. That was when Bodar showed 4 cards working slower then 3 back last November on youtube. I get almost full gpu usage on each card. Maybe not 100% scaling.

Also, the wattage being used is in extreme situations. So I agree something more powerful is needed but this has nothing to do with the cold boot issue.

Both cards are working by themselves, the cold boot issue is in quadfire it seems. And I have isolated it to displayport only.

So the problem seems to be displayport related.
 
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Got to the bottom of it. One of my mates came around about 10.30pm tonight with his 5970 Toxic.

So :

For starters - all 3 cards tested individually with displayport and dvi and no issues.

Then tested in quadfire with displayport :
1. 5970 Toxic as primary and good 5970 as secondary - no issues
2. Good 5970 as primary and 5970 Toxic as secondary - no issues
3. 5970 Toxic as primary and suspect 5970 as secondary - lose video during boot into windows when doing 1st boot. Have to poweroff and on and everything works
4. Suspect 5970 as primary and 5970 Toxic as secondary - same as above except no video signal from very start. Again hard reset sorts it.

Retested quadfire above with DVI : no issues

So it looks like a dodgy displayport. Rats :mad:
 
It doesn't seem to matter if you swap cards around. What happens then is you loose signal just as the windows login screen is about to come up, even though you are using displayport of the other card. Very weird. Back to dvi and no issues.

What you are saying about scaling is true to some extent. Even users here got the same result going from 1 5970 to 2 in AVP, proving the bench sucks. But in Heaven for example I got double the score with 2 5970's compared to 1. I'm going to borrow a mates 2gig 5870 eyeinfinity card and compare trifire against quadfire before I make up my mind, but so far in all benches I have run it seems like a nice boost. I'll have a direct comparison between trifire and quadfire by the end of the week though so may end up eating my words :)
 
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