Crossfire and A8R32-MVP Problems...

IYoung

IYoung

IYoung

Associate
Joined
23 Mar 2006
Posts
17
I have just built a system with the following components;

Motherboard - Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe
GFX card 1 - HIS X1900 ***Crossfire Edition*** 512MB
GFX card 2 - Connect3D ATI Radeon X1900 XT-X 512MB
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+
Memory - Mushkin 2GB DDR XP4000 Redline Extreme Performance Dual Channel Kit (2x1GB)
Power Supply - FSP Sparkle FX700-GLN Epsilon 700W ATX2.0 PSU
Hard Drives(2)Raid0 - Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache RAID Bundle (BU-001-WD)
Case - CoolerMaster Stacker 830 RC-830 - Silver Trim
DVD drive - Plextor PX-760A 18x18 Dual Layer DVD±RW ReWriter
CPU fan - Zalman CNPS9500-LED Aero Flower (Socket 939/754/478/775) CPU Cooler
Monitor - Dell Ultrasharp 2405FPW 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor
OS - Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition inc. SP2 - OEM

Installed windows, then updated it. Then installed catalyst 6.3 drivers.
Everything appeared to work ok. Then installed Everquest2, launched the game and noticed massive flickering. Disabled crossfire and the problem went away, re-enabled crossfire and the system rebooted itself.

I have installed other games, Doom3, Farcry etc and none work in crossfire mode, but work ok when crossfire is disabled (obviously only using one gfx card).

I have installed the cards in their correct slots, crossfire can be turned on and off through the catalyst control panel, but anything that starts to actually use crossfire mode is now crashing my computer, normally it reboots itself - sometimes it just freezes and I have to reset.

It looks to me as though one of two things has happened here, either I have received faulty goods, in which case I need to find out a way of discovering what is at fault, or I have been sold fully working equipment that doesn't do what it says on the box..

Any help would be much appreciated ;)

P.S. No overclocking has been done yet, i wanted to try and get a fully operational and stable system first :(
 
Last edited:
Don't give up straight away - I've just got my XFire setup running properly and it is awesome!

Do you know how many 12V rails your PSU has? My PC would shut down when trying to play games with XFire enabled, this turned out to be because the 2xPCIe connectors and the Mobo connector were on the same 12V rail on the PSU and the drain from both cards was overloading it (650W Akasa PSU) I read around and the fix was to get a 2xMolex -> PCIe power adapter so that the second X1900 could be powered from a different 12V rail. Works a treat now :)

I do get some bad flickering on the Canyon Flight 3DMark06 test, not sure what that's all about but it doesn't happen in any games thank god.

Have you updated the BIOS to the newer 0311 version?
 
The Canyon Flight test problems are caused by setting mipmap to performance.

Enabling high quality solves it, but for benchmarking you would want this as performance anyway.

The corruption doesnt effect the overall score though


One thing you can try is to disable the VPU recover in the CCC, i couldnt get CSS to start, and it would restart the PC, disabling VPU recover solved this for me.
 
Last edited:
playworker said:
Do you know how many 12V rails your PSU has? My PC would shut down when trying to play games with XFire enabled, this turned out to be because the 2xPCIe connectors and the Mobo connector were on the same 12V rail on the PSU and the drain from both cards was overloading it (650W Akasa PSU) I read around and the fix was to get a 2xMolex -> PCIe power adapter so that the second X1900 could be powered from a different 12V rail. Works a treat now :)
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure it's not the powersupply, as the FSP 700W is Crossfire certified for the X1900 series. It has 4 separate rails.
 
LoadsaMoney said:
Welcome to the forums. :)

This could be faulty Asus A8R32-MVP number 4. :(
Click to expand...

Loadsamoney

do you think they all came from the same store , the boxes do have ser.no. on them that may be a way to see if it indeed a bad run
 
Im assuming they were all bought from here, a couple were, but i guess the odd one thats faulty may have been from a diff place, but then as you say it could be a bad run.
 
Hi,

although my sytem is stable, there are a few things that can cause the ati drivers to stop working on certain games, BF2 for example, what I have to do is a complete uninstall of the ATI graphics drivers and CCC.

Anything in bios that changes the ram skew, screws with the ATI drivers on my board, so I have to clean and then reinstall them.

Even though you have not changed anything in bios, the auto settings may have changed themselves after a reboot, so it's worth trying -

I don't know if you've tried this already, please be forgiving if you have.

Unistall the drivers use driver cleaner pro if possible, reboot, cancel the 4 hardware wizards that will pop up, and reinstall the catalysts, reboot, enable crossfire and have a go.


If that does not work, post back and we'll try and see if it could be something else.....

Raja
 
Last edited:
** Update **

I took each cards out individually and tested each one out in the computer on its own, in both mb slots (4 tests in all). Everything worked fine. Plugged them both back in together, re-enabled crossfire and problems returned; bluescreens, freezing and system restarts on loading 3D games.... except one... Crossfire works in Doom3 in 800x600 mode. I'm also able to get Everquest2 working with crossfire in windowed mode, but nothing else.

During my testing of individual cards I noticed that when testing out the slave card in the slave mb slot (master slot empty), the system defaulted to 16bit colour. When two cards are installed I couldn't find a way of checking what colour mode the slave card was running at, so I tried an experiment.

I uninstalled Catalyst using ATI's Cat-Uninstaller.
Then I removed the master card.
Turned computer back on and installed catalyst 6.3 with only the slave card present. Rebooted. Went to Display Properties/Settings and found the colour mode at 16bit - changed it to 32bit... Turned computer off.
Plugged the master card back in, computer on... Found master card running at 32bit by default, so I enabled crossfire, loaded Everquest2, and.... it works :cool:

I've tested out a few other games, Doom3, Farcry etc, and all seem to be ok at the moment, so I'll let you know if anything else happens ;)
 
IYoung said:
** Update **

I took each cards out individually and tested each one out in the computer on its own, in both mb slots (4 tests in all). Everything worked fine. Plugged them both back in together, re-enabled crossfire and problems returned; bluescreens, freezing and system restarts on loading 3D games.... except one... Crossfire works in Doom3 in 800x600 mode. I'm also able to get Everquest2 working with crossfire in windowed mode, but nothing else.

During my testing of individual cards I noticed that when testing out the slave card in the slave mb slot (master slot empty), the system defaulted to 16bit colour. When two cards are installed I couldn't find a way of checking what colour mode the slave card was running at, so I tried an experiment.

I uninstalled Catalyst using ATI's Cat-Uninstaller.
Then I removed the master card.
Turned computer back on and installed catalyst 6.3 with only the slave card present. Rebooted. Went to Display Properties/Settings and found the colour mode at 16bit - changed it to 32bit... Turned computer off.
Plugged the master card back in, computer on... Found master card running at 32bit by default, so I enabled crossfire, loaded Everquest2, and.... it works :cool:

I've tested out a few other games, Doom3, Farcry etc, and all seem to be ok at the moment, so I'll let you know if anything else happens ;)
Click to expand...

Nice one, glad you sorted it, and your up and running. :)
 
It's a fine board, at least mine is. No problems what so ever. I haven't tested Crossfire yet though, and will probably be a few months away until I purchase a master x1900
 
squiffy said:
It's a fine board, at least mine is. No problems what so ever. I haven't tested Crossfire yet though, and will probably be a few months away until I purchase a master x1900
Click to expand...
hows it clock? what sort og htt's are you getting with it :D
 
Haven't really spent time overclocking, but I did get 2.4ghz with a 4400+, also clocked memory a bit higher but at CAS 2.5 But gone back to stock due to CAS2 setting. All of the oc options are a bit confusing though and rather not damage something. If I see a guide to overclocking this board (what each does and what is safe) I'll try it. The two passive heatsinks are just warm so no extra cooling needed. Mobo and CPU temps are really cool so could oc a bit more I guess.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom