Crossfire problems....

[IYoung]

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

 

[smids]

Game test each card individually and if they pass fine, reinstall that Cats - that's a good start. Take out one card each time you test - this will ensure it isn't the motherboard port which is broken. Double check the dongle, make sure all chipset drivers are installed - just more bits you could try.

 

[IYoung]

P.S. No overclocking has been done yet, i wanted to try and get a fully operational and stable system first

 

[IYoung]

** 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

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

 

[footman]

have you seen all the threads in the motherboard section about your motherboard(mine too!) ? There seems to be a bios problem fixed by the latest bios.