• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Crossfire problems

PaulC2K

PaulC2K

PaulC2K

Associate
Joined
4 Mar 2010
Posts
2,115
Hi,

I recently upgraded my system, everything except HDDs and PSU is new. In there i have a pair of 6870s and they cause my system to lock up after 10-30min of playing Bad Company 2 online (its fine in single player oddly) and i really havent got a clue where to start.

I was having the same issue (lockup) last month on a single 5770, but fixed it using drivers from June. All was well. When i installed the drivers for the 6870s i went straight to these and the problem was back. Im now resorting to disabling Crossfire and using March drivers just to get stable gaming.

I've played 3-4hrs of Dead Island today on crossfire, and bits of Deus Ex, Trackmania, Crysis 1 & 2, and BC2 single player and they've all been fine. I've also installed a fresh W7, installed basic drivers and BC2 and seen it crash, so it suggests it isnt a conflict within an old (2mo) OS installation.
Temps i have displayed with OSD (MSI Afterburner) and having the 2nd monitor i can watch CPU & GPU load, temps, everything. They seem perfectly reasonable.

Now tonight just as i was joining the server my screen started to flicker. Dropping the signal for just a moment. I know it was monitor related because im on dual screen and only 1 died, and the OSD menu would disappear after a flicker. Im going to assume its the loss of signal rather than the monitor, purely because its fairly new and its fine on the desktop and in-game menu.
When i disabled the secondary monitor and got into the game it was fine (i was useless, but it played - on a single card though).

Im at a complete loss as to what to do. The PSU is 750w, i did ask for assurances on here before ordering and it seemed ok. The PSU is about 2yr old, by Xigmatek, so no Corsair or Enermax etc. Am i looking at an aging PSU thats getting saggy and a system build pushing too close to the limit?
The fact that crossfire & recent drivers gives identical results as single & recent drivers would suggest its fine (im not buying 200w dipping tbh) but i really have no idea. When everything is new, bar PSU and HDDs, where do you start and how do you find out exactly where the problem lies without spending a fortune on more hardware which end up being fine afterall.

I really could do with the combined genius that is the OcUK forum to give me some pointers. At a push, i'll live with a single card BC2 solution, but my concern is this may follow me to future titles (god help folk if it happens in BF3!!).

Any suggestions? I'll try any software, any tests, any drivers etc just want to get it working. If need be, i'll buy a PSU & im on the fence for an M4 SSD so you'd be giving me an excuse, but really i dont want to spend unless theres sensible reason to believe that'd help.
 
Last edited:
If you are using the 11.8 drivers then read this, it's a known issue.

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst118ReleaseNotes.aspx


Known issues under the Windows 7 operating system
The following section provides a summary of open issues that may be experienced under the Windows 7 operating system in the latest version of AMD Catalyst™. These include:

STALKER - Call of Pripyat may randomly hang when entering a new or saved game.
F1 2010 may randomly hang on application launch.
Battlefield – Bad Company 2 may randomly hang after a period of game play.
Dungeon Siege 3 may randomly hang on application launch.
Dead Rising 2 may randomly hang on application launch.
Random flashing may be observed while playing F1 2010 and Dirt 2.
 
Im currently running 11.3, ive tried 11.8, 11.6 and stopped at 11.3 simply because that allowed me to at least play with a single card. :(
added my system details into my sig too.
 
BC2 crashes if you have the OSD running from MSI Afterburner.

If you close Afterburner, go to its program files directory, rename RTCore.cfg to something else, start Afterburner, you should be able to run BC2 with the Afterburner OSD.
 
accod said:
BC2 crashes if you have the OSD running from MSI Afterburner.

If you close Afterburner, go to its program files directory, rename RTCore.cfg to something else, start Afterburner, you should be able to run BC2 with the Afterburner OSD.
Click to expand...

I had mentioned to a friend early last week that it'd been running fine for a while (1h+), and then 5-15min after loading Afterburner up it crashed again. Its plausable this could be the cause of my BC2 troubles. I've made the modification suggested and i'll find out tonight i guess and post an update.
 
PaulC2K said:
I had mentioned to a friend early last week that it'd been running fine for a while (1h+), and then 5-15min after loading Afterburner up it crashed again. Its plausable this could be the cause of my BC2 troubles. I've made the modification suggested and i'll find out tonight i guess and post an update.
Click to expand...

Had a bash of BC2 from 9:00pm till about 1:20am, had a random crash to desktop but otherwise no other problems. Thats the first time i've ran it crossfire without it locking up :eek:

I disabled the secondary monitor too, i've noticed lately its blacked the screen out when launching it, and the odd Alt-Tab seems to fix it, but today while i had the 2nd monitor content visable, it wasnt inactive so completely useless. Not sure what caused that. The FPS werent all that either, no better than ive had single card but i noticed the load was much lower on both. 45-55fps were the norm. Im actually fine with that, provided it actually scales up and works harder when i need it to. There was some weird flickering too, not in-game, but in the menus on the news ticker.

[edit]
rebooted, the weird flickering wasnt there and the frames are much higher, 110+ on Port Valdez and ive got everything on max (no HBOA or V-Sync). Which seems plenty to me
75% GPU usage @ 68c on the main card, and 75% usage and 58% on the secondary card.
[/edit]

Thanks for the tip Accod, looks like thats done the trick. I'll try with the secondary monitor on tomorrow and hopefully i can use both (i like seeing who's on teamspeak and live PC specs). Stable play with both cards was the main goal, so im happy with that .
 
Last edited:
BC2 is quite a cpu demanding game. If you want more than the 110 fps you're getting now, you'll get higher gpu usage if you overclock your cpu. Having the gpu's at a lower usage helps with temps and fan speeds so keep that in mind if you like a quiet pc.
 
Yeah, for some reason i'd never actually noticed it was that demanding.
My old specs were Q6600 @ 3ghz & 5770, so maybe the CPU wasnt being the bottleneck then.

I havent bothered overclocking the CPU yet as there isnt really any need to do it yet, so why bother. If i decide to do something a little more CPU intensive then i'll have a play. Need to look into Speedstep/EIST or Turbo boost, whatever these chips have these days and see how that can help keep things running cooler and also give me more power when called upon. I'll head to the CPU section for that though :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom