PC is now cursed by the red devil? New CF 290Xs causing hassle

[RobHague]

I used Driver Cleaner to remove all traces of NVIDIA drivers before installing two shiny new R9 290X's

Booted up, installed the Catalyst drivers and things seemed mostly ok. I ran 3DMARK and got some reasonable scores.

I was monitoring with Afterburner though, and saw that while running the benchmarks the second card was throttling its core speed a little after a while. Bumping down from 1030Mhz to 900 some Mhz. Just that top card though.

So, I ruined my case aesthetic and said to hell with it, and moved them two slots apart. Rather than next door to each other. That seems to coincidentally be when the trouble started. These are some of my issues so far.....

• 144hz causes crazy flicking and LSD like lines on the screen. I guess AMD cards do not like 1440p at 140hz?
• I keep getting hard lock ups. Random. But so far just in windows and not while doing anything in particular.
• The cards aren't up and downclocking right. The second card was going into power off mode. But now its stuck in 2D mode. While the main card has its clocks fixed on 1030mhz. Even while on the desktop... if I untick crossfire in control panel, then retick it, it seems to fix it. But it randomly (when booting) just decides to screw itself up again. Windows makes the 'ding ding' noise like its found new hardware just before.
• I booted up and found that only one card was detected. Rebooted and Windows decided to see the other one. But it wouldnt let me enable crossfire. I had to reinstall the drivers. Then things started to work again, but I experienced a hard lock.
• Thought it could be my PSU. But I have an AX860w, which has a Hybrid fan mode. It's passive at anything under 80% load... the PSU fan has not kicked on ever. It does work btw, I switched it over to normal and it started to spin.
• Evidentially the leaf blower coolers do not dump the hot air all outside the case. I was monitoring volts this time, to see if any dips happened etc. I happened to have the system temp monitoring and it hit 60*C!!!!! Yet the CPU was only hitting a max of 47*c?? hmm

 

[Kaapstad]

Have you disabled ULPS

 

[Undesirable]

You say you relocated the cards right before things started going wrong. Could be that one or more of the cards are not seated properly. Could be that you used an incorrect PCI-E configuration with your motherboard and that's why it craps out. To fix that, you'd need to move that lower card back and find a way to get better airflow to the overheating card or switch to watercooling with plenty of rads, because even a single 290X is too hot for air.

 

[ChrisD.]

Single 290X too hot for air? Right...

 

[Kaapstad]

A couple of reference 290Xs are fine on air even right next to each other, they are just a bit noisy depending on how high the fans are set.

 

[LtMatt]

I used Driver Cleaner to remove all traces of NVIDIA drivers before installing two shiny new R9 290X's

Booted up, installed the Catalyst drivers and things seemed mostly ok. I ran 3DMARK and got some reasonable scores.

I was monitoring with Afterburner though, and saw that while running the benchmarks the second card was throttling its core speed a little after a while. Bumping down from 1030Mhz to 900 some Mhz. Just that top card though.

So, I ruined my case aesthetic and said to hell with it, and moved them two slots apart. Rather than next door to each other. That seems to coincidentally be when the trouble started. These are some of my issues so far.....

• 144hz causes crazy flicking and LSD like lines on the screen. I guess AMD cards do not like 1440p at 140hz?
• I keep getting hard lock ups. Random. But so far just in windows and not while doing anything in particular.
• The cards aren't up and downclocking right. The second card was going into power off mode. But now its stuck in 2D mode. While the main card has its clocks fixed on 1030mhz. Even while on the desktop... if I untick crossfire in control panel, then retick it, it seems to fix it. But it randomly (when booting) just decides to screw itself up again. Windows makes the 'ding ding' noise like its found new hardware just before.
• I booted up and found that only one card was detected. Rebooted and Windows decided to see the other one. But it wouldnt let me enable crossfire. I had to reinstall the drivers. Then things started to work again, but I experienced a hard lock.
• Thought it could be my PSU. But I have an AX860w, which has a Hybrid fan mode. It's passive at anything under 80% load... the PSU fan has not kicked on ever. It does work btw, I switched it over to normal and it started to spin.
• Evidentially the leaf blower coolers do not dump the hot air all outside the case. I was monitoring volts this time, to see if any dips happened etc. I happened to have the system temp monitoring and it hit 60*C!!!!! Yet the CPU was only hitting a max of 47*c?? hmm

You need to check that after moving the cards apart the boh pci-e slots are running at x8 speed. It could be you need to change a setting in the bios, I've seen people have problems running the second card at x1 speed. Check the bios of your mobo and look for a pci-e speed setting.

Another thing to remember is Crossfire only works when using Full Screen mode in games. So don't use borderless windowed mode. The clock issue could be caused by this.

Use MSI Afterburner to disable ULPS. It won't be the cause of your problems, but it won't hurt to turn it off either and may give you a small performance boost. Also enable Unified Gpu Usage monitoring too. You can find these options within the settings tab of Afterburner.

I think switching the card around is causing the problems, possibly because the slot you've put it in might be running at a slower speed.

Use the latest beta drivers just released, 14.1.2. Uninstall the old drivers first.

Finally regarding the fan speed. Go into Catalyst Control Center and unlock overdrive and set the max fan speed to 100%. The cards won't ever run at that speed, but it will allow them to use as much fan speed as required to stop the clocks from dropping. Make sure to do this for each card within Catalyst Control Center. Either that or just set a custom fan profile in Msi Afterburner yourself.

 

[RobHague]

Thanks Matt

Sorry I didn't explain too well there. My second card was going into ULPS on idle just as it should. Waking up when in a game etc.
But after the next reboot I found it was stuck on at 300mhz, and the main card was fixed at 1030mhz core. If I disabled and re-enabled crossfire it seemed to fix it. However I experienced a hard lock while doing this at least once.

I checked the BIOS and both cards are at 8x. The only setting I seem to have is setting the gen though, Hmm. The MSI bios is a bit weird in layout.
On more investigation it seems the slot I have my card in shares its bandwidth with the top slot. Which is why they are at 8x 8x instead of 16x 8x. I wonder if this could be causing the problem.
(See: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18622557)

They flat out refuse to do 144hz on my RoG Swift anyway. I googled this and it seems I am not alone? The screen goes crazy, multicoloured lines and flickering. 120hz and under is fine.

Thus far I have only had the 2 random lockups. Both were on the desktop oddly, it's just a freeze and I've never experienced those before so that's why I associated it with the cards.
I am wondering if maybe I should consider a clean install of Windows to eliminate the possibility of that.

I am using those latest beta drivers too thanks I'm in the process of downloading DA3 and FC4 so made sure I had them.

I'm not sure why my system temp is hitting 60*c but that's concerning more. I have 3 intakes, and a exhaust. I just assumed the 290Xs would cough it all out the case which does seem to happen (lots of hot air there) but I am wondering where the temp sensor is on the motherboard it may be down near the pcie.

Edit: So I booted up just now (first time all day) and PC pretty much turned itself off right away. Then restarted.... all is well. The cards look well seated. All the power cables are in firmly.... I have no idea. I did not have it in the other slot long enough to see if I had these issues, it seemed like things were just going to run too hot. As I said below though, I decided (rather late, like usual for me lol) to grab that more expensive 295X2 and be done with it. A cooler and quieter setup and Matt advised me to go for that really originally but dem cheap 290Xs were just too tempting. The fact they may be causing some large heat build up inside my case (the system registering 60*c!) is more cause for concern than anything the cards hit. Shame though, they are nice looking cards and when I have been in some games things seem to run pretty well.

 

[pgi947]

For what ever reasons amd cards do not like 1440/144 with the swift, leave it at 1440/120 and you'll be fine, it's been a known issue since the swifts release and tbh you aren't loosing much by dropping the refresh down to 120hz.

 

[Rroff]

IMO its an advantage I see no real difference between 120Hz and 144Hz personally and the swift struggles at 144 with screen door type artefacts.

 

[RobHague]

I have not given in. I made a choice, and I'm going to ditch the R9 290Xs and grab the 295x2....

Just got off the phone with OcUK, they were nice enough to knock the price down to what it was a few days ago.
When I rang up to ask them to price match Amazon who embarrassingly raised the price while I was on the phone ...

Anyway. I always learn the hard and long way round its just my way lol. I have had pretty bad luck with dual GPUs since building my new PC, but hopefully the 295X2 will be an end to it and I can just sit back and enjoy the new dragon age this weekend.
It's been fun playing with a range of hardware configs though in my attempts to attain gaming nirvana. Even if a little costly. It's allowed me to collect some interesting benchmark comparisons though and kind of shows me how badly priced the 980 is for its performance vs the 970. Also the 290X seems to be level with the 970 so which ever card is cheaper wins the value there.

I guess I will have some 290Xs headed to ebay now anyway but I have not had any issues selling cards on before so.

Also the 144hz thing... well true but it's kind of made my swift redundant now. It's just a 1440p 120hz monitor. Maybe I should look at some 4k ones, might be just as well.