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Strange 5870 behaviour (x-fire)

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Joined
30 Aug 2009
Posts
305
Hi guys,
I've had my pair of 5870 Vapor-Xs for some time now (a year and a half, maybe more) using my displayport connection and last week I encountered an interesting fault.
I was happily playing BF2BC when Windows 7 made its 'you removed hardware' sound in my ear and my monitor turned off.
The game crapped out so I restarted, but I was greeted by only a black screen rather than my Asus UEFI splash screen.

I immediately presumed that the upper most card must have croaked, so I did the expected swapping of cards:
Card 1, slot 1 alone - black screen (on DP, HDMI and DVI)
Card 1, slot 2 alone - black screen (ah crap I'm thinking)
Card 1, slot 2, Card 2 slot 1 - splash screen (at least card 2 is alive!)

However I get into Win 7 and CCC tells me 'yup, your crossfire is enabled' and I'm still able to see both cards. I fire up BFBC2 and Wow and Dead Island and everything is as it should be - no performance loss, crossfire logo is in the corner.

This is very perculiar. Thankfully I still have my old x48 systems lying around so I pop Card 1 out and plug it into slot 2 of my Rampage Formula - and it boots fine, screen works over DVI, perfect.

I am now very confused, it's like Card 1 and my Sabertooth have fallen out. No amount of plugging, unplugging and replugging of any of the cables will coax a signal out of it (the monitor goes to sleep it's gets so tired of waiting) but other than that it seems to function perfectly.
Does anyone have any ideas why this might have occurred please (and maybe how I can get it outputting again?!)
 
I don't think it can be, as card 2 works in either slot of the motherboard and they are exactly the same model. I've got a 1KW Antec psu, and swapping the 6 pin power cables between cards doesn't make any difference card 1 won't work in any slot with any combination of the 4 power leads, but card 2 is happy in either.
They both power up fine, CCC reports them both working, spinning up the fan and increasing the Mhz when gaming, card 1 just doesn't want to output anything at all :( It's not a big deal I suppose, as they are working together, but it's really REALLY odd that one won't output on this motherboard but is fine on others.

Meh I really don't wanna undo the snakey psu power cables to check either :D
 
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