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To All CrossFire Users:Anyone Needed To Bios Flash to Enable CrossFire?

tommybhoy

tommybhoy

tommybhoy

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From the 'NVIDIA drivers Vs AMD drivers' thread found here:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=21787139#post21787139

Bhavv pointed out something I have never known about, or indeed ever had to do myself:

bhavv said:
4870 crossfire - didn't work without a bios flash
5770 crossfire - gray screens of death without a bios flash

GTX 460 / 560 SLI - worked perfectly out of the box.

Skyrim - Zero day SLI support added as an SLI profile by Nvidia, AMD crossfire didn't work, produced negative scaling, AMD blamed Bethesda.

NVIDIA drivers support driver level FXAA, adaptive vsync, 3d vision and physx. Only one of those is an NVIDIA exclusive, AMD drivers still don't support the other 3.
Click to expand...
And:

bhavv said:
Dude Nvidia rolled out full SLI support profiles for Skyrim the day before it realeased, and it has been working flawlessly since.

Any system with crossfire ran skyrim at a 20 fps slideshow for several months after the game had launched.

Plenty of Nvidia issues with Skyrim ... Yea right, making things up as you tend to do.

I didn't even mention anything about scaling in my comparison, all the scaling in the world wouldn't matter the slightest if the multiple GPU setup simply doesn't work well in the latest games, or needs severe measures like bios flashing to get it working, which tends to be a recurring case with crossfire.

Also your 2 Gb memory on the 6970s was always worse and beaten in just about everything by 1280 Mb GTX 570s, even at 2560x1600 resolution.

ATI 6900 series - most useless and misleading GPUs ever released with 2 Gb vram. Worse in almost everything than 1.2 - 1.5 Gb on GTX 570 / 580.
Click to expand...


As I said, has any CrossFire users past/present had to flash their bios, to get CrossFire to work?

Thanks in advance.
 
Oh and according to Asrock who have sent me private beta bioses in the past.

Crossfire is not dependent on anything to work. All it logically requires are enough PCIE slots for the cards you want to run in Crossfire. It is not bios dependent it is mechanically dependent.

SLI on the other hand needs the go ahead at a low level from the bios to work. Theoretically Crossfire should work on a SLI board but doesn't because the vendor IDs from the cards are being blocked at a low level in the bios.

SLI should work on a Crossfire board but again, the drivers look for the low level instructions.

That was from my favourite lady at Asrock who knows her onions as she spends her days writing drivers.

It makes perfect sense too. The SLI "hack" used to work by telling Windows you were using an X58 motherboard. Thus, when the Nvidia drivers went looking they saw X58 in the device manager and gave the go ahead for the cards to link.

The reason the same hack did not work the other way around was due to low level checking on an SLI board. I once tried to run Crossfire (two 5770s) in my Asus Crosshair II Formula (780a Nforce) and it would not even get past post before resetting and trying again. Turns out she was right and the bios was blocking the PC from even booting.

Which again makes sense. If I was able to get into Windows with the two Radeons there would be nothing to stop the system running in Crossfire.
 
Have never flashed a gfx card and CF has always worked.

5770 gray screens of death was fixed by drivers and had nothing to do with CF.
4870 crossfire needing gfx bios flash to work is nonsense.
 
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680GTX SLI 990FX 5 fps problem

How about needing a near full system change.

680GTX SLI 990FX 5 fps problem
Hey gang, I have a crosshair V mobo and 1 680GTX runs awesome, actually higher fps than the p[air of 6950's! add a 2nd 680 and fps drops to 4-7fps! in benchmarks and even simple games like SWTOR ...

I was trying to replace my crossfire 6950's and run with this platform for a little while longer before upgrading the mainboard and cpu, let ivy mature a month or 2, and maybe see if Ivy-E comes earlier than rumored ...

I've tried the latest bios, drivers etc, tried a freshly formatted drive, release, and beta nvidia drivers, different psu's different bridge cable

Bios shows both cards running at PCIe 2.0 x16 , Nvidia control panel shows sli, GPUz and Asus utilities all show SLI enabled...

I am new to SLI and at wits end. I have posted on the ROG forums, and they are working on finding me a solution, that's cool, but I figured you guys here are a very knowledgeable bunch and may have some ideas for me to try while i am waiting

I am not the only person, There are a few other Sabertooth users, 1 MSI GD80 as well. ... all 990fx chipset users so far that I have seen... A couple of these guys upgraded from SLI 580's , so this is bizarre...

Any help would be appreciated!

Kar
Phenom II x4 965 @ 4.15ghz, Asus Crosshair V, 16gb ddr3 1866, Asus 680Gtx....120gb OCZ Vertex 3 Maxiops, 2tb WD black Caviar (3) VE278Q Asus LED monitors, W7 64. Haf-X and 240mm ECO a.l.c. water cooling
Reply With Quote
Click to expand...

Well guys, just got some bad news. HiVizMan from the Asus ROG forum has spent a massive amount of time built a Crosshair V system like mine, tried to find a fix for us for the SLI 680GTX fps issue...Could NOT find anything that helped. He went WAY above and beyond the call to help ...

It would appear Nvidia didn't take the time to fully validate 680GTX in SLI on AMD 9xx chipsets.
I have done a ton of forum searching to see if I could find a solution to our problem and/or ANY 9xx user that was successfully running SLI 680's ...So far that would be no one...

so, i don't know what to do. running out of time to RMA my GTX680 cards fast.

Will nvidia come out with a fix in the next drivers? ...or ever? It's not like it is just poor scaling. Adding the 2nd card makes EVERYTHING unplayable ...and there are a surprising number of us in the same boat. spend near 1100.00 worth of cards we cannot use

There are 7970's avail, but most of the custom cards that run close to the 680 performance are very hard to find in stock ...

Build a Sandy Bridge E platform for the 680's? that's a lot of money to make video work like it was advertised to work ...

I dunno, very angry and frustrated at Nvidia atm...

Phenom II x4 965 @ 4.15ghz, Asus Crosshair V, 16gb ddr3 1866, Asus 680Gtx....120gb OCZ Vertex 3 Maxiops, 2tb WD black Caviar (3) VE278Q Asus LED monitors, W7 64. Haf-X and 240mm ECO a.l.c. water cooling
Click to expand...
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1688947
 
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ALXAndy said:
It could just be a driver bug.

If SLI is enabled then to me it sounds like the board is doing its job.
Click to expand...

Yep could be but its seems some NV users have adopted the Apple slogan "it just works".
Maybe a bios flash is needed ;)
 
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Final8y said:
Yep could be but its seems some NV users have adopted the Apple slogan "it just works".
Maybe a bios flash is needed ;)
Click to expand...

Yeah maybe a bios flash for the GPUs.

SLI works in the same way no matter which generation of cards you link. It just needs to be given the nod at a low level in the bios and you can enable it from there.

The rest is up to the drivers. Look at boards back in the day where you linked a Voodoo card to your GPU whether on or off board. Or if you linked two Voodoo 2 cards in SLI. There were never any bios updates needed as it does not interact with the bios unless the drivers force it to.

As I mentioned before. Crossfire would theoretically run on any motherboard as long as the board isn't stopping it from happening (see also Nvidia chipsets). This is why every dual slotted motherboard can run Crossfire but not all can run SLI. Merely because that needs a bios instruction from Nvidia to allow it to work.

So if this is a **** up then it's Nvidia's **** up and nothing to do with Asus. I would strongly suspect the drivers.
 
I have had a few ati series cards in crossfire now and have never had any issues ( driver or any other )what so ever , have never had to flash bios to get it work and dont understand why you would have to do this as ati crossfire generally speaking works straight out of the box on most motherboards.
 
same as mjones. different pcb's, completely different bios's on each card. never had to do anything other than click "enable crossfire". used it on different mobo's as well.

oh and my 5850's ran skyrim perfectly fine at 50fps+ from the get go.

sounds like bhaav is wearing green specs.
 
I've had 2 different crossfire setups, and found it to be plug and play.

Once though, when i swapped the 2 5850s slots, and upped to 3 monitors at the same time, I couldn't re-enable crossfire, until I removed all drivers with driver sweeper and reinstalled.

But no BIOS change needed.
 
Rusty0611 said:
I'm sure you can find a help post for every set up on earth spazzing out and causing issues. What exactly does this prove?
Click to expand...

It proves that most issues are not exclusive but many think it is.
I see users having a problem and they assume that its only possible with that side.

Another both sides are having coming out of sleep issues which some seem to think its only a 7xxx issue atm..
 
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Thanks for the info folks, just thought I would find out from CrossFire users if there was any truth in the matter, but the answers given were what I was expecting tbh.
 
First time I've ever heard of someone needing to flash a cards bios for that reason.

This is my first CF setup and its two identical first batch HIS cards bought on the same day, so it's not likely to be an issue but I did flash one card with an ASUS bios and CF ran exactly the same.
Both running on ASUS bios now actually, think it was when I was checking out ASUS smart doctor.
 
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