GA-790XTA-UD4 + Crossfire 5850 Issues

[matrix311]

A little history about my setup.

Phenom II x4 965BE stock speed
Zalman CPNS910 CPU Cooler
GA-790XTA-UD4
Sapphire HD5850 stock speed (original card)
MSI R5850 Twin Frozzr ii stock speed (just purchased for crossfire 11/15/11)
8GB 1600mhz Kingston Hyper-X Memory
Corsair AX-850 PSU
two spinpoint F3 1TB HDD's in RAID-0 configuration
Antec 900 Case
Win7 Pro x64-bit

So for the past 2 years i've been running this system with a single Sapphire HD5850 card. Just yesterday I purchased the MSI R5850 so I can crossfire the cards to improve FPS in BF3. I was running the Corsair HX620 PSU but needed some extra juice for the additional 5850 so today I purchased the Corsair AX-850 PSU. Regardless i'm still having the same exact issues with both PSU's so it's possible the PSU is not an issue. I'm still going to keep the ax-850 now that I have it.

The problem i'm having is very bad performance when the two video cards are installed and in crossfire mode. My FPS in BF3 is around 15-20fps in crossfire. It lag's extremely bad and the system runs poorly. If I go into CCC and disable crossfire then jump back into BF3 my system runs as smooth as butter and I get 60-80fps. The issue only happens when I enable crossfire.

I've got the latest AMD Catalyst 11.11 drivers installed with the latest 11.11 cap1 installed as well. I also tried resetting the bios back to defaults just in case there was something in there causing the crossfire to not work properly. That didn't do the trick.

Some other troubleshooting I've done is trying each GPU individually. I install the card into the pci-x 1 slot (the primary) and no issues. Both work perfectly fine stand alone so I know both cards are working. Is it possible pci-x slot 2 where the 2nd GPU for Crossfire goes into is bad causing these problems? I've also tried different crossfire bridges and still no luck.

Last resort i'm backing up my OS right now and going to do a clean install of windows 7. My current install is about 1.5yr old since I've reloaded it. Is there anything you recommend I try before blowing out the OS? I'm not sure what else to do to get this crossfire setup to work properly.

Thanks for your help!

[autotech]

Doing the clean install would be best and make sure when you install the CCC that both cards are installed with a bridge connection and that both 5850's have the proper video card power plug ins also. Also make sure your motherboard bios is up to date and clock back that ram to 1333 you can always tighten the timings possiably but that processor will run 1600 it is not recommended and that CPU running that ram at 1600 and trying to do crossfire can cause major headaches.

No over clock on the CPU either till after you get the cards running then if you want to overclock cpu and ram go ahead.
Just do mild overcocks first and use computer for a day inbetween settings if you start getting a ati.amg error you know your overclock is starting to get unstable turn it back a tad and try again.

[matrix311]

Thank you for your reply. I just finished reloading windows and i'm in the process of installing all the drivers. Hopefully this does the trick!

[matrix311]

Well i've reloaded my computer with a fresh install of windows 7 and the problem is still here. Extreme poor performance and low fps. I've got all the latest and greatest drivers installed and the extreme bare minimums. Is there a way to test pci-e slot 2 where the secondary GPU goes into to verify that is not defective? Right now that's the only thing I can think of causing this problem.

For some reason this system just does not like crossfire and it's very frustrating.

[absic]

Hi there,

the easiest way of testing the second PCIE slot is to just use a single Graphic card in that slot and set the Init First Display to PEG1.

When it comes to running Crossfire with BF3, the problem could be due more to the drivers and the game programming, rather than the actual hardware.

[matrix311]

Hi there,

the easiest way of testing the second PCIE slot is to just use a single Graphic card in that slot and set the Init First Display to PEG1.

When it comes to running Crossfire with BF3, the problem could be due more to the drivers and the game programming, rather than the actual hardware.

Thanks I will give this a try. I'm assuming this is a bios setting to set Init First Display to PEG1.

Also regarding the bad performance it's not just BF3. It's every graphic intense application in general. COD Black Ops gets maybe 20fps and my 3dmark scores are ultra ultra low.

Hopefully this will tell me if the slot is bad.

[matrix311]

Hi there,

the easiest way of testing the second PCIE slot is to just use a single Graphic card in that slot and set the Init First Display to PEG1.

When it comes to running Crossfire with BF3, the problem could be due more to the drivers and the game programming, rather than the actual hardware.

Well the second pci slot seems to be working. I just made the change in my bios to peg1 and it booted into windows. I decided to hop in BF3 to test it out and my frames were extremely low just as they are in crossfire only getting 10-20fps and the computer was really slow and fidgity when trying to load the game. I also tried COD Black Ops and same results. Normally when I try to get into a COD server it almost instantly loads up, this time it took about 1 minute to load.

Here is my board http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3263#sp click details and this is a little tid bit I found.
(Note 3) For optimum performance, if only one PCI Express graphics card is to be installed, be sure to install it in the PCIEX16 slot. The PCIEX8 slot shares bandwidth with the PCIEX16 slot. When PCIEX8 is populated with a PCI Express graphics card, the PCIEX16 slot will operate at up to x8 mode.

Could this be my problem? Could this be creating a bottleneck when both cards are running at 8x? I wouldnt think so but i'm out of ideas. Could this simply be a driver issue? Is there some magical thing I need to do to get crossfire to work properly? I've tried both 11.10 and 11.11 CCC drivers and same results with both. I also have the most current application 11.11cap1 installed as well.

Please help! I dont know what else to do to get this working.