6870s in crossfire on a Crosshair IV Formula board results in blackscreen

[savage1987]

The system in question:


Crosshair Formula IV board
2x MSI 1GB HD6870s
Phenom II x4 955BE stable at 4.0GHz
Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler
Zalman manual fan controller
Corsair AX1200 PSU
1TB Caviar Black OS/apps HDD
2TB Caviar Green storage HDD
4GB G-Skill Ripjaws (F3-16000CL9-2GBRHD x2)
Windows 7 home premium 64bit


I think that's about all that should factor in to it



The issue at hand:

System works fine on each card independent of the other.

As soon as the 2nd card is added, it will make it to desktop once, then blackscreen in a few seconds.. then it blackscreens every restart, usually after the Welcome screen, until the second card is removed. It WILL however still boot to desktop in safe mode. As soon as the 2nd card is removed, it boots up fine.


Is it worth trying an update to the 1902 BIOS for the board?


PSU issues have been suggested, but this happened on a Corsair HX650, and to be extra sure I upgraded to their AX1200 and it's still occurring.

Overheating seems likely to cause things like this but my case is not crowded, and my cards stay cool under load. The case is a Lian Li item with massive airflow so I shouldn't have any worries there.

Single monitor plugged in to a DVI port on the card in slot 1.



Cards are in red slots 1 and 3, where ASUS recommended.


This problem seems to happen a lot, and people have been dancing around solutions all over the internet with no firm results.

If anyone can shed any light on this issue I would be incredibly grateful.

Sam

[Dirbatua]

simple, swap to nvidia, ATI is shit.

[savage1987]

Sorry Dirb but I really wish people would stop giving me useless responses. There has to be a solution to this somewhere!


These cards have worked in this system previously to great effect, I am trying to get back to where it was before unspecified shit went awry.







minor update: updated mainboard BIOS to 1902, blackscreen isn't manifesting any more but it does hang at the logo screen whenever both cards are installed.

[Dirbatua]

stupid question but have you tried an archived driver, not the new one but one like 5-10 versions ago

[savage1987]

I have. I had some success with 10.12 (25/11/2010 release) but not complete.

Got me stumped what I did but it started working properly with the Xfire setup (with latest drivers - CCC11.5b), booted to desktop reliably and benchmarked OK.. but there were a couple of things I wasn't happy with so I killed it, formatted C:\ again and installed a fresh copy of Win7, 64bit (Home Premium) this time. In the throes of updating it now, will hopefully see some good results with it.

[footy]

might help if you list your computer specs

[savage1987]

OK I'm getting a feeling it might be a hardware issue with one of the cards.

Reasoning:

Crossfire failed to boot to windows (hung at logo screen).
Tried a single card in slot 3.
Logo screen had weird colours on the right hand half as the logo came together (left side was normal), then blackscreened, then BSOD'd.
Restarted a few times to make doubly sure it was going to stay this way. It did.

Swapped cards, still in slot 3.
Booted to desktop fine.





HOWEVER:

the same sequence of events happened earlier in the day, and upon swapping the cards back again it worked fine.

I don't really want to sit here and swap cards over all night (again..) so I'm going to call it a suspect card and be semi-happy with that diagnosis.

The tragedy of the situation is that I'm not 100% sure where the receipt for all this gear is. I will get in contact with the supplier (online - pccasegear.com) and see if they have it on record and can help me out with a warranty swap.


This is really the only thing I can think of to progress from here. Until then I will just deal with life on a single card, which is a real shame.


If anyone has any other hypotheses, please do share!
Sam




(updating first post with PC hardware listing now)

[footy]

flash ur bios and reset all oc voltages etc to stock+ try different set of ram if you can get any
failing that it's either a faulty mobo or gpu

all i can think of

[dijm8]

ur having a few probs with these cards hey...only thing i can suggest is headin over to the ocau forums, those guys will fix u up

[savage1987]

flash ur bios and reset all oc voltages etc to stock+ try different set of ram if you can get any
failing that it's either a faulty mobo or gpu

all i can think of

the overclock isn't causing it.. the CPU is running as a 3.6GHz Phenom x4, a factory setting, with normal volts etc for its hardware, it only clocks to 4 with a software OC within windows.

I've been troubleshooting this whole issue with it set on factory 3.2GHz also, and the problem set hasn't really differed either way so I have eliminated the OC as a possible cause.

I flashed the BIOS to ASUS's 1902 BIOS today, latest to support the AM3 CPUs, and it didn't solve anything really.. I don't have any spare RAM so that fails unfortunately.

ur having a few probs with these cards hey...only thing i can suggest is headin over to the ocau forums, those guys will fix u up

I've been all over overclock.net, the guys there have been pretty helpful but no definitive results. It's just such a random god damn problem!

[savage1987]

/double post

[NV-MY-VT]

Sounds to me like you might have ESD'd one of the cards while rebuilding the computer. If it works with just the one card, just make do with one video card for now (Which is more than sufficient...) and then following that, try and chase up another card to test, to see if it works.

If it works with a new GPU, then you know your original card is fried.

See if you can call your supplier, tell him you only just started using the faulty card, like JUST took it out of the box and it's DOA. They'll probably just replace it for free.

[savage1987]

oops forgot to update here.. copy paste dump:



OK I'm getting a feeling it might be a hardware issue with one of the cards.

Reasoning:

Crossfire failed to boot to windows (hung at logo screen).
Tried a single card in slot 3.
Logo screen had weird colours on the right hand half as the logo came together (left side was normal), then blackscreened, then BSOD'd.
Restarted a few times to make doubly sure it was going to stay this way. It did.

Swapped cards, still in slot 3.
Booted to desktop fine.





HOWEVER:

the same sequence of events happened earlier in the day, and upon swapping the cards back again it worked fine.

I don't really want to sit here and swap cards over all night (again..) so I'm going to call it a suspect card and be semi-happy with that diagnosis.

The tragedy of the situation is that I'm not 100% sure where the receipt for all this gear is. I will get in contact with the supplier (online - pccasegear.com) and see if they have it on record and can help me out with a warranty swap.


This is really the only thing I can think of to progress from here. Until then I will just deal with life on a single card, which is a real shame.


If anyone has any other hypotheses, please do share!
Sam
























oops, just noticed this:
A large percentage of warranty returns are tested to be without fault. If the product is found to be not faulty, a $25 service fee per item may be charged and the non-faulty items will be shipped back to you at your expense. As such we recommend contacting our service team first for assistance with testing and troubleshooting to make sure the item is faulty before returning it.



I think I will jump on the phone to them and explain the situation just to make sure they don't send it back.




edit: sent off the warranty request with a nice lengthy explanation of the fault.






















Got an email yesterday from pc case gear saying my warranty application had been approved, so I'm running one card for now (surprisingly powerful cards) and the other one will be sent off as soon as I find an appropriate box and padding

[dijm8]

new 11.6 drivers are out...give them ago aswell

[savage1987]

goddamnit i am going to have to use another big ass chunk of my mate's internet

I'm running a single card at the moment and it's stable as anything. loving life

[87RB30VL]

Let us know when you get your new card back! By the sounds of it you don't even need it hahaha

[NV-MY-VT]

Why on earth would any sane home computer user need dual cards....

I mean, bitcoin miners, hash calculators... sure....

[Dirbatua]

Why on earth would any sane home computer user need dual cards....

I mean, bitcoin miners, hash calculators... sure....

multiple monitor output, i have 4 screens running off 2 cards sometimes but mainly just 2 screens off the 1.

better graphics, dual cards share the load.

and mainly cause you can, price for dual, triple or quad video card setups these days ain't that expensive

[Super_Low 91]

Why on earth would any sane home computer user need dual cards....

I mean, bitcoin miners, hash calculators... sure....

I decided against dual cards, well kind of, I got the HD6990 witch is technically 2 cards strapped together. Iv had nothing but dramas getting the thing to work, mostly due to the fact there was no actual driver support for it at the time i got it, but now the new 11.6 has been released it works like a charm, i also got the latest CAPS as well an that helped with some support for the games i play,, There is still a few issues with it but least it runs now,

Hopefully when you get your card back savage it will all work out nicely for you..

[savage1987]

Why two cards? As Dirbatua said, mainly because I can

[NV-MY-VT]

*sigh*

It all just seems so excessive to me...

[savage1987]

I have 2 V8s as well. Personality disorder maybe, I don't know

[NV-MY-VT]

Nuhhhhhhhh....

-.-