Alright whats the deal AMD...

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Godmachine said:
Well after spending hours today trying to figure this out I've discovered a few things about this setup.

1. Both cards work perfectly ... on there own. Benchmarks have them right were they should be , they are properly cooled and running average temps.
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greengrovesystems said:
Here's an idea - have you tried running the default windows 7 drivers?

Have you tried running each card individually?
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People really didn't bother to read the thread did they? Lol.
 
Godmachine said:
People really didn't bother to read the thread did they? Lol.
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Once again individual experiences are what they are. I've read through this thread and it looks like you've tried everything I would have thought of. There are people that complain about issues with nVidia SLI solutions that I've never seen or noticed. Stuff happends in individual cases, doesn't mean that other will have the same experience.

People just don't take others at their word much around, the words they bother to read ot listen to. Pretty sad.
 
Godmachine said:
Seriously though I did what I could , if it was my setup I might have gone a few steps further but I think I already went far and above what I had to for a friend. I don't feel like spending weeks on end trying to figure it out for him when I can buy different cards and have them work as they currently are. Bottom line.
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Much to read. :p
What was the final conclusion/bottom line? You didn't get crossfire to work, one of the crossfire bridges was broken or you got crossfire working in some games and some not? :)
 
Go to nvidia and let us know
nvidia also has problem right now
gpu usage going up and down all over
my 460 and 470 uses only 50% in sc2 and drops down to 405mhz(2d clock) automatic
 
heatlesssun said:
Once again individual experiences are what they are. I've read through this thread and it looks like you've tried everything I would have thought of. There are people that complain about issues with nVidia SLI solutions that I've never seen or noticed. Stuff happends in individual cases, doesn't mean that other will have the same experience.

People just don't take others at their word much around, the words they bother to read ot listen to. Pretty sad.
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Indeed . I'm not out to turn this thread into "How I became a Nvidia fanboy and an AMD hater" just seems certain people can't grasp how one person could experience something different them and therefore that person is either wrong or an idiot.

Tamlin_WSGF said:
Much to read. :p
What was the final conclusion/bottom line? You didn't get crossfire to work, one of the crossfire bridges was broken or you got crossfire working in some games and some not? :)
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Bottom line , some games worked as they should and were benefiting well from the Crossfire setup. Others would have weird frame rate drops or half the performance that it should have been , despite trying many different drivers and hunting across forums all over the net the issues I was experiencing weren't quite plentiful. I ran the cards on there own and they worked flawlessly , once I connected them together (one bridge wouldn't allow me to enable crossfire , however 2 did) everything became touchy again. Maybe it was a motherboard issue , maybe not but with the current 460 SLi everything runs great.

If this was my setup I might have waited for a another driver release just to see if anything improved however my friend didn't want to wait and I think I did enough to help , he plays CS, BCBF2 competitively and performance is paramount for what he wants so I can understand his reasoning. He's happy now and thats all the matters.
 
Godmachine said:
Bottom line , some games worked as they should and were benefiting well from the Crossfire setup. Others would have weird frame rate drops or half the performance that it should have been , despite trying many different drivers and hunting across forums all over the net the issues I was experiencing weren't quite plentiful. I ran the cards on there own and they worked flawlessly , once I connected them together (one bridge wouldn't allow me to enable crossfire , however 2 did) everything became touchy again. Maybe it was a motherboard issue , maybe not but with the current 460 SLi everything runs great.

If this was my setup I might have waited for a another driver release just to see if anything improved however my friend didn't want to wait and I think I did enough to help , he plays CS, BCBF2 competitively and performance is paramount for what he wants so I can understand his reasoning. He's happy now and thats all the matters.
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Thanks. :) It was a bit hard to grasp what was really wrong. Could have been a motherboard issue as you say (some MB's play nicer with Nvidia cards and some play nicer with ATI cards and sometimes a bios update is all it takes), or it could have been a faulty CF bridge. One CF bridge should work anyway, so something didn't match here.

Of course, the most important thing is that your friend got to game in the end, but I would have liked to know what went wrong (a tinkers curiosity). I don't think drivers would have fixed this, if your performance was very different from review performance in the games you tested.
 
Tamlin_WSGF said:
Thanks. :) It was a bit hard to grasp what was really wrong. Could have been a motherboard issue as you say (some MB's play nicer with Nvidia cards and some play nicer with ATI cards and sometimes a bios update is all it takes), or it could have been a faulty CF bridge. One CF bridge should work anyway, so something didn't match here.

Of course, the most important thing is that your friend got to game in the end, but I would have liked to know what went wrong (a tinkers curiosity). I don't think drivers would have fixed this, if your performance was very different from review performance in the games you tested.
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It could have been a mobo issue but when they were crossfire'd there was no instability at all and I would think that if there was even a bit of an issue with the mobo it wouldn't have been as smooth to hook up. The BIOS on the mobo was the l latest release , I checked that off the list early on.

But either way its water under the bridge now.
 
Zachstar said:
I and MANY MANY others have zero issues with AMD drivers. So I am sure they are plenty serious about Software.
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I wish there was a thumbs up option lol.

and I really think it is a stupid statement to say that AMD isn't serious about there drivers, they are struggling with them yes, but they seem to be working their ass off on fixing them.
 
Hi interesting thread I too seem to be having problems with a video card that seems to be driver related.
I may have to switch my games to console gaming soon.
The PC industry seems to become more crappy every year as things get more faster and consume more power and worst of all, more expensive. And depriving young poor soles of there hard earned savings while profits sky rocket.

There may also be minor incompatibility issues that just arnt listed.
With computers everything is trial and error.
Good luck with this build, hope something comes up
 
I wouldn't mind seeing AMD take two months instead of one to release drivers. This would allow more development time for the driver team to make something solid.
 
Primu$ said:
Hi interesting thread I too seem to be having problems with a video card that seems to be driver related.
I may have to switch my games to console gaming soon.
The PC industry seems to become more crappy every year as things get more faster and consume more power and worst of all, more expensive. And depriving young poor soles of there hard earned savings while profits sky rocket.

There may also be minor incompatibility issues that just arnt listed.
With computers everything is trial and error.
Good luck with this build, hope something comes up
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Thanks for the reply , well I don't think this thread should convince you to quite PC gaming .. that wasn't my intention at all lol. There have always been cycles where one GPU maker has an edge over the other , the difference this time around is that AMD has the better overall hardware (in terms of design , cooling and applications of Eyefinity) but Nvidia has the performance and solid drivers.

The PC industry is always changing and the market is far different than it use to be.
 
Primu$ said:
Hi interesting thread I too seem to be having problems with a video card that seems to be driver related.
I may have to switch my games to console gaming soon.
The PC industry seems to become more crappy every year as things get more faster and consume more power and worst of all, more expensive. And depriving young poor soles of there hard earned savings while profits sky rocket.

There may also be minor incompatibility issues that just arnt listed.
With computers everything is trial and error.
Good luck with this build, hope something comes up
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I generally disagree. All of my systems are 2010 hardware all running Windows 7 and there a solid machines, VERY few issues, my tm2 did lockup couple days ago, that's about the extent of my problems.

Also I wouldn't say stuff is getting more expensive so much as there's more stuff to buy, We have a large range of devices and parts to choose. Desktops, laptops, phone and know slates along with all kinds of neat hardware for PCs still. The overall price on the high end hasn't changed but you do get more for your money.

All I can say is that I'm very pleased with all of my Windows 7 machines, they run smoothly and solidly and for what I've gotten, I can't complain much about the prices but sure, who wouldn't want stuff to be cheaper.
 
Well weather you agree or not this is just MY OPINION, everyones hardware may vary.
As I said before there may be setups that have incompatibility issues that arent listed.
Some people who upgrade dont upgrade everything in the same year. For instance I have an old mobo its an Asus P5N32-SLi (Sadly i just maybe the one who is having a incompatibility issue with my video card.) and even tho I have a mobo that supports a PCI-E video card there maybe some kind of compatibility issue with something newer.
Im just saying this could be one of the reasons.

Back to the origianl post...
Also what model Gigabyte mobo does your friend have?
I know im 2 pages behind but have you tried updatin bios of the mobo?

EDIT: as technology gets better ( so they say) Why is that When I go to forums it seems now a days almost 50/50 chance people hardware will work without any issues.
 
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Primu$ said:
Well weather you agree or not this is just MY OPINION, everyones hardware may vary.
As I said before there may be setups that have incompatibility issues that arent listed.
Some people who upgrade dont upgrade everything in the same year. For instance I have an old mobo its an Asus P5N32-SLi (Sadly i just maybe the one who is having a incompatibility issue with my video card.) and even tho I have a mobo that supports a PCI-E video card there maybe some kind of compatibility issue with something newer.
Im just saying this could be one of the reasons.

Back to the origianl post...
Also what model Gigabyte mobo does your friend have?
I know im 2 pages behind but have you tried updatin bios of the mobo?

EDIT: as technology gets better ( so they say) Why is that When I go to forums it seems now a days almost 50/50 chance people hardware will work without any issues.
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He has a GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R but we sold off the 5870 cards and bought 2 GTX 460's , its working perfectly now without any problems. His mobo had the latest beta release so it wasn't that , it was really weird driver performance that was the issue so. He wanted the setup to "work" so I just took the easy road so its all good now.
 
this seems to be the more common fix lately is to go Nvidia =D
Nice!
 
Zachstar said:
Wrong.. Blaming AMD because you diddnt do things right wont help you. Multiple places have shown that Crossfire performance is fine and that this driver mess is seriously blown out of wack.

If you don't want to accept that you have not done everything you can to resolve this and just choose to libel AMD instead take it elseware. This is a forum for people who are serious about hardware.
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Zachstar said:
Too late he already showed his buddy AMD is supposed teh driver evil and convinced that person to go green. The topic was a nice extra shot at AMD.

Believes they are not at fault, Blames AMD every step of the way, Nvidia at once "happens" to come up (Ya right) And they want the other person to not only go Green but go with the crap that is GF100.

Anyone else believing this? I sure aint
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Wow fanboy much? Seriously, how old are you?
 
Primu$ said:
EDIT: as technology gets better ( so they say) Why is that When I go to forums it seems now a days almost 50/50 chance people hardware will work without any issues.
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Well, people tend to make a thread addressing a problem of theirs more than a thread that just says, "Hey my new video card installation went fine, and this is a pointless thread!".
 
Wendig0 said:
Well, people tend to make a thread addressing a problem of theirs more than a thread that just says, "Hey my new video card installation went fine, and this is a pointless thread!".
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Yea so whats your problem?
 
Bought a 5870 because my GTX285 kept crashing (definitely installed my Arctic Cooling HSF wrong). This is my first time doing ATi/AMD for a machine that's for me. I've built machines with ATi for a lot of friends with no problems. However I do like Nvidia a lot more when it comes to drivers. It probably has something to do with the layout or maybe it's because I'm simply just more familiar with them.
 
Godmachine said:
Probably the real truth. Sad if so , plenty of customers still need to be treated properly with regular working drivers that fit the bill across the board.


- rep AMD :(
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What about how good are the ATI drivers for "regular" applications like browsing, word processing, or maybe spreadsheet and photo editing?
 
People here get way too uptight when someone's preferences differ from theirs lol. Apparently, unless one has exhausted all troubleshooting attempts, one is not allowed to blame ATi for it not working correctly. That's ridiculous lol. Even if you could get it to work really well after tinkering and troubleshooting it, does not mean that you should. It's perfectly legitimate to not want to bother with troubleshooting. If getting alternative hardware works right away, as it did in Godmachine's case, then I'll gladly take that route, and the company that can deliver that kind of hassle-free performance earns extra points in my book for sure. Time is the most valuable thing.

From my limited experience, Nvidia does seem to deliver expected performance more consistently. If you're willing to tinker and troubleshoot in order to take advantage of the better hardware, then props to you, but don't flame anyone for having different preferences/priorities in life.
 
DaRuSsIaMaN said:
People here get way too uptight when someone's preferences differ from theirs lol. Apparently, unless one has exhausted all troubleshooting attempts, one is not allowed to blame ATi for it not working correctly. That's ridiculous lol. Even if you could get it to work really well after tinkering and troubleshooting it does not mean you should. It's perfectly legitimate to not want to bother with troubleshooting. If getting alternative hardware works right away, as it did in Godmachine's case, then I'll gladly take that route, and the company that can deliver that kind of hassle-free performance earns extra points in my book for sure. Time is the most valuable thing.

From my limited experience, Nvidia does seem to deliver expected performance more consistently. If you're willing to tinker and troubleshoot in order to take advantage of the better hardware, then props to you, but don't flame anyone for having different preferences/priorities.
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Couldn't have said it better myself :cool: , wish more people shared your viewpoint.
 
DaRuSsIaMaN said:
People here get way too uptight when someone's preferences differ from theirs lol. Apparently, unless one has exhausted all troubleshooting attempts, one is not allowed to blame ATi for it not working correctly. That's ridiculous lol. Even if you could get it to work really well after tinkering and troubleshooting it, does not mean that you should. It's perfectly legitimate to not want to bother with troubleshooting. If getting alternative hardware works right away, as it did in Godmachine's case, then I'll gladly take that route, and the company that can deliver that kind of hassle-free performance earns extra points in my book for sure. Time is the most valuable thing.

From my limited experience, Nvidia does seem to deliver expected performance more consistently. If you're willing to tinker and troubleshoot in order to take advantage of the better hardware, then props to you, but don't flame anyone for having different preferences/priorities in life.
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This. When you're test driving a car and it starts acting up you don't pull over, pop the hood, and start trying to fix it yourself.

You just get another car.

Fanboys can't seem to grasp that for whatever reason.

I have/had (2 days away from my ebay auction closing) a 5870 and the damned thing was the most unstable POS I've ever had the displeasure of tinkering with. Eventually I was able to get the card stable (there was some kind of driver issue between my Mobos onboard LAN and the card itself that caused the card to crash in almost every game, among a few other driver conflicts as well) but it had soured me from ever using an ATI card again.

Needless to say I plopped in a 480GTX and it had no issues, ran perfectly out of the box.
 
I understand people have their own preference but a difference is that most AMD video card users seem to have their stuff work properly and they go on their way quietly. Meanwhile Nvidia fans can't help but run their mouth no matter the situation and it has been this way for years.

The GTX 460s have seen only one driver release and currently have a beta out. There are massive problems with the drivers just check the Nvidia forums.

Nvidia has released drivers that have burned out cards. AMD/ATI has never done this.

No less than a third of all Vista crashes were the result of Nvidia's bad drivers. Nvidia had over a year at least to work on these and they ignored it These drivers conflicts were not just with the Vista. Some people with Nvidia mobos were reporting conflicts between the drivers for different parts of the board.

In all six of the various PCs I have only one is actively running an AMD card. That one PC is my main and has used various ATI/AMD cards for 6 years straight without issue acorss three different versions of Windows. All of my Nvidia cards still work fine, even my old AGP TNT2.

Both companies have issues the difference is that one camp likes to continuously dump on the other through vicious rumors while ignoring their own software/driver short comings. Even more so now that ATI is dominant in DX11 and has risen to no less than a 50/50 market share in discrete cards.

Yes yes CUDA blah blah HPC professional market blah blah blah. MS & Intel use Direct Compute, Apple uses OpenCL and Adobe has said they will be switching to OpenCL in future versions.
 
Vagrant_Zero said:
This. When you're test driving a car and it starts acting up you don't pull over, pop the hood, and start trying to fix it yourself.

You just get another car.

Fanboys can't seem to grasp that for whatever reason.

I have/had (2 days away from my ebay auction closing) a 5870 and the damned thing was the most unstable POS I've ever had the displeasure of tinkering with. Eventually I was able to get the card stable (there was some kind of driver issue between my Mobos onboard LAN and the card itself that caused the card to crash in almost every game, among a few other driver conflicts as well) but it had soured me from ever using an ATI card again.

Needless to say I plopped in a 480GTX and it had no issues, ran perfectly out of the box.
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So, it wasnt the video card at all it was your motherboards on board lan card, and you still blamed ATI for the problem....

yeah, thats intellegent..
 
Comte said:
So, it wasnt the video card at all it was your motherboards on board lan card, and you still blamed ATI for the problem....

yeah, thats intellegent..
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Intelligence is not wasting your time trying to fix something that isn't your problem to begin with.

Took me 5 minutes to toss out the 5870 and plop in the 480GTX which has been running with 0 issues. Took me much longer to check every single last piece of hardware and software in my PC to figure out the instability that ONLY occurred with the ATI card.

But hey if you're the type of the bloke that prefers tinkering with random electronics over doing everything else a high end PC can do when it's functioning properly, don't get pissed when somebody calls you a grease monkey.

Besides, I'm selling the 5870 for as much as I originally paid for it over a year ago and managed to pick up a new 480 for $350 so I'm making out like a bandit here.

Lastly, the word is intelligent. Try spelling it right before mouthing off.
 
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Dark Shroud said:
I understand people have their own preference but a difference is that most AMD video card users seem to have their stuff work properly and they go on their way quietly. Meanwhile Nvidia fans can't help but run their mouth no matter the situation and it has been this way for years.

The GTX 460s have seen only one driver release and currently have a beta out. There are massive problems with the drivers just check the Nvidia forums.

Nvidia has released drivers that have burned out cards. AMD/ATI has never done this.

No less than a third of all Vista crashes were the result of Nvidia's bad drivers. Nvidia had over a year at least to work on these and they ignored it These drivers conflicts were not just with the Vista. Some people with Nvidia mobos were reporting conflicts between the drivers for different parts of the board.

In all six of the various PCs I have only one is actively running an AMD card. That one PC is my main and has used various ATI/AMD cards for 6 years straight without issue acorss three different versions of Windows. All of my Nvidia cards still work fine, even my old AGP TNT2.

Both companies have issues the difference is that one camp likes to continuously dump on the other through vicious rumors while ignoring their own software/driver short comings. Even more so now that ATI is dominant in DX11 and has risen to no less than a 50/50 market share in discrete cards.

Yes yes CUDA blah blah HPC professional market blah blah blah. MS & Intel use Direct Compute, Apple uses OpenCL and Adobe has said they will be switching to OpenCL in future versions.
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AMD fans are just as loud mouthed and firm on there stance as Nvidia fan's thats the way its always been. Of course the majority of people out there don't experience the issues people do say on this forum. I've pointed out more than once that my problem is a "personal" experience that I'm not implying all users and setups are effected.

I've owned many ATI/AMD cards myself over the years and this is probably the first time I've ran into such weird issues. I've had cards die but none of that surprises me with how gamers like us push our cards on a constant basis. Hardware dies , its the way of things.

Whatever you decide is a better brand is your own personal opinion , regardless of what anyone else tells you as long as your happy with it thats all that matters.
 
Godmachine said:
Hes running a Corsair 1k watt PSU so I don't think its the problem. I think its poor driver support I mean ATI is still completing its merger with AMD and thats bound to effect certain departments including driver support. I guess I've always had great experiences with ATI products and I'm wondering if I advised my friend wrong which is not something I'm use to doing.
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No this is true. I believe that ATI borked the drivers 10.5 up for crossfire. At one point it was so bad that a pair of GTX 460s was smoking the 5870 CFX setup. I think they did fix a few games but apparently not all of them.

I don't know what to say but maybe he should consider selling those 5870s and wait for the 6000 series. Maybe AMD will get the drivers right this time. (ATI brand will be dead with 6000 right?).
 
vjcsmoke said:
No this is true. I believe that ATI borked the drivers 10.5 up for crossfire. At one point it was so bad that a pair of GTX 460s was smoking the 5870 CFX setup. I think they did fix a few games but apparently not all of them.

I don't know what to say but maybe he should consider selling those 5870s and wait for the 6000 series. Maybe AMD will get the drivers right this time. (ATI brand will be dead with 6000 right?).
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Heh well thanks for the advice but a few pages back I sold his 5870's and we bought 2 GTX 460's and they are running wonderfully. Hes very happy with what hes got and we've been playing a bunch of BFBC2 and SC2.
 
Godmachine said:
Heh well thanks for the advice but a few pages back I sold his 5870's and we bought 2 GTX 460's and they are running wonderfully. Hes very happy with what hes got and we've been playing a bunch of BFBC2 and SC2.
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I'm glad to see that your friend's rig is running fine for him. Seems like the only time this thread is brought back to the front it's somebody hating on you. Maybe it's time for you to close this thread. LOL :)
 
Godmachine said:
Heh well thanks for the advice but a few pages back I sold his 5870's and we bought 2 GTX 460's and they are running wonderfully. Hes very happy with what hes got and we've been playing a bunch of BFBC2 and SC2.
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Cool. Yeah 460 SLI offers real nice bang for the buck performancewise. I'm sure if AMD ever got their video driver act together, they'd score a lot more customers. But right now AMD's engineering team is about 10x more talented than their driver team. *shrugs*
 
Lord_Exodia said:
I'm glad to see that your friend's rig is running fine for him. Seems like the only time this thread is brought back to the front it's somebody hating on you. Maybe it's time for you to close this thread. LOL :)
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Thanks and yea for real lol , lots of hate for a guy that is just trying to get things working :D

Anyway's time for this thread to go bye bye. Thanks for the help (those that offered it and not fanboy rabble).
 
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