290X CF setup not working - please help (X58 users?)

If anyone has a X79 mobo or X58 mobo and a 290x crossfire setup, if you could do the following for me, it would be GREATLY appreciated:

1. Turn on crossfire and use ATI 13.11 v9.5 beta drivers.
2. Load up hitman: absolution and turn on vsync.
3. See if the audio crackles and/or the game stutters and is overall sluggish.

Perhaps if we can get a few people saying yes / no we can build up some info as to why it is happening!

Please mention your system specs in the response too please
 
Tanquen said:
Well, the 7970s crashed randomly on the X79 motherboards for almost a year before they fixed it. Some people got some free games out of it but all in all it sucked.
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Oh no shit? Wow, well I guess they don't want to learn from their past. I guess you can make the jump to Nvidia , at least the shit will work for you without issue.
 
The only reason I'm not irate is that I have a huge backlog of WiiU and 3DS games to play through, and I can at least mine with them. But I really want to know what's causing this.
 
Rizen said:
The only reason I'm not irate is that I have a huge backlog of WiiU and 3DS games to play through, and I can at least mine with them. But I really want to know what's causing this.
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Yea, the issues with BF4 made me open my PS4 after a getting it launch day and having it sit there in the box. Oh well, cant believe I am playing COD again after 2 years.
 
Hey Rizen,

I noticed the 13.11 beta 9.2 drivers actually rectified the stuttering for me in League of Legends and Hitman

Might want to try them out. Still a royal shitpile of a mess though... How AMD ever thought this would pass muster I just don't know. As far as I'm concerned, these cards are still very beta...
 
Just FYI, the cards are exhibiting "coil whine" - one much worse than the other. I swapped to a MSI Z87-G45, 4770k and Corsair AX1200 and it made no difference. So clearly, mobo, processor and power supply make no difference to the whine.

So that's the latest "what now" development lol... I found running borderless in games eliminates the coil whine entirely (and disables crossfire) while enabling vsync slows the whine down to a "tick tick tick" that ticks about 60 times a second - it's synced to the framerate.

Running borderless though does entirely rectify it...

Also, making the primary card the one that is quieter also reduces the overall noise, it's "tolerable" but for $1300 this shit ought to be flawless.. I gotta say, I won't be buying AMD for a LONG time after this experience. I had 8800GTX sli, GTX 260 SLI, GTX 480, GTX 580 SLI prior to this and every time it was flawless but this has been a shit show...

One thing after another I tell ya!
 
Should I say it? I had 7970CF. I hear you. I had a stupid problem once every 1-2 months. My problems were infrequent enough to where I still enjoyed the performance. I actually liked those cards - I actually advocated the 7970CF here on H because the performance was great. Then, I went green. After going green - In retrospect when I went to the green side and I noticed something. The stupid bullshit? Gone. Never had stupid shit happen.

Okay, i'll be blunt. I'll say it. Did you have these issues with 580 SLI? I'm guessing you didn't. Wild guess here. AMD on the other hand, some strange bullshit once every 1-2 months. For me with 7970CF it was....forced vsync not working...witcher 2 crashing in crossfire....waking from sleep NEVER working without a crash...Having to re-install windows once every 3-4 months because some AMD beta driver fucked my shit up.... I thought i'd get something similar with the green side. NOPE. Everything always just works. Oh. AMD still hasn't fixed eyefinity + crossfire microstutter, two years and two months post release. How funny and sad is that?

If you go back to nvidia SLI, everything always works. If you have coil whine and issues - RMA that shit. Straight up. It isn't worth the headache bro. Or sell that shit on ebay to a miner and don't look back. Go back to the other side, issues gone. Sorry, I hate to say it, but i'm going to take a WILD WILD GUESS and say that you didn't get this shit with 580 SLI. Did you? Just curious. I can 99.9% guarantee you, on the green side, that you won't get stupid shit like this and if you do, their driver team will fix it pronto. That has been my experience. All the random stupid shit that happened, never happens now. It would take a major incentive at this point for me to go back red, although i'll happily mine their GPUs. So while I cringe to buy a GPU specifically for that purpose, hey, whatever .AMD is paying for my future upgrades. But I aint going to game on that shit, hell no.

Again. The performance of the 290 is awesome (noise not withstanding) but the strange mysterious bullshit issues? Is it worth it? Is it worth the 100$ savings? I'll tell you. It isn't. Straight up. Now some might not have issues, but NV just has less issues than AMD.
 
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Ya my 580 sli was flawless, as was every other nvidia product i had before it.

Considering selling the 290x's, so I can get back to gaming and not tweaking the everloving shit out of every little setting
 
RyanLucier said:
Just FYI, the cards are exhibiting "coil whine" - one much worse than the other. I swapped to a MSI Z87-G45, 4770k and Corsair AX1200 and it made no difference. So clearly, mobo, processor and power supply make no difference to the whine.

So that's the latest "what now" development lol... I found running borderless in games eliminates the coil whine entirely (and disables crossfire) while enabling vsync slows the whine down to a "tick tick tick" that ticks about 60 times a second - it's synced to the framerate.

Running borderless though does entirely rectify it...

Also, making the primary card the one that is quieter also reduces the overall noise, it's "tolerable" but for $1300 this shit ought to be flawless.. I gotta say, I won't be buying AMD for a LONG time after this experience. I had 8800GTX sli, GTX 260 SLI, GTX 480, GTX 580 SLI prior to this and every time it was flawless but this has been a shit show...

One thing after another I tell ya!
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Did swapping to a Z87/Haswell setup clear up the stuttering? My cards do have some coil whine in games when I let them run 100+ fps but I just use Dynamic Frame Rate control and they don't whine then.
 
i just stumbled across this thread.

I originally had a i7-950 & a Big Bang Xpower. I had problems with my GTX580SLI + 6 DIMM moduals. It would take 10+mins to boot, and everything would be super sluggish, and glitchy. Moving to a beta BIOS from the mdi forums cleared it all up.

Recently i purchased a pair of 290X's to crossfire. At the same time i purchased a H100i to replace my H70. The H100i connector popped off the block while i was installing and spilled coolant all over my board. most of it went straight down onto the IOH chip under that grey finned heatsink. I dried it all of and cleaned it quiet well, but after installing the cards it was slow to boot, and everything was slow and stuttery, and glitchy. It has been so long since i had the problem from before that i forgot about it. I assumed this occurrence was because of the coolant leak. I switched the motherboard out with a 3570K + Z78 Sabertooth. The 290x's run awesome.

Now reading thru your experience, i am beginning to think that it may have not been the coolant spill that caused it that second time. I am doing to put together a make shift system with the i7-950+big bang+580SLI to see if it still runs fine with the original setup.
 
AMD finally got back with me today and let me know they are digging into this.
 
Rizen said:
Hi there,

I just installed my 290X CF setup today into my system in my signature. When I have both cards installed, using the latest AMD beta drivers and Windows 8.1, my system slows down dramatically. Windows takes much longer to boot, the whole system feels laggy and games are unplayable. They load slowly and when I load in the frame rate is unplayable and audio is choppy. This is regardless of settings (tested BF4 on Ultra and on Low - same fps).

When I remove one card from the system - everything works perfectly fine. Tested both cards and both work fine by themselves. No other changes other than installing the extra 290X.

I am thinking this may be a motherboard incompatibility problem. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
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Hello Rizen,
Could you please post your issue, as detailed as possible if you don't mind, on the Catalyst Feedback Form, here is the link: http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D25AD12B3D

Your feedback will be very helpful...and thank you in advance.
 
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Thanks Sam. I'll send over all the details later this evening, as I'm mobile at the moment. I appreciate the response.

Ben
 
Report sent. I used the form for the Beta 13.11 Drivers instead though since the 13.9 drivers don't support the R9 290X.
 
Hi Sam,

I have a trouble ticket open with MSI Support as well, and this is what they just told me:

So far it seems like a resource allocation issue with AMI BIOS and the VGA BIOS. We are still checking to see if this can be resolved or not because AMI does not support legacy codebase anymore due to X58 being EOL product.
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I'm hoping this can be addressed, if not by MSI then by AMD, or at least we could see some additional pushing for a fix with AMI if needed.
 
Rizen said:
Hi Sam,

I have a trouble ticket open with MSI Support as well, and this is what they just told me:

I'm hoping this can be addressed, if not by MSI then by AMD, or at least we could see some additional pushing for a fix with AMI if needed.
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I have to say, this is a very interesting problem.
I hope you guys get this sorted out.
Looks like this may be an X58 chipset deal after all.
wow.:eek:
 
magoo said:
I have to say, this is a very interesting problem.
I hope you guys get this sorted out.
Looks like this may be an X58 chipset deal after all.
wow.:eek:
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I'm just glad that I am not going crazy and this is a real problem, rather than a random part failure or something that I configured wrong. I've spent several hours installing and uninstalling different parts of my system and so far the only thing that fixes the issue is removing the second 290X.
 
Rizen said:
I'm just glad that I am not going crazy and this is a real problem, rather than a random part failure or something that I configured wrong. I've spent several hours installing and uninstalling different parts of my system and so far the only thing that fixes the issue is removing the second 290X.
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Yeah, I noticed that, which is why I asked earlier if you might have a model with a PLX chip.

I wonder if an X58 with a PLX would have the same problem?

I wonder if there is still someone around who has one of those EVGA X58 Classified models?
 
I'm curious if flashing one of the cards to a different manufacturer's bios would prevent the resource conflict........just wondering.
 
Lith1um said:
I'm curious if flashing one of the cards to a different manufacturer's bios would prevent the resource conflict........just wondering.
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I could try that, but I believe that all the cards are essentially the same at this point - reference designs. Although I do know that some manufacturers locked voltage and some didn't, so I could try an ASUS VGA BIOS. But I'd like to hear more from AMD first.
 
Would I run into this issue with a Gigabyte mainboard, if it is a AMI BIOS issue? The BIOS on my X58 mainboard is Award PheonixBIOS.

Currently considering a new GPU and plan to CF/SLI later on... but I have no plans to upgrade my CPU until Haswell-E, so this could be a deal breaker.
 
I don't know. I can't answer that since I don't have that product :(
 
Glad i found this thread. Was about to upgrade my 7970's. Don't plan on upgrading my system either.
 
So, weird update - MSI Technical Support emailed me and asked me to remove a stick of memory (dropping the X58 system to dual channel instead of triple channel). This actually seems to have fixed the problem. I just hopped on a BF4 64 player server and was running 2560x1440, ultra everything, HBAO, 4X MSAA - butter smooth. System boots up normally now, the system performance feels much better.

Odd.
 
Rizen said:
So, weird update - MSI Technical Support emailed me and asked me to remove a stick of memory (dropping the X58 system to dual channel instead of triple channel). This actually seems to have fixed the problem. I just hopped on a BF4 64 player server and was running 2560x1440, ultra everything, HBAO, 4X MSAA - butter smooth. System boots up normally now, the system performance feels much better.

Odd.
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Wow, very surprised by this. Glad you are up and running!

Sounds like the triple channel is using quite a bit of the pcie bus and its not feeding those cards the bandwidth it needs running without finger connectors.
 
Venomous said:
Wow, very surprised by this. Glad you are up and running!

Sounds like the triple channel is using quite a bit of the pcie bus and its not feeding those cards the bandwidth it needs running without finger connectors.
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I don't think that's the problem, if it was bandwidth starved I would expect it to be stuttering in games, but the entire system was slowed down. MSI said it was a "resource allocation problem" - but haven't clarified on what exactly that means yet.
 
I wouldn't exactly call dropping to dual channel a "fix"

I was thinking about some newer cards, going to wait and see how this plays out
 
jojo69 said:
I wouldn't exactly call dropping to dual channel a "fix"

I was thinking about some newer cards, going to wait and see how this plays out
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Nope, I don't either. Reality is that 2x 290X and dual channel is faster than 1x 290X and triple channel, but losing 1/3 of my system memory isn't really acceptable. Waiting to hear more from AMD and MSI now.
 
Well I do not consider dropping to dual channel a "fix" at all! :mad:

Just a work around.

Triple channel probably throws the timing off for crossfire, that's an issue which should never have passed QA.

Hmm, gonna get a few cards to mine, but not on my personal rig, unless this is fixed! :mad:
 
Any more news about this? I want to pickup 2 290's in the new year once aib's are out and prices are stabilized. However this is making me re-consider.... would love to know if anyone has solved the issue? I wonder if taking a ram stick out would work on my P6t deluxe v1 if i encounter this issue.... hmm
 
Does the P6T use an AMI or Award BIOS?

MSI told me that it was an issue with the amount of VRAM on the motherboard. They told me that UEFI was needed to support 2x 4GB GPUs. They did send me a beta BIOS to try, but it didn't resolve the issue. Removing a stick of RAM does resolve the issue for me though.
 
AMI bios unfortunately, looks like ill probably run into the same problem as you.
Was considering picking up a 4770k and Z87 mobo. However, it would probably be almost the same performance as my X58 running dual channel so not sure if its worth it. I guess the smart move would be to wait until ive got the new cards to see what issues i run into.

Thanks.
 
Hope this issues doesn't take as long to fix as the 7000 series crossfire+eyefinity issues on x58/x79 systems. Good luck fellas!
 
MSI told me that they have an R&D engineer working on this, and I'll keep you guys updated.

I'm not sure who's fault this is - possibly no one, I mean X58 is now almost 6 years old, the biggest GPU available had 1GB of memory when i7s were released and now we have 6GB GPUs available. So I'm pleased that AMD and MSI are at least investigating - certainly much better than being told "sorry". Still, it would have been nice to know this ahead of time.

With the memory in dual channel both video cards work well, for what it's worth. I can run BF4 online multiplayer @ Ultra settings with 150% resolution scaling (equivalent to 4K resolution) and it's smooth.
 
I have two MSI R9 290X cards installed on an Asrock X79 Extreme9 motherboard with a 3930K CPU and 32GB of RAM. They are connected to 3x 30" monitors - two Dell 3011s and one older 3007. The difference in monitors is part of the reason why I went with AMD this time around, as Eyefinity can tolerate different sync polarities but nVidia surround can't.

When I had crossfire enabled, the system would just randomly freeze - with or without eyefinity. The last image would stay onscreen, but the system would be completely unresponsive.

Fortunately a couple times instead of just freezing, it bluescreened which generated some Windows dumps that allowed me to definitively place blame on the graphics cards. Since disabling crossfire however, the system is now stable again.
 
Raizer said:
I have two MSI R9 290X cards installed on an Asrock X79 Extreme9 motherboard with a 3930K CPU and 32GB of RAM. They are connected to 3x 30" monitors - two Dell 3011s and one older 3007. The difference in monitors is part of the reason why I went with AMD this time around, as Eyefinity can tolerate different sync polarities but nVidia surround can't.

When I had crossfire enabled, the system would just randomly freeze - with or without eyefinity. The last image would stay onscreen, but the system would be completely unresponsive.

Fortunately a couple times instead of just freezing, it bluescreened which generated some Windows dumps that allowed me to definitively place blame on the graphics cards. Since disabling crossfire however, the system is now stable again.
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"The last image would stay onscreen, but the system would be completely unresponsive." They had the same kind of issue with the X79 boards and my 7970. My 7970 did the same exact thing.

They (mostly) fixed it a year or so later in 12.11 beta 11. My system crashed 3-4 times a day at times until this fix.

From the 12.11 beta info:
◾Resolves a sporadic system hang encountered with a single AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPU seen on X58 and X79 chipsets.
◾Resolves an intermittent hang encountered with AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series GPUs in a CrossFire Eyefinity setup.
 
@Rizen
Sorry I'm late to the party on this one, but that Big Bang board has had a history of problems with Multi GPU support. I used to own one myself and had one in a client's machine, and ran into all sorts of problems. Bios updates eventually fixed most of the issues, but they manifested exactly like yours, entire system slowdown (Had the problems with some configurations of multiple 570's, 580's, and 680's in 2/3 way sli).

One thing I could do to get it to work was to actually reduce the amount of system ram. Try running only 2 or 3 memory sticks, and see what that does.

Unfortunately, the private support forum thread with all the beta bioses looks to have been removed. After spending way too much time with online support, RMA's, and their beta bios thread, I replaced myboard with the p6t6 WS Revolution. At this point in time, sadly, I think your best bet is to move on to a new platform. MSI would never officially confirm myproblems existed, but then release a beta bios to fix it 6 months later. As much as I loved that board, it's time to let it go if multi-gpu is your thing :(
 
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