5850 Crossfire Dimming.

[Ocean]

From the Beginning...

5850 crossfire...
Crysis crashed, crysis crashed again. Furmark works. Temps are good. ram and cpu are good. Heaven Benchmark crashes, only with AA on. AA triggers crashing in Crysis. AA is broken.

Download newest drivers, uninstall old drivers. reinstall new drivers. disable crossfire to test one thing at a time, and screen goes dim. reenable crossfire, and screen stays dim. uninstall and reinstall drivers, and screen is dim.

when drivers are not installed, the screen is regular brightness.
the windows loading screen is normal brightness.
the log in screen is dim.

i cant find any specific info on this issue, and it isnt any sort of color setting issue. off to play find the leprechaun.

 

[Ocean]

tested with each card on its own, both cards yield dim when ran in a single configuration. doesnt seem to be hardware.

 

[Deviationer]

the dimming is probably the gray screen of death.
Try 10.4 or 10.5 with the 10.7 app profiles

Uninstall from Add/Remove / Programs and Features
Run driver cleaner (from guru3d.com)
Reboot
Goto device manager
Right click uninstall both video cards and both of the HDMI audio drivers
(Yes to removing software)

Search hard drive for ATI/AMD folders and delete
Search registry for ATI/AMD and delete
Reboot
Install 10.4 or 10.5


I had the same issue pop up with 10.7. First time I have had issues with ATI drivers. I disabled crossfire to play Dungeon Siege LOA and bam, gray screen of death. The only time I didn't have a gray/dim screen was in the BIOS, safe mode, or just using basic VGA drivers when in normal windows. I tried going back to 10.6, GSOD still there, so I tried 10.5 with 10.7 app profiles and everything went back to normal.

I might even go back to 10.4 since I have noticed with 10.5/10.6/10.7 I randomly get mouse cursor corruption. I can "fix" it by loading a game, or moving my mouse around between my monitors fast, or changing the cursor icon set and then changing it back. It's a minor issue though.

 

[jeremyshaw]

for dimming, it only occured after exiting from a game (and only from Mafia 2 demo), so I just logoff and login again (which reinitializes the graphics drivers, thus solving the problem).

 

[Ocean]

there was a file in the system 32 folder. atieclxx.exe

it wasnt getting updated, or uninstalled. i manually removed it. it worked.
also utilizing other dvi ports resolved the dimming issue, but i still had the aa crash issue.

but im now running off the second dvi port on the second card, i never could get that to work before. but im hoping itll improve the life of my cards since that second card gets better airflow.

i dont think it was the grey screen of death, it didnt match the youtube videos. and it didnt affect performance in games at all.

 

[Vexamus]

There's two kinds of dimming. Post gaming dim, that can be fixed by logging off and back on again. Just restart the Desktop Window Manager service (DWM). That will fix that dimming.

For the grey/dim screen of death, try resetting your driver to factory defaults by going into CCC and into Options > Preferences > Reset to factory defaults.

Sucks if you have an OC or something, but that's what's been working for me..