6870 Crossfire- Driver Horrorshow!

A

Arthur Hucksake

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 27, 2010
Messages
373
Running a pair of 6870 in Crossfire.

10.10d hotfix no less.

Booted PC up this morning, not longer after hard lock... freezing up in Chrome.

Obviously, being a new PC build I began to shit ones pants. Memtest, prime95, LinX, Intel Burn Test. All came back clean.

I suspected it was to do with ram timings, voltages etc because I never had any indication of display issues. Reset everything to stock. Stressful!

Finally, after one of these hardlocks I left the PC frozen to go off and find something to hang myself with. Came back, low and behold "Display driver had stop responding and has recovered" ....event viewer kicked back amdkmdap error.

amdkmdap.... wtf

Swapped the two cards around, driver sweeper and reinstall. 30 mins now and not had a crash yet.... phew.

The cause? Uninstalling and reinstalling the profiles without reinstalling the whole driver set.

The Catalyst drivers aren't ready for this these yet.
 
Reading things like this really make me second guess going crossfire. I have been tossing the idea around after being against it for so long. I would like to see more feedback about the issue. I do know the positive and negatives, I am mostly interested it the amounts of good to bad experiences.
 
From the few games I did play yesterday, before this all started, it was incredible. Just unfortunate this went on.

Only began from a cold boot this morning which is puzzling. Hard to retrace my steps to what triggered it but I am guessing it has to be driver related.
 
why would you uninstall and reinstall the profiles without reinstalling the whole driver set? All you need to do is install the new profiles over the old ones.
 
There are a few things in my case that going crossfire also add. New PSU, new sound card and another 6850. Then I have to wonder if any games would be an issue. Its quite a bit to consider, even if it was just one game, that would drive me nuts. I hate things not working.
 
I ran 5750 crossfire for more than 6 months, and the only real issue I had with it was the starcraft2 Beta, and you expect problems with a beta. Since the official release, no problems with SC2 either. I'll be getting my second 6850 tomorrow and I'll try to get some benchies and testing done for it.
 
Flyinfinni said:
why would you uninstall and reinstall the profiles without reinstalling the whole driver set? All you need to do is install the new profiles over the old ones.
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First time i've ever used Crossfire. Coming from the nVidia school of logic.That place where shit actually works. Shame their newer cards suck balls.
 
cfx works for me and has worked for others, tell us more of what is going on to help you out, have you tried 10.10 without the hotfix?
 
Its working now, got a feeling one of the cards might be iffy. Before I switched them around was getting weird jitters in wmv playback and one time had a fuzzy image in the bios. See how it holds up being card numero 2 with a reseat and tinkering of power cables.
 
Arthur Hucksake said:
Its working now, got a feeling one of the cards might be iffy. Before I switched them around was getting weird jitters in wmv playback and one time had a fuzzy image in the bios. See how it holds up being card numero 2 with a reseat and tinkering of power cables.
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Maybe you should slow down on calling the drivers crap and stuff then. Figure out the actual problem before coming online and ripping on stuff you're not sure about. Might be worth doing some real testing on each card individually ;-)
 
Flyinfinni said:
Maybe you should slow down on calling the drivers crap and stuff then. Figure out the actual problem before coming online and ripping on stuff you're not sure about. Might be worth doing some real testing on each card individually ;-)
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People are mighty protective of their brand loyalty arent they. I'm a 3DFx fan myself. :)

Threw on Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, worked fine. Didn't spot anything unusual, just praying this thing holds up for Black Ops tonight. I'll be one of about three people buying the PC version instore I should imagine.
 
Flyinfinni said:
why would you uninstall and reinstall the profiles without reinstalling the whole driver set? All you need to do is install the new profiles over the old ones.
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Oh, should have mentioned. I actually had to uninstall the profiles to get World in Conflict working. Then for newer games I reinstalled them again. That breaks the 10.10d hotfix it seems.

Nevermind, with any luck things will remain crash free for now.
 
Can play all newer games just fine with my EAH6850 CrossFire setup (Lost Planet 2, Metro 2033, AVP, TF2, WoW, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, BFBC2, etc.). However, I cannot play my classic all-time favorite game Starsiege: Tribes. No matter what I try (10.4 opengl file, etc. etc.) it always crashes within 1-2 seconds of starting the program. I'm pretty sure it's not even a CrossFire issue and that ATI just sucks.
 
Arthur Hucksake said:
People are mighty protective of their brand loyalty arent they. I'm a 3DFx fan myself. :)

Threw on Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, worked fine. Didn't spot anything unusual, just praying this thing holds up for Black Ops tonight. I'll be one of about three people buying the PC version instore I should imagine.
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I'm not a fan of any particular brand. I just hate to see people mindlessly throwing out complaints and trashing something they haven't fully tested. I own AMD's right now, but thats because they were better price/performance/watt than Nvidia's. If I was an AMD Fanboy, I'd have an AMD CPU as well.

You really ought to do some testing with each card individually- the only time I had issues similar to the ones you are having now is when I had a bad card or a bad PCIe slot. The bad PCIe slot was with an ATI card, the bad card was an Nvidia- but caused very similar problems to what you are seeing now.
 
Arthur Hucksake said:
Oh, should have mentioned. I actually had to uninstall the profiles to get World in Conflict working. Then for newer games I reinstalled them again. That breaks the 10.10d hotfix it seems.

Nevermind, with any luck things will remain crash free for now.
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Maybe try turning crossfire off for that game, and then back on again for others instead of uninstalling the profiles?
 
Flyinfinni said:
Maybe try turning crossfire off for that game, and then back on again for others instead of uninstalling the profiles?
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Yeah, tried that first thing unfortunately.

Afterwards I discovered renaming the .exe would have worked too.

Well, taken out the second card I suspect of being dodgy. See if I get anymore BSODs. What a pain in the ass.
 
Even to this day, my brother in law still cant play Borderlands with the latest drivers, he is stuck in 10.4 . It will crash at random on his 5970. After seeing all that trouble I stayed with a pair of 480's for my portrait gaming. I can see where you come from. If he disabled CFX he can play borderlands all day with crashing. He rather play Borderlands then disable CFX so he is still using 10.4
 
uninstall in windows; cc cleaner in safe mode a couple of times; reinstall 10.10s and app profiles and then see if that helps
 
Its such a shame, I hear so many terrible things about ATI drivers. I so want to get a high end ATI card, but what wait for 6970 or better yet 6990 and then wait for 3 months for them to get the drivers working properly?

In the same sense I have to have two high end nVidia cards for surround, where is ATI one card? We can never win, in the world of computers.... :D

Oh microsoft please learn from OSX and allow us to make drivers, bios and updates so easier and less stressful. I really hate throwing my keyboard against the wall, and yelling at my PC. :)

Well keep your fingers crossed and lets just hope GTX 580 or better yet 590 go off without a hitch.
 
Been running for about an hour now without a freeze or BSOD with a single card. Going to flip the cards around, see if it happens again.
 
An hour of gameplay or a run of vantage is not enough to prove stability or disprove a defect. To even have any semblance of assurance you're gonna need to get at least a few hours of card pushed to 100% via benchmarks, then play 3 or 4 games for 30-45 minutes each. Then you've got some idea but still not enough for a definitive answer.
 
CustomModAddict said:
Its such a shame, I hear so many terrible things about ATI drivers. I so want to get a high end ATI card, but what wait for 6970 or better yet 6990 and then wait for 3 months for them to get the drivers working properly?

In the same sense I have to have two high end nVidia cards for surround, where is ATI one card? We can never win, in the world of computers.... :D

Oh microsoft please learn from OSX and allow us to make drivers, bios and updates so easier and less stressful. I really hate throwing my keyboard against the wall, and yelling at my PC. :)

Well keep your fingers crossed and lets just hope GTX 580 or better yet 590 go off without a hitch.
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I'm in the same boat. Only bought the 6870 as a stop gap card but now it's seems like 6870CF is better the GTX 580 at the same price. But.... the drivers. When I had 5850/5870CF/5970, I had issue after issue with each driver. Either low performance or instability. It's not fun when 10.8 is released and you still have to run 10.4/5 to have a "decent" experience from your $500+ GPUs.
 
Just reboot with the suspect card on its own, machine hard locked following "Display driver failed to respond" hovering over the taskbar Catalyst icon.

Looks like an RMA is on the cards.
 
requiem99 said:
An hour of gameplay or a run of vantage is not enough to prove stability or disprove a defect. To even have any semblance of assurance you're gonna need to get at least a few hours of card pushed to 100% via benchmarks, then play 3 or 4 games for 30-45 minutes each. Then you've got some idea but still not enough for a definitive answer.
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Loading a web page was enough to bring it down, 3D Vantage brought it down too (when in Crossfire) Be interesting to see what happens when I 3D Vantage the suspect card.
 
It passed. FUCKSAKE! lol

Lets see if the power of seldom hardship webpages like Gmail can crash it again with a single card.

Christ, I want to set fire to all of this shit right now.
 
And theeeen it crashed, when clicking on a forum link in Google search. Went down quicker than Lindsay Lohan at a Motley Crew convention.

Back to what I hope is a good card. Please be stable, please be stable, please be stable, please be stable.

This fails im buying an Amiga.
 
I'd like to thank you, the OP, for scaring me away from xfire. I thought I was going to be purchasing my first ever ATI/AMD gpu. :confused:
 
erf said:
I'd like to thank you, the OP, for scaring me away from xfire. I thought I was going to be purchasing my first ever ATI/AMD gpu. :confused:
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Your welcome, but it appears to be a nerfed card..... thats if this thing holds stable as it currently is.

Im hoping Catalyst drivers are just more sensitive towards hardware issues than the green team.

When one of my 7800GT SLI pair went wrong, you could barely notice in day to day use when infact one of the cards was totally destroyed.
 
Ok, cool. I can now do amazing things like use Tweetdeck, Google Chrome AND Spotify at the same time.

Promising signs.

I should have known better getting a Crossfire setup, troubleshooting one card against an entire system is bad enough let alone two of them.
 
Great, just when I was considering waiting for 6970's to go xfire with instead of GTX 580's if they turned out solidly, for the MLAA feature... I get timid again after my own 5870 experiences being so bad...
 
On the upside, my 6870 experience has been good. I wouldn't trust these to crossfire, there are enough annoying problems already, but MLAA makes up for it (for me). And most games work just fine so far, around 85-90% in testing, thats better than the 75% I was expecting.
 
Don't let my experiences be the judge of anything IF this card holds out on it's own. Shall soon find out. Im pretty sure this thing would have crashed by now though if I was using the hooky card. Locking up in bloody Google is pathetic.
 
For the record windows has not crashed since I installed the 6870 last Friday. I did get hardlocks in KOTOR and a number of games refuse to ALT-TAB without crashing (a problem I never EVER have with nvidia cards), but overall it has been stable enough to consider using as my primary gaming rig card for a while at least. I want something faster for MLAA usage, but I think I've pushed my luck pretty far already.
 
requiem99 said:
On the upside, my 6870 experience has been good. I wouldn't trust these to crossfire, there are enough annoying problems already, but MLAA makes up for it (for me). And most games work just fine so far, around 85-90% in testing, thats better than the 75% I was expecting.
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My problem was that I wasn't happy with what the 480 GTX offered, the 5xxx series ATI cards will no doubt be getting screwed over with driver support here on and the VAT tax goes upto 20% over here in January.

I had to pull the trigger now. Maybe 460s in SLI would have been more prudent, but being greedy I went for 6870.

Knowing my luck this card will be fine and hold out then Black Ops will be crashing like feck. lol
 
requiem99 said:
For the record windows has not crashed since I installed the 6870 last Friday. I did get hardlocks in KOTOR and a number of games refuse to ALT-TAB without crashing (a problem I never EVER have with nvidia cards), but overall it has been stable enough to consider using as my primary gaming rig card for a while at least. I want something faster for MLAA usage, but I think I've pushed my luck pretty far already.
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Ewwww, is there a way to make KOTOR work? I was going to re-play it soon :(...
 
WorldExclusive said:
I'm in the same boat. Only bought the 6870 as a stop gap card but now it's seems like 6870CF is better the GTX 580 at the same price. But.... the drivers. When I had 5850/5870CF/5970, I had issue after issue with each driver. Either low performance or instability. It's not fun when 10.8 is released and you still have to run 10.4/5 to have a "decent" experience from your $500+ GPUs.
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I saw that crappy review too but I think your going a little too far. Dual GTX 460 1gb dual 470 dual 6850 and dual 6870 should all outperform a single GTX 580 and I'll even bet a kidney that they'll outperform a single 6970 too. With single card you get more stability usually and obviously better performance than most if not all other single cards. You could always go dual 580 or 6970 too.

Once the rumors came out about GTX 580 being 20% faster (it's actually around 15% or less faster with current drivers) I knew that GTX 460 1gb SLi would be faster since they are about 25% or more faster than a GTX 480.
 
I disagree, ATI's drivers don't suck because they stop supporting older products, they suck because their engineers simply cannot write good drivers. This has been true forever.

I think once you get your 6870's going acceptably you won't be disappointed in the IQ or performance. The problem is getting the games you play to run on a level you are comfortable with. That often takes a lot of time and headaches. Verify that the 2nd one is DOA (looks like you are already there or almost there) then run the single card for a while whilst you work on the RMA. You'll learn a lot about what to do when you get your 2nd card back and are ready to attempt crossfire again.

You can do it! MLAA is absolutely the shit and you will be happy when you get your setup working.
 
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