Question on dual 5850's

[Wildman1024]

Hey guys new to the forum here and got a quick question. I'm not as up on this stuff as i used to be as I just don't have the time.

Anyways I was running dual 5850's in my system for about a year. I always thought I should have had alot better performance then i was getting. For example to play black ops with decent graphics and to play smooth I had to turn my resolution way back to 1280x1024 from 1920x1080.

Fast forward to today. One of the fans died in one of the cards suddenly so I removed the card and am now only running 1x5850. Since now only running 1 card my gaming performance has atleast doubled. I am able to play black ops for example at 1080p with everything turned 100% up and vsync and it plays 100% all the time.

Question is why is my system better with 1 5850 then it was with both? I always run the current drivers etc.

System Specs Are:
AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition (3.7ghz)
Asus Crosshair II Formula ROG
2x5850 - currently only 1 as one died
8gig Patriot in dual channel 1,600mhz ganged mode
Corsair trupower 850watt modular
Antec 1200 case

 

[MrC4]

Numerous folks have suffered from the dreaded "negative scaling" when using crossfire of sli. A quick Google search revealed Black Ops as a title that suffered from this problem.

 

[Wildman1024]

Numerous folks have suffered from the dreaded "negative scaling" when using crossfire of sli. A quick Google search revealed Black Ops as a title that suffered from this problem.

Can you explain more about this "Negative Scaling" you speak of. I thought maybe it was something wrong with my setup but its with the cards running in crossfire?

BTW i just used black ops as an example. It was happening with most games I play