Crossfire 290x Underperforming

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justinone

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Hey all.

I come as a last resort to anyone who might be able me with my 290x's in crossfire.

My issue is that when gaming in crossfire mode, my performance is either worse than or equal to using a single card.
Single card performs normaly as it should, but crossfire just wont work properly.

Here is what i get in Furmark. You can see the second card starts off fine and then dips. In furmark i can see it starts to stutter and the fps drops at this point.

gpu.jpg


Any possible idea's? I can run tests if it helps. Thanks.

I have checked:
crossfire is ENABLED - shows in GPUz and CCC
PCIe bus speed - x8 3.0 both cards
Disabling ULPS
Multiple drivers
Testing each card individually - work fine
swapping each card into slots
Upgraded PSU - 1000w EVGA G2
Upgraded MOBO - Asrock extreme 4 z77
Reinstall Windows 7
Ran everything at stock setting
Im sure there is more i have forgotten
 
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sincreator

sincreator

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Are your cards reference model? How hot are they getting? Maybe they are throttling because of temperature, or maybe you are just trying games that can't take advantage of crossfire very well. What games are you playing? What are your framerates in these games you speak of? We need more info to help pinpoint the issue.

Furmark puts an unrealistic load on your video cards so heat is probably why you are seeing dips. The GPU's will downclock once they hit a certain point. 95 degrees I believe.
 
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J

justinone

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It happends on all games i have played. Very unstable experience.
Yes they are reference model. I have a 80 degrees limiter with fan limit of 80% of both cards so they dont rise above 80 as you can see on Afterburner graph
I am running in fullscreen.

My GPU-Z looks fine and benchmarking programs like Valley and Heaven seem to give an increase in performance but games struggle to take advantage.

In BF4 i get alot of CPU Spikes, but that could be down to the game. Single card is smooth.
Titanfall i get no spikes but the fps, when looking at lots of textures ect, has no gain over a single card and can be worse in some cases.

I thought BF4 was the crossfire game to go to or my system just isn't right.

I shall post the framerates of single card and crossfire.

Thanks
 
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D

Dblkk

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So, as you confirm, 80c is the limit. And that limit is being reached, which is your reason for performance. The cards are hitting their limit, they cannot go any higher. That limit is temperature.

When you have two cards in crossfire, temps are higher in your case than with a single card. So the reason that your crossfire cards are performing around a single card, is that two cards pumping out os much heat then causes the cards to limit faster than they would with only one. I'd recommend either increasing case circulation, getting a new beter case, or water cooling your cards. Getting better aftermarket coolers for the cards is also a possibility, but if theyre not reference, then they should have decent coolers.
 
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justinone

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I did try and it seems to stop the stuttering issues on furmark.

It still seems almost identical performance to a single card though with no gain in fps.

Valley benchmark shows a clear almost double performance increase, just not in games.

Maybe its a CPU bottleneck? i have a 3770k @4.4ghz which i read should be fine for 290x's
 
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maxalge

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LOL "I set that limit myself".

What do you think they are doing TO not go beyond that limit?

They throttle back performance ( more work = more heat ) to stay within that temperature limit you set.

YOU have bottlenecked the performance to stay within that thermal zone.

So in order to see better performance = no thermal limiters = custom cooling/better case more fans, etc etc.
 
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Dblkk

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No, def shouldn't be a CPU bottleneck. An i5 should be fine as its frequency not cores once you hit i5 series.

By any chance, is it like 60fps crossfire vs not? If that's the case, then its likely vsync or game in game settings holding you back
 
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justinone

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The only thing i can think of is the 290x in crossfire just doesn't want to run on my mobo and CPU(even though i tried it on 2 different boards)

I dont realy want to be doing a massive upgrade on a system thats still very much in date and it might not even solve the problem.

I used to have 2 6950's which ran perfectly. Maybe the lack of a bridge is causing problems. I dont understand how benchmarking programs show how the cards should be performing, but in game its poor. Who knows, maybe its a software issue.
 
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sincreator

sincreator

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What games are you playing? Did you research on what the performance should be in such games? Not all games scale perfectly like many of the synthetic benchmarks will. Some you may gain only 10-15% and others may scale 90% or higher. There can be a lot of variance from one game to another. Time for you to start Googling, lol.
 
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justinone

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in bf3 i tested and it looks as though the CPU is struggling with the draw graph. Maybe my 3770k can't handle it :(. I've been googleing like mad but not much comes out of it. I think i'll be going nvidia next time. No reason why this shouldn't work on my setup.
 
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sincreator

sincreator

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Here is what you should expect in BF3: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/radeon_r9_290x_crossfire_vs_sli_review_benchmarks,16.html

What driver are you running? The 14.4 WHQL is known to be good overall. I use the 14.7 RC3 beta driver myself with my crossfire setup and have had good results with it. Try it if you like: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx

You should remove your current drivers in safe mode with this program: http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

Then reboot and install the beta fresh. I recommend doing this before every driver update.

PS: You can always try disabling hyperthreading in the bios as well. That way instead of 4 cores with two threads, you will be using 4 full power cores essentially turning your i7 into an i5. I doubt this is going to change much though....
 
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justinone

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I tried all this sincreator and still its bad unfortunately.

I have taken some screenshots from battlefield 3 to show you the perfoverlay between crossfire enabled and disabled.

First is crossfire enabled on ultra ->


Crossfire enabled on Low ->

Crossfire disabled ultra ->

Crossfire disabled low - >

To me it looks like the CPU is struggling. This kind of behavior happens in most other games also with crossfire enabled.

Could it be a bottleneck?
 
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