Problems with Crossfire

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Radeoncore

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Apr 25, 2014
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Hello,



I am having some issues right now and I can't figure out what the problem is. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am about ready to give up on Radeon cards...

Here are my system specs, I will include BIOS versions for what I can remember:
PSU: Seasonic X-1250w 80+ Gold certified
Mobo: Asus Sabertooth 990fx (Open Box special from Newegg Bios ver. 2501)
Memory: Corsair Dominator Platinum 1866
Video: Crossfired Gigabyte R9 290x 4gb (Both on BIOS ver. 015.042.000.000)
CPU: AMD Fx-8350 eight-core cpu @ 4.1 Ghz
Cooler: Corsair H100 liquid cooler
Storage: SSD Samsung 840 Evo 128 Gb and Seagate 1Tb drive
Netgear WNA3100 WiFi addapter
Logitech G-930 headset
Logitech G510s Keyboard
Logitech G700s Gaming Mouse

Here is my problem, previously I had two R9 280x video cards, one of which stopped working at some point. That would be the secondary card, not the primary. I RMA'd the secondary card three times, the first time they sent me a repaired replacement, it also had similar problems. Second RMA, I received a brand new replacement, In order to figure out whether or not it was the PCI slot that was causing problems, I moved the primary card down to a lower slot and used the new one as primary, which still had issues. The third RMA was a refurbished card and it had the same problems both in the secondary position, and on it's own.

After the third time, I called Gigabyte and requested a model upgrade on both my cards, they sent me R9 290x cards for my crossfire setup. I connected the primary to slot one and the secondary to slot three (Recommended by the motherboard manual). I booted the system up and immediately had a black screen freeze up. I rebooted and it ran fine in Windows. As soon as I tried running FireFall, It ran fine for a while, but the screen was flickering a lot (Firefall does not support crossfire), so I left that game and started BF4.

During the loading screen on BF4 my computer froze up, I close BF4 and was able to recover, I went back and tried BF4 again, this time it shut my computer down during the map loading. If I tried to power on the computer at this point It would not power on.. I had to flip the switch on the powersupply off, then back on again in order to get it to power up. At that point, I disabled crossfire and ran each card individually. The primary worked great by itself, but the secondary was having glitches, I was seeing horizontal black lines, black and white odd sized boxes/rectangles and then the screen when black and my system was locked up.

So, my question is, WHY is it that the primary card always survives and the secondary one always dies???? I've tested my PSU voltage with MMeter, (PCIE connectors are registering 12.16 V on all pins on both cards. I've tested for continuity on all of these lines, I've made sure my wall socket was connected correctly. I'm not sure what is going on, but I've had a friend suggest that it is a problem with the motherboard.. But, if that's the case, then If I connected my primary (working) card to the slot where the broken secondary card was, wouldn't it ruin the primary card (I've tried that and it worked fine).... I don't know what to do here.

PS: I checked the Gigabyte website for a new BIOS for these cards but unfortunately they're all listed as F-xx instead of xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx which is how I see them in GPU-z.. I don't know how to tell what is what here.

Update: When my system crashes, I noticed on reboot that there is ALWAYS another hardware problem caused by the crash.. For example, after a crash, my WNA3100 WiFi adapter would act strange on reboot. Where it would install a second version of the adapter like "WNA3100 Wifi USB adapter #2" and it would act like I plugged it into a different usb port, but of course I couldn't even use the device until I deleted the #2 adapter and then disconnected and reconnected it to the USB port. I've also noticed that during gaming or after gaming my sound acts kinda weird. If I'm on TS and playing FireFall I notice that when people talk on TS it sounds like a whisper (Didn't use to be the case), system sounds seem to be distorted and always change volume, for example, if I open explorer and I start opening random files the "click" noise it makes is always at a different volume and is kinda scratchy.

There were a few times that for some reason my computer would "think" that the storage drive was corrupted and it would run a checkdisk at boot. After that I would look in event viewer and see NTFS errors on that drive.
 
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Radeoncore

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Apr 25, 2014
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Bumping myself for a cure! This is very irritating, I've been going through RMA and RMA and nothing seems to be working, I've 280x refurbs, rev1.0, and a rev 2.0 280x all of which had problems. But the primary card always survives... Now I've received two brand new r9 290x oc wf3 4gig cards, I connected them, the secondary card was bad.. What are the odds here? Is it my motherboard?? (Motherboard was purchased openbox from Newegg! Please, any help is appreciated!
 
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Radeoncore

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Well, I have more information. Just trying to keep it to a minimum. I don't think anyone has had this problem before and I'm leaning toward a bad motherboard... This just doesn't make any sense that every time I get a new card it's the same thing. The secondary one always has issues. Like I said above, I received a new rev2.0 R9 280x back when I had two of those, it was brand new, I put it in slot one and I put the old one in slot three as secondary and the primary died. I just can't figure this out. Also, it probably is too much for someone to want to read.
 
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Radeoncore

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Apr 25, 2014
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Let me rephrase that, I hope there is someone out there who has had this problem and has a solution to said problem so I can stop having it and no longer have to RMA my video cards because there may or may not be something wrong with them. I can't tell if this is my motherboard, or the video cards? I don't think it's the PSU because it's 1250 watt X series from seasonic which was the highest rated on Newegg when I bought it a few months ago. I did notice, though, in the device manager under system devices it shows three "High definition audio" and one of them ALWAYS says "Error (Code 10)" no matter what I do, one of them always shows a code 10, for the 290xs I have now and for the old 280x cards, this has always been an issue.
 
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Radeoncore

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By the way, these two cards were running at 1.18 V under load. Which I thought was a bit low compared to the 1.25 V on the Gigabyte R9 280x card... I'm not sure why the Voltage requirement is lower. Also, I forgot to mention, when I run a 3d test with just the card that's not working installed it gives me black screen flickering and in BF4 I saw little blue spots on the screen in a repeating pattern and then eventually the computer stopped responding, I was actually able to get back to windows without restarting the PC but sometimes I have to perform a hard reboot.
 
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DonkeyOatie

DonkeyOatie

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Sep 16, 2014
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No false hope, but the absence of responses suggests that this is specific to your computer, rather than some generic Crossfire problem. That, in turn suggests that the problem is elsewhere (voltage control on the PCI-e due to a motherboard fault, I dunno) If a couple of others had this problem, you would have heard by now.

Does anyone reading this have Crossfire 290X WITHOUT the problem?. Lets see how many of those there are.
 
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Radeoncore

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Better yet, does anyone reading this have an Asus Sabertooth 990fx with 290x crossfire who doesn't have this problem? Also, those of you who might have this set up, does OCCT and all other hardware monitor programs report that you're 12, 5 and 3.3 voltages are lower than they actually are?
 
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Radeoncore

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Well, I've posted on techpowerup.com and have received more than enough input to tell me that I need to RMA my motherboard. Thanks for trying to get me help here. Appreciate the attempts to keep this threat alive until someone had something to say, but I think all of the evidence really points at the motherboard or power supply. I'll be replacing the motherboard and if that doesn't fix it I'll replace the power supply. If that doesn't work then I'm going to get a cash refund for the cards and purchase different ones from another manufacturer.
 
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