Crossfire help

I've upgraded to a new motherboard and bought a new X1950 Pro (256MB) which are supposed to have native crossfire. I installed the system no problem, both cards run and both bridges are installed. When I turn on Crossfire in the driver, running games doesn't work - they go all corrupt and stuff. I tried installing older drivers but they just told me a crossfire connection couldn't be detected.

Hardware is: Sapphire X1950 Pro 256MB (x2), they are slightly different in design but they are the same card; and a P35-DS3P from Gigabyte with CrossFire support.

You need to remove all ati drivers from your system - run the ati removal tool from add/remove programmes, then restart the computer in safe mode and use driver cleaner or something similar to ensure all the ati drivers are fully removed.

Restart again and install the latest drivers from www.ati.com and see what happens then - i had a similar issue with my x1950xtx setup where crossfire options vanished after an update, i believe the problem was a corrupted file somewhere in the driver install, and following the steps above fixed it.

As for the corruption in games try the games with the catalyst AI disabled and see if you see the same corruption - the catalyst AI causes corruption in some older games such as knights of the old republic and the only way around the missing textures/corruption in those affected games is to disable crossfire or the AI (if disabling the AI doesn't work, try disabling crossfire).

One last thing to check is that your PSU is good enough to support both cards in crossfire.

It shouldn't be a problem installing the drivers fresh for both cards, but then again you shouldn't be having trouble, so maybe installing for one card, seeing if it loads games correctly then re-installing for both cards and seeing how things go would be good for narrowing down the source of the problem.

Whenever my friends install a new dual-card setup in their machines i always advise they test each card on its own first, to make sure there are no hardware faults that could be covered up by the second card - in my Xfire setup one of my cards had a faulty memory chip and i didn't know about it for 2 months until i finally investigated my low pcmark 06 score by testing the cards individually... It would be a good start to try each card on it's own to make sure that is not the problem.

Both cards are working fine, but put together this buggered-ness happens in 3D apps. What do you suggest I do about that if it's true Gravemind123?

I had a similar problem when I just installed the 7.9 drivers with my 2 X1950pro's.

Here's what mine are now and I no longer have this issue:

AA set to use application settings

Anisotropic filtering set to use application settings

Catalyst AI set to standard (as recommended by ATi/AMD)

Minimap set to quality

vertical refresh set to off unless application specifies

Adaptive AA is unselected.

Also, have to admit my 2 Sapphire X1950pros are a different design (fan's in a different location) but after doing a recent spring clean and testing a mates graphics card I put them in the other way around compared to how I had then and when I boot now the bios info right at the start displays RV570XT instead of just RV570.....