4830 crossfire performance extremely poor

[intensewil]

hi, I just built my computer and had 1 sapphire 4830 and liked it so much I got a second one. I crossfired them and i went from 10500 in 3dmark 06 and it dropped to 4000. I have ai enabled on standard and I know crossfire is working cause i enabled the logo. I have an amd 9650 2.4 overclocked to 2.6, 4 gigs of ocz 1066 ram and a 550watt rosewill power supply. could my power supply not have enough power? I got the bridges and installed them right, I just dont know what else to do, any help would be great, thanks

 

[Maziar]

Hello and welcome to the forums mate
Check the cards one by one(single mode),and see if both perform the same

 

[evongugg]

You power supply is okay. Not the best quality though. Tell us about your resolution and monitor.

550 Watt and two 6-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode

http://ati.amd.com/products/radeonhd4800/requirements.html

 

[photonboy]

Power supplies fail by causing intermittent glitches, crashes, BSOD's etc. They having nothing to do with scores.

I suggest you:

1) benchmark and test the new card by itself

2) get other benchmarks and games

3) confirm you are using the latest drivers

World in Conflict is a great game to use and it should show a big boost from your second card. The demo has the benchmark utility as well.

I do find your situation a little odd but it seems most likely it's a setting somewhere. If you have Vista or Windows 7, get your Windows Experience Index.

Anyway, make a list of what you want to do and get all setup so you avoid swapping your cards too many times.

If you aren't running Vista 64-bit (or Windows 7 64-bit) you should be.

Note that not all games or benchmarks take advantage of multiple cards but it's rare to see a performance drop. Crysis is another game that you can get a benchmark utility for.

 

[intensewil]

i tested each card seperatly on 3dmark06 and got scores of 9400, 8800, an 9200 on one and scores of 9600, 7700 and 9200 on the other. I am a little baffled by this because when I benchmarked the system a week ago it was at 10500 with the card that got 9600, 7700 and 9200. Ill try and play some games later to see if there is a difference and Ill try other benchmarking softwares, any reccomendations? I ran both cards in crossfire again in 3dmark06 and it seriously got a score of 1800 so something is not right. what should all the settings in ccc be? im only running xp so idk what my experience number is but ill be getting it eventually so any other thoughts or ideas would be great, thanks

 

[daedalus685]

3dmark 06 has a very high random error as it is so dependant on the CPU and thus background programs.

Make sure Catalyst AI is on, usually standard for CF. Also, its about time to but 3dmark06 to bed.. it is well over three years old.. and realyl not a very good yard stick anymore.. If you msut use a synthetic at least sue a DX10 one.. It is time to move on from XP if that is why you are using 06...

Provided yuo own teh games, Farcry 2, Crysis and warhead all have free benchmark utilities. Crysis is specially nice as it alows you to do 64bit testing.

 

[intensewil]

ya, im working on getting vista or xp 64 bit, I just didnt have the money when I did the build, I was debating about using windows 7, any thoughts? I also downloaded folding at home and ran it on the cards and i got some funny responses. I can get 620 iter a sec with one single card, but only 440 with both cards in crossfire. Could one of the cards be bad and cause the performance drop when in crossfire mode? could the crossfire cables be bad? this is really perplexing.

 

[ailgatrat]

I believe I read in these forums somewhere that you should only use one bridge when crossfiring the lower performance cards like the 4770/4830/4850. May also want to make sure you uninstall the Catalyst drivers and use driver cleaner or a similar program before you reinstall drivers. I also read here somewhere that reinstalling drivers when going to X-fire tended to help some. Good Luck.