I7-920 / EVGA 58 SLI / 5780 crossfire system problem.

[wesh2]

Hello! It's been a while since I've built my own PC, but the bug hit me again so I did times 2. One for me and one for my Wife. Here is what I've used:

Motherboard: EVGA X58 SLI
CPU: Intel i7-920
Cooler: Zhalman CNPS9900LED
Memory: Corsair xms3 6gb kit (1333)
Power: Antech TPQ-1200
Case: Lian Li PC-K62
CD: LG CH08LS10 Blu-ray/DVD combo drive
Video: XFX Radeon HD 5870 (2 in crossfire).

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate.

All seemed to go to ok. Did not put anything other than the date it the bios, just let it Auto detect. Intended to overclock them a bit later, but have not done it yet.

Dropped the Win 7 cd in, let it install. Seems to go in great.

The CD that came with the MB didn't seem to have any drivers for Win7, so I grabbed the latest ones and the latest Bios off EVGA's website. (http://www.evga.com/support/drivers/ Mainboard -> EVA X58 Series -> Chipset, Network, Audio) Installed all 3.

Went and got the latest version of the Cat. Suite for the video cards (9.12) and installed it. Seemed to be fine.

Installed WoW, my steam account with L4D and L4D2, Fallout, Vent, etc. Wife went into WoW and started getting these graphical glitches. Hung on a sort of Grey screen. Thought maybe it was the Crossfire. Disabled via software and it happens more and more. Re-installed Cat. Drivers.. same thing.

Finished my system. Same thing in WoW. About once a hour or more, total lockup. L4D2 runs for a bit, then framerate / quality seems to degrade and it crashes. Same with Fallout. 3D mark Vantage in its 3d test gets a similar graphical error then crash. about 50% of the time when this happens, windows will report that the graphic driver has stop responding.

I've re-installed the ATI Cat 9.12 suite and it doesn't seem to change.

Anyway. Both systems are not overheating (watched temp via Realtemp) that I can see.

Anyone spot a flaw in my install? A driver or something I missed or that I need to re-do? This is driving me crazy. Does the X58 SLI not like crossfire?

Wes

 

[zach538467]

I know you didn't say it in your post, but you didn't overclock your cards did you? My 5850 does some weird things when I overclock it.

Have you tried running with one card only? Have you tried reverting to 9.11 to see if that clears anything up?

If it were mine, I might try a slight underclock on the cards as well(wouldn't really notice a performance hit :-D)

How about your ram, got everything timed right? A lot of instability problems can be caused by ram.

And as to your question, x58 is usually great for x-fire, that is the main reason to go 1366 instead of 1156 these days

 

[wesh2]

I was intending to OC eventually, but I have not done it yet. I wanted to have a stable system before I started in on it.

I'm about to try pulling the second card, but I find it odd that I would have the same issue between 2 systems and 4 cards.

I have not found the 9.11 drivers for download yet. ATI seems hell bent on hiding them... Anyone have a link?

For RAM timing, all I've done so far is set it to 1333 on one of the 2 systems. The other system is still running on the "auto" settings.

I did run a memtest and it didn't find any error through 3 different runs.

 

[vtecflightdeck09]

Could be a problem with your 5870's

Check this article out: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ATI-Radeon-Grey-Screen-Crash,9529.html

Seems like a problem with quite a bit of the new 5000 series cards.


Hopefully this gives you some info on what might be happening on your system.