Pci express

are you sure the MB does not have its 8X pcie at the top? many MB mgf's have the top PCI-E at 8X and the second one at 16X. i would double check your boards layout. there are also settings in the bios to change pci-e link speeds (most high end boards have this anyway)

What is the ASUS model of the motherboard in question?

On most motherboards the primary PCI Express x16 slot is the one located closest to the CPU.

no nothing like 8X, im talking about a ASUS m4A89TD pro usb3 and previewsly i had this mobo doing great in the first pci-e 1 but after flashing the card with a toxic sapphire 6870 bios it just failed and crippled my pci-e 1

what i fear is that all my crossfire plan is to *** since i cant rely on that lane and meanwhile ill use the second one, but i was asking if their is a fix for this

i tried bios flashing, reinstallins windows, even trying ubuntu, cleaning the pci e lane and checking for bent pins below or anything that might be a reason

i hate this since i payed top dollar for my motherboard

i have had asus boards fail as well, i switched from asus to msi back in 2000 and never had another issue.

you may end up needing to buy a new board, i woudl call asus and check on teh warranty. im not sure what asus warranty periods are but i know my MSI is a 5 year. even if its out of warranty i have had good luck with some msi and gigabyte boards ive aquired in the past and paying a small fee for the MFG to repair/replace them while out of warranty.

What is the actual brand and model of the HD 6870 graphics card?

What PCI Express x16 slot was the graphics card in when you re-flashed its BIOS.

FYI @ncc74656: On the ASUS M4A89TD PRO/USB3 motherboard its AMD 890FX chipset runs the two PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots at x16/x16.

yeah thats why i bought the board, because of the 2 16x lanes which at the time was kind of odd since not every board had that

my 6870 is actually a Sapphire 6870 which is right now running a HIS bios, i had a pair of 5770 in crossfire also by sapphire befoe, after i sold the 5770s i planned to go 6870 crossfire but for some reason managed not buying the other but had my plan to making it so, now it seems i will buy another board or buy a 6970 or something similar like GTX570 or 580 cause if i think it over i will try to go sandy bridge and manage some 500 with just a 6870 crossfire oh and a new PSU, lets go 700 dlls more or less, and if i buy just a GTX580 i will blow anything out of the water or a 6970 may be enough and is 300 something, i fancey those Direct CU from ASUS 3 SLOT cards huge!!!! make suggestions keeping in mind that i may have this thing for a year or so, the thing no one tells you about buying big sold VGA vs 2 middle class for a crossfire is that its alot easier to re-sell the 2 middle ones

oh and i flashed the card in the now busted pci-ex lane

Did you have a problem finding a working Sapphire HD 6870 BIOS?

Where did you get the HIS BIOS from?

Either HIS or Sapphire has deviated from the reference design.

Can you post a TechPowerUp GPU-Z image for your card?

let me explain with te bios flasing what happened step by step , i have the normal sappire core 900 mem 1050, i then found out that HIS made an exact reference card but had core 920 and mem 1120 and i flashed it in DOS mode atiflash -p -f HIS6870.bin and it all worked perfectly for 8 monts or so, i then saw that sappire made a Toxic edition with 970core and mem 1150 and that flash is what made all things wrong, first i saw that the card wouldnt boot but fortunatly i had a X1800 lying around and flashed it back to the original sapphire bios which i saved even before going with the HIS bios 8 months or so ago, and it came back to life and worked, but then i realized that some games ran slow or slower, and decided to run 3Dmark 11 and scored 3700 instead of the usual 4400, i started to freak out since i thougt it was the VGA card and tried re-flasing it with the SAPPHIRE and later with the HIS one and still scored low having no problems with boots and 2D all seemed fine even Bluray i thougt maybe it was the OS and reinstalled windows 7 and still low scores arrrggg and ten it came to me, maybe the pci-e has gone to 8x or 4x and decided to look for a solution but meanwhile to support my theory is that i moved the video card to the second pci-e 16x and scores and games went back again to normal.

if its just config, pcie dont have a speed adjustment as AGP had, in GPU-z says its still 16X, another question, is 6870 crippled in a 8X lane or would it have to go to 4X to see that diference, i ask cause my brother has a 6850 and maybe if its 8x i can still go crossfire but with the 6850s what u think