6870 Poor Crossfire Performance

Picked up a pair of 6870's today to check em out and do some benchmarks.. I'm getting really poor performance and I'm not sure whats up. For example, getting between 35/40 FPS in Crysis Warhead on gamer settings @ 1920x1080 with no AA.. Other games are performing equally as crappy.. Before these cards, I had a GTX470 SOC in this rig. Uninstalled the drivers and Nvidia software, put these cards in and installed the latest ATI drivers from the website.

In GPU-Z It looks like the clock on the second card doesnt go up very high and the memory clock on either doesnt get about 280 or so. Checked BIOS, no special settings to change. Am I missing anything?

Edit: I notice in 3DMark Vantage, after installing the 6870's, my CPU performance dropped from 50,000 to 11,000?

hmm,there is definitely something wrong here.Re-install your windows and see if it helps.
Also what are your other system specs?(CPU,RAM,PSU)

So isn't it possible for you to re-install your windows ?

Try some other games,because Crysis doesn't play very well with CF.

Before the format I tried in Lost planet.. I gained 6 FPS from the 470 with all the same settings.. I gained quite a bit in Resident Evil 5. I saw some gameplay benchmarks on youtube with crysis at 1920x1280 with 4xx AA on and it looked like they were getting 40 something FPS.. Figured 1920x1080 with no AA would push that into the 50's pretty steadily.. Maybe I was completely overestimating the 6870's..

I noticed that, I wasn't sure if the 470 would have that effect on the CPU only test.. Thanks for confirming it would.. I assume thats what bloated the first score.

So if this reformat doesn't change anything, we can assume that TWO 6870's = 1 GTX 470 SOC.

Those are the numbers I was expecting... The format just finished.. I just installed my mobo drivers.. Getting ready to install the video card drivers and crossfire profiles (yes, I isntalled them the first time as well) and the test out a few games.. Wish me luck.. I'll report back the findings.

is your motherboard x16/x16 and crossfire compatible?

how much of a difference is between 16x 16x compared to 8x 8x

It may be too early to be certain that it's fixed, but I think I may have gotten to the bottom of it.. Or at least what I did to fix it.

Pissed off after a day of saying WTF, I figured I would play some Champions Online.. Not incredibly graphical and lots of settings that can be changed to adjust for performance.. I opened it up and was disgusted instantaneously.. With the 470, I was getting 38-45 FPS.. With the two 6870's Xfired, I was getting 18-23?!

That was the last straw, so I disabled Xfire and re-opened the game.. I got about 55 FPS.. Pissed off, I closed everything and removed the profiles that I installed earlier.. Forgetting to enable the second card, I installed the profiles for the 4th time.. Then I enabled the second card and opened up Champions again.. Bam, 65 FPS.. Opened Crysis, got 34as a MINIMUM with an average of about 45-62 on "gamer" settings.

Have N O idea what the hell happened, all I can think of was I installed the profiles with the second card disabled and THEN enabled Xfire. I'm beat now, so going to crash, but when I get up I'm going to run some benchmarks and whatnot to tell if it's fixed for sure or if it's just a fluke.

Wow that's some good info. Thank you for it.. That maybe whats happenin..As I play with it more, it seems like it's hit and miss.. For instance, after having it fixed, I started to play Champions again.. Then out of nowhere I got framerates in teens. I disabled crossfire, played and it was back to high 50's. Re-enabled crossfire and back to the 70-80's.. Who knows.. I'm headed to bed.. Back at in the AM.

PS- Just heard my 580 is comin within the next few days .. Looking forward to checkin that out too.

Have you checked for bios updates for this board at the m/b's web site.
Also they may have updated chipset drivers , that will be 'better' than what windows 7 installs.
They are what controls all the sub sytems, pci-e controller, pcie slot traffic etc.

http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=kPGmtxee5RsQVsXG

there is a bios dated 9/10/10 there
and a AMD chipset whql driver

No its not.
There is something going on here.
OP, can you go in to your bios and turn of cool and quiet.
There are situations where load is not forced. I see it happen much more often with the 6 cores. Its as if the turbo gets tricked, and the system responds as if its not in a rush.
Best way to describe it.
I've seen benchmarks of the new gtx 580 on AMD systems, return expected numbers.

5th revision of 10.x drivers for the new 68XX cards, maybe this revision will get your combination of hardware going , good luck ?
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloa [...] otfix.html

I called ATI yesterday just to see if they would have any ideas, they mentioned that the hotfix had been release, but at that point I had already taken the cards out and put in my 470 to do some video benchmarks. I'm going to put them back in tomorrow and apply the hotfix and we shall see what happens.. Thanks for the help and input.. I'll post up what happens tomorrow when I get it done.

I don't think it's CPU related either, but I am going to give it a shot. That's a good idea, we'll see what happens with that too. Thanks..

Either way, this isn't a terrible tragedy.. I have a few other cards on order for testing. I'll sell the ones I don't want and keep the one I decide is the winner. I have a 580 coming on Tuesday, and when the 6970 comes out, I'll grab one of those too.

Full disclosure . . . it is hunter315's idea, I just steal shamelessly