New System Dual Sapphire HD 6970's Boots No Video

pickupcash

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Hope I'm putting this in the right section.

Just finished building a new killer system. When I turned it on the first time I get no video signal to the monitor. ie No BIOS display or anything. Orange LED on monitor tells me it's getting no active signal.

This may sound like a stupid question but I have built 100's of new systems, just not recently. I put 2 new Sapphire HD 6970 2Gb DDR5 video cards in this system. Each card has 2 DVI ports, 2 mini Display Ports and an HDMI port. The monitor I'm using just to test is an older VGA Dell monitor but I'm using the VGA to DVI adapter that came with one of the video cards so I assume the monitor does not have to be a DVI monitor. My question is, with 4 DVI ports, which one will the system try to boot from?

I have tried powering everything down and moving from one DVI port to the next but none of the 4 give me any video. I hear a POST beep, all fans power up, all LEDs on the Mobo are on that should be on. Just no signal getting to the monitor. I'm pretty confident everything was installed correctly and has power. As I said, I've done this many, many times and I'm a stickler for details and reading manuals first.

Here's the rest of the system in case it helps...

Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3 Motherboard (with PCI-e 3.0 slots / backwards compatible)
(the 2 Sapphire cards are in slots 2 and 5)
4x 8Gb PC-1600 GSkill Ripjaws DIMMs (32Gb total RAM)
OCZ Vertex 3 120Gb SSD (SATA III 6Gb/sec)
2x Seagate Barracuda 2Tb SATA III Hard Drives
Rosewill Thor V2 Full Tower Case
Intel Core i7 Processor 3.4/3.8GHz
Asus 24x DVD-RW SATA

All drives have power and data cables connected at both ends.

Video cards both have PCI-e Power connectors connected from the Corsair 850w PSU and Power LED's on both video cards come on.

Crossfire bridge cable is connected between both cards, although it looks like there are 2 bridge connectors. I used the one near the bracket end of each card. I could try taking that bridge cable off. I found nothing in the documentation about which connectors to use or if I'm supposed to use both or none at first.

Oh, almost forgot. The Mobo has a VGA and DVI connector too but I don't see anything in the Mobo manual about onboard video. Besides, I tried both of those ports too and get the same thing. No video signal.

I've never run a dual video Crossfire system like this before and can't find anything in the manuals about setting it up, which port to use to boot from, etc.
 

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Been doing some more troubleshooting and reading in the MB manual. There are LEDs on the MB for different things. DRAM, Boot Device, CPU and Video. The CPU LED is red and it's on as soon as I apply power. Problem is, I can't find anything in the manual other than "if there is an error this LED will be on" which doesn't tell me much. The CPU fan is plugged in and on. I remember verifying the arrow on the corner of the CPU was in the right location, according to the MB manual.

What else could cause the CPU LED to come on? What should I do now? Remove the CPU fan and CPU and reinstall them?

Also still need to know which port to use on the 2 video cards.
 

pickupcash

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I think you are asking about the cpu fan power connector and yes, I did.

More troubleshooting done. I removed the CPU Cooler and mounting bracket. Cleaned off some of the graphite grease on the bottom of the cooler plate. Removed the CPU and cleaned some of the grease off of that. Then looked at the pins with a magnifying glass and light. There was 1 pin leaning some so I tried with a small blade to move it slightly back. I doubt I moved half a mm.

Installed everything again. Powered up and the CPU POST LED came on and went right back off like it's supposed to.

Then I had a Boot Device POST LED on. This motherboard has 2 sets of SATA III connectors, 2 ea. One is RAID capable and uses an onboard Intel controller. The other is not RAID capable and uses an onboard Marvell controller. I had the SSD and one HD connected to the Marvell ports so I moved the SSD to the Intel controller by itself and put the 2 Barracuda's on the 2 Marvell ports.

Guess what? Now I have ZERO LEDs staying on, yet I still have no video. I'm back on the topmost DVI port which is the Dual Link DVI port on the Sapphire card that's in Slot 2. I kind of figured the system would by by slot order. Guess not.

Anyone?
 

elayman

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Have you tried disconnecting both graphics cards and running off the cpu graphics via motherboard HDMI out? Or disconnecting one video card and try using a single card? Those would be my first steps in troubleshooting.
 

pickupcash

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I did not disconnect or remove either of the Sapphire cards but I did try connecting my monitor to the onboard VGA connector a few minutes ago and got the BIOS display. In the BIOS, under Advanced ==> System Agent Configuration it says you can set which graphics controller you want to use as a boot device. It was booting off of iGPU but the default setting when I went in there was PCIE/PCI. I changed it to iGPU and then back to PCIE/PCI, exited and saved settings.

When it reboot I intentionally left the monitor connected where it was to see if it changed anything. It did not boot off that VGA connector. So I shut the system down, and the monitor, put the DVI adapter back inline, and connected it to the top port on the Sapphire card in Slot 2, then powered up the system. Guess what? No video.

I just tried it off the next DVI port down. Same thing. About to try the 2nd Sapphire card, top DVI port.

This is really messed up. It should either be in slot order or it should be able to detect which port has a monitor connected.
 

pickupcash

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I think this has something to do with the LucidLogix Virtu that's in the BIOS on this Asus motherboard. It's supposed to switch between graphics adapters automatically.

I still can't get the system to boot off my Windows 7 installation disc as I get no video. If I choose iGPU as the boot device I can see the Windows loading progress bar for a few seconds, not using the Sapphire cards at all. Then it goes away and the system stops reading from the DVD.

Makes me wonder if it's because it has to boot off the iGPU until there's an operating system that tells it there's another PCIE card available. The fact that it won't boot off my Windows 7 disc could be something else. Maybe it doesn't see a drive to install to, although the SSD is showing up in BIOS.

Tired of working on this tonight. Maybe someone will jump in here and give me some help.
 

Matt34533

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Hi, I'm having the exact same issue. Did you ever get it to work?
 

pickupcash

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Yes but it wasn't that. There are 2 power plugs on each video card. I was only using one of them. You have to use both on each card.

There is nothing in the documentation for either the motherboard or the ATI video cards that tell you this and I asked the question specifically in this forum and nobody answered. Had to learn the hard way I guess.
 

Matt34533

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Oh, well both the power plugs are plugged in on mine. I guess the search is on again...
 
I think you are asking about the cpu fan power connector and yes, I did.
Just following up here, it's not the CPU FAN connector, its the 4 or 8 pin connector that's located near the CPU (it almost looks like a PCIe power cable).

Aside from that, can you get it to boot off of one GPU? Trying to think of what else could be the problem...