Battlefield 3 Crash Issues. Need help determining if its my CPU or GPU

mr1hm

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Hi guys, I am currently running a somewhat "decent" rig at the moment.
Here are the specs:

CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 640 (Propus)
GPU: Diamond Radeon HD 5830 Crossfired with Gigabyte Radeon HD 5830
RAM: 8 Gigabytes. (2 sticks @ 2 gigabytes ea. from Microcenter) (2 sticks @ 2 gigabytes from OCZ)
Motherboard: MSI 870A-G54
PSU: 600w from OCZ "stealth"

I thought I'd be getting the BSOD when I grabbed those 2 sticks of ram from a different brand, but surprisingly I have only received it once and that was when I thought my single Diamond Radeon HD 5830 was starting to act up a bit (I overclocked it to about 845Mhz Core Clock Speed and close to 1200mhz for memory).

I, being a moron :fou: decided to try various methods of trying to unlock the mythical (maybe not?) L3 cache that apparently existed in Propus based processors for my CPU. I won't get into details but, lets just say I played with my Motherboard for a good 2 days...

Unfortunately, there was no L3 Cache for me.

The CPU had become extremely unstable but, after resetting the CMOS I was alright. Windows was booting properly and etc...

I have also tried to overclock the CPU to about 3.7ghz but was unsuccessful due to the stock cooler but, still was able to get 3.5ghz (Currently, I am using stock CPU settings).


Ever since then, my crossfired video cards have been acting strangely...
I feel that it may be a issue with my motherboard as well :(
I have updated my BIOS to the latest version.

I headed to a round of Battlefield 3 and I noticed that my Diamond 5830 card was just screaming.. I looked it up a bit and saw that the motherboard was running the Diamond card at 16x and my Gigabyte card at 1x... This resulted in me crashing from BF3 and the system rebooting with a problem I ran into earlier which is Windows 7 64bit Ultimate freezing at the loading screen (the screen where the windows sign glows).

I wanted to upgrade my CPU or GPU (I'm not sure if the problem is from my CPU or GPU) and was hoping for some good recommendations or (solutions) with a bang for your buck!

Hopefully right around the $150 range for both CPU and GPU would be awesome! :ange:

 

malindar

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May 11, 2011
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hmmm do you have problems with all the other games tooo try this "Atiman Uninstaller" remove the existing drivers. i love this tool personally

More info : http://gamer.lk/index.php/topic,15027.msg242513.html#msg242513

anyway ATI give us head aches with drivers when it comes to crossfire..

and one more thing just after you launch BF3 Alt+Tab out to windows and alt+Tab back in to the game..fixes the negative scaling issue...
i know it sounds silly but it works swell i got to know about this trick on Guru3D worked for me swell issue.. even thou the game is patched and the proper drivers are there even for me the Crossfire some times doesn't work until i do this


and as for your Hardware recommendation wait for the Ivy bridge to come out in April this year and grab one of them when the price is down... if you are in a hurry to upgrade then go for


sticking to your budget of $150 ish you can go for a


HD 6870 retails for around $160
http://www.amazon.com/SAPPHIRE-Radeon-6870-GDDR5-Graphics/dp/B005C8RTTU

since you already have a AM3 mobo go for a

AMD fx 6100 (not a Fan of the new Bulldozer but in your case it will be cost effective)
http://www.amazon.com/AMD-6100-6-Core-Processor-Socket/dp/B005UBNKWO/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1325424980&sr=1-1


my recommendation -

Intel 2500K - $200 ~

and a asuss /gigabyte /Asrock Z68 mobo - i prefer Asrock Z68 extreme 6 lo cost has good features and i have the P67 and im loving it....

Nvidia 560TI - $240 -
 

mr1hm

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Thanks for the reply!

I am looking for a quick upgrade on whatever may be causing the issue here...and I feel like it may be Ati and there damn crossfire drivers as you mentioned :(

I'm thinking of running down to my local microcenter real quick, return my Gigabyte HD 5830 that I bought for 139.99 and grabbing this

Diamond 6870: http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0378704

Not sure which brand I should go for. I do like the Diamond brand because I've had good experiences with them but, they also have the XFX 6870 and the Gigabyte 6870.

Recommendations?

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

EDIT: I'll be doing the mentioned above AFTER retrying to setup the drivers correctly. I forgot to mention that I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and that I have tried uninstalling my drivers in Safe Mode. When I uninstalled the drivers and booted Windows normally it worked....the first time..... Will follow the link you have shared with me and will post as soon as I get the chance!
 

mr1hm

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After 4 days of thinking about it and 3 days of hard work and research, I am at the breaking point. I've tried most guides that I've found online and either eventually windows doesn't boot or windows doesn't boot immediately... MSI Afterburner reads my Primary Video Card as the secondary video card and the secondary card as the Primary. My secondary video card is on a PCI-e 2.0 x16 @ x4 2.0 and the sluggish, choppy, and screen flickering battlefield 3 gameplay is just proving Afterburner's readings to be correct.

If anybody has any ideas or has suggestions please let me know. :)
 

decoy77

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Mar 25, 2010
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Im running hd 5870x2 in crossfire with current drivers, no problems with bf3. But they will get loud even in crossfire as well as your cpu fan. Battlefield 3 a system punisher if running on ultra or even high graphics on a decent size monitor. I'm running a i7 930 with a 212+ fan and was overclocked to 3.5 (modest oc) and my cpu would still get to hot and shut computer down after about 4 hours of battlefield 3 play, so I had to unoverclock cpu to try and keep it cool. (i7 920/930s run hot anyway), not much loss in fps. I did have problems running a gtx 470, game would crash after 10 mins. Rolled back to original battlefield beta driver and seemed to help. There is an option to repair game on the origin tab. Did you try using it? Read a few blogs where people said it helped. Might be a game software issue for you and not a hardware issue.