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5870 dropping frames and cross fire unstable, help?!

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Hey guys, I've got a couple of problems and i swear ive tried everything i can possibly think of to fix it, and so i come to you guys for some help, thanks in advance and the best answer will go to whom ever helps me the most.

I've had my 5870 for about 2 years, and the 2nd 5870 for around 6 months

To be honest ive never been 100% happy with the frames ive been getting with the 5870, its even now a relatively powerful card, however on my machine i feel although its not doing justice. its fine most of the time but say in certain situations when there's a lot going on, it locks up. an example of this is in bf 3 it runs ok, and then when there's a fire fight it drops alot. but then i have no trouble flying around in the jet.... and then i try loading Minecraft (a very very low graphically intense game... and im lagging all over the place. This to me doesn't make sense. No problem loading bf3 at times, but lags with Minecraft and there are many other situations like this. (eg runs Crysis 2 flawlessly, crashes for no reason watching youtube)

about 2 months ago i started getting what is known as the Grey Screen of Death, where the display locks up, there's grey (sometimes other colours) vertical lines up and down the screen, and the only way to fix it is to restart via the power or switch. I found a fix for this was to actually underclock the card which seemed to fix it, ive even been able to revert back to the factory settings now and the grey screen hasn't come back yet.

Ive got the AMD Control center installed, which means the drivers are all up to date.

Ive tried my other 5870 in the machine, the same things happen.

tested my sisters 5700 series card, frame rate was awesome. smooth all the time.

I would really love to finally have crossfire work on this computer, its why i got the second card in the first place, however it just hasn't ever been stable when ive tried it. The computer crashes and ive never noticed an increase in performance whilst playing with the second card enabled. Infact i usually have to remove the second card, because it causes the computer to lock up.

TLDR; 5870 dropping frames, cross fire unstable, need help.

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750watt Xigmatek ... from the looks of things.

Id assume the drivers are up to date ive got the control center installed which updates it (i think) and if i search for drivers in device manager, it says its up to date.
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Mr 420 said:
750watt Xigmatek ... from the looks of things.

Id assume the drivers are up to date ive got the control center installed which updates it (i think) and if i search for drivers in device manager, it says its up to date.


Actually check the version of your drivers against the latest vs just assuming the updater check worked. Go make sure you have the latest 12.3. I started getting slowdown after upgrading from 11.X to the 12.X drivers with my 6870.

Also, I second the opinion that it might be power based, however, the fact that you can run one card in the system and still experience the crashing is weird. If the crashing only happened when you had 2 cards in the system, I would guess it was power based.

... ok so im not 100% where to check out what drivers i have, i went to device manager > display adapters> and it says


Driver Date: 25th - oct - 11
Driver Version 8.911.0.0
when i hit update driver in there, it says the device has the latest drivers.


So thats definatly not 12.3 , however the AMD VISION Engine Control Center says its up to date when i search for updates, and one would assume it does all that for you?

it also says thats catalyst version 11.11

i just uninstalled the catalyst and updated the latest version 12.3, ill see how that goes.

amuffin you really think this problem described is power related? i mean 750 watt should be ok..

Wattage is not everything, the power supply most likely does not supply enough amperage on the 12v rails for both cards. REMEMBER 5870's use tons of power! I suggest you change power supplies, it will most likely solve your problem.

You should really use something like driver sweeper to completely obliterate all the AMD drivers on your system. I've had problems in the past where old drivers would just not go away. Make sure they are all gone before you reinstall CCC. Hope this helps!

try this:
1-uninstall ccc and caps using add/remove in control panel,shut down
2-remove second card,restart,install(i would try 12.1 drivers and 12.2 profiles 1st)ccc
3-shut down,install second card and restart

Just because theres new drivers(ccc) doesnt mean there the right ones for your system.

A short post on how to properly install drivers, meant for CF or SLI:
http://wolframpc.blogspot.ca/2012/01/how-to-install-cro...

Secondly, the gray screen of death happens sometimes with bad overclocks. If it happens at stock you probably got a bad card.

Also as for the BF3 situation at least, this can depend on what settings you're running. The 1gb of VRAM is a limit in BF3. I'm running a pair of 5850s OCed to 5870 levels and if I max the graphics it's similar. The game will run fine until there's a bunch of stuff happening and then it stutters. I find that by turning the AA to 2x, textures to High, and the AO to SSAO instead of HBAO you can reduce the VRAM usage quite a bit and overall get a smooth game. I average over 70fps.
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