4870X2 and 4870 crossfire issues

[Devil's Prophet]

Are you sure you got the psu-headroom for tri-fire AND an OC'd cpu? Or is it just weirdness all the way?

[aussie-revhead]

It does the same weirdness with the x2 on its own too , so Im still confirming whats at fault here but 850W 70 amp should be enough , it fails even with very slight overclock too .

[Devil's Prophet]

It does the same weirdness with the x2 on its own too , so Im still confirming whats at fault here but 850W 70 amp should be enough , it fails even with very slight overclock too .

And what about only a single HD4870? But since your psu is sturdy, we can rule it out I guess. What's left then as the possible reason for all this?

[aussie-revhead]

OK I have now found that the x2 issues have continued when installed on its own , the pc shuts down when overclocked to previously stable clocks , its a hard shutdown. What makes a pc shut down like that ? I measured the 12v rail while this happened and its a bit hard to tell which occured first but it was stable up until shutdown occured.

The same rig is stable with two 4870s.

[Robilar]

I didn't try resetting my system when I connected the two cards to stock. (I typically run at 3.6 ghz on the cpu).

So you are saying that with everything at stock, tri-fire boots into windows but as soon as you attempt to overclock in any way it will not post?

[Xello]

I didn't try resetting my system when I connected the two cards to stock. (I typically run at 3.6 ghz on the cpu).

You should try it, at least it's better than nothing and could identify some overclock settings as being the issue.

[aussie-revhead]

I didn't try resetting my system when I connected the two cards to stock. (I typically run at 3.6 ghz on the cpu).

So you are saying that with everything at stock, tri-fire boots into windows but as soon as you attempt to overclock in any way it will not post?

Its doing alot of weird stuff , tri-fire seems to set OK with everything stock but no score boost over x2 alone , so its not working. Any cpu overclock makes the pc crash.

[Robilar]

I came across this article that I found interesting as well

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...review-22.html

DFI Motherboard Owners….Take Note

Unfortunately it has come to our attention that the fix listed below is not working for some people while others have claimed it worked. Thus, until we have either heard from DFI regarding this issue or the community is given a fix we are recommending you AVOID DFI X38 and X48 motherboards if you intend to buy this card.

You may not believe it but we had much, much more planned for this review but unfortunately our DFI motherboard conspired to haunt us again and again. Other than the fact that our LanParty DK X38 T2R decided to mysteriously give up on our very slight memory overclock, it refused to cooperate when we installed the HD4870 X2 into it. An ASUS X48 P5E Deluxe worked without a hitch, as did a Gigabyte EP35 and ASUS P5Q Pro so we knew it wasn’t the chipset and had read of these same things happening to owners of the HD3870 X2 when pairing that card up with certain DFI boards.

Basically, what happened was that we installed it into the board and a BIOS splash screen would not display even though the LED indicators told us everything was booting fine. There just wasn’t any video signal coming through the card so we somehow deduced that there was an issue with the X2’s display output. Well, we popped in the second HD4870 X2 card and lo and behold, had the same issue. Somewhere within the ensuing flurry of BIOS flashes, the motherboard decided enough was enough and finally died leaving us without a board and an approaching deadline.

To cut a long story short, we brought in another DK X38 T2R along with a beastly LanParty LT X48 T2R and found both new boards to have the same video display issue so we immediately knew that it was the board itself and not the card. After searching through the DFI Beta site, a BIOS was found that completely resolved the problem with the incompatibility between the motherboard and the HD4870 X2.

At this time we have only experienced problems with DFI’s X48 and X38 boards. The P35 and P45 series seem to be fine but if you are having problems with either of these chipsets, please post in our HD4870 X2 comment thread and we will try to sort things out.

Below we have listed the motherboards which may be affected by this problem as well as links to their corresponding Beta BIOS pages. You should use the most recent BIOS file we indicate or the latest one available.

LANPARTY DK X38-T2R: X38D725

LANPARTY DK X38-T2RB: X38D7251

LANPARTY DK X48-T2RS: X48DD725

LANPARTY LT X38-T2R: X38AD725

LANPARTY LT X48-T2R: X48AD725

LANPARTY LT X48-T3RS: X48GD725

LANPARTY UT X48-T2R: X48CD725

LANPARTY UT X48-T3RS: X48BD725

If your motherboard is not listed here, please visit the main page to the DFI beta BIOS site and look for your motherboard in the drop-down menu.

Use beta BIOS at your own risk..they are Betas for a reason folks.

The main problem we can see with this is that if you are building a new computer and do not have access to another graphics card, you will be in a fair bit of trouble. This is because you will have no way to update the BIOS if you can’t get a video signal. So, we recommend that if you are planning on buying a DFI board and the HD4870 X2 that you buy a cheap PCI-E graphics card just in case you have the display problem that seems to pop up on these boards. On the other hand, if you are upgrading to the HD4870 X2, you should update your BIOS before installing your new card.

[roller11]

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15293/8

What is that, then? "Radeon HD 4870 X2 + 4870 (x3)" with the x3 implying tripple crossfire (duh!).

So I guess you are wrong. Or else The Tech Report is wrong. But I find that harder to believe, really.

A better question is "what do I gain if I CF 4870x2 with any other card"?
Answer is nothing. Sure, you can buy either a 4870x2, or a 4870, and plug it into your mobo, but why would you given that there is zero scaling with the 4870x2 in CF? In other words, the extra card either does nothing, or in some cases slows down your games.

[palese]

http://csd.dficlub.org/forum/showthr...t=7672&page=17

X48 UT bios fix as well as other posted by Praz on DFI Club

[texasreefer]

I keep hearing that XP can only handle 2 GPU cores, from what I understand XP can handle 3 cores, and Vista can handle 4 cores. There have been alot of issues with the 8.5x and 8.54 driver editions, especially when it comes to unistalling and reinstalling drivers.

'Aussie-Rev' it could very well be a bad driver or a bad driver install. I'm assuming that you performed a clean unistall prior to adding the X2 and or the Tri-Fire card. Evertime you change out your cards you have to do a fresh uninstall.

'Robilar' this may also apply to you, since the most recent catalyst versions i.e. 8.8 (8.54) would have the highest capability for hybrid crossfire.

I have been back and forth with my catalyst versions and I still have problems when trying to install catalyst. I am getting better performance with 8.52.6 driver version, than the new 8.54 driver for 8.8 catalyst.

Prior to 8.6 catalyst, I would use ccleaner to remove the driver, then unistall the catalyst suite. With the newer catalyst drivers I use the control panel to remove the suite, then go back to the device manager and remove the driver manually.

If anyone has refined the method for clean uninstalling Catalyst...Let us know.

----------------------------------
Maximus Formula w/fusion block
Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz, 4GB DDR2 900 Mushkin
Vista Dual-boot, MSI 4870X2 OC

[Xello]

I keep hearing that XP can only handle 2 GPU cores, from what I understand XP can handle 3 cores, and Vista can handle 4 cores.

That seems correct to me, if memory serves one of the reasons Quad SLI didn't take off properly originally was this restriction in XP, or maybe something rather to do with DX9?

[xMrBunglex]

Windows XP is capable of using three GPU cores, but ATI's drivers don't allow it. CrossFireX is for Vista only.

[BulletProof]

i have a 4870 x2 in Crossfire with one 4870 512 MB that combination is something like a X3 (3 gpu's) (both Powercolor), and it works great... only window Vista (my version, ultimate 64) can recognize 3 GPU's, windows XP is useless, only recognizes one or 2 GPU. (yes, i have both OS in my computer) all i had to do is install the 4870 x2 first, install drivers, then plug the 4870 and reinstall everything, if your really lucky, this process wont be necessary, windows will recognize the 4870 512 mb and allow you to do crossfire as soon as you restart the machine.

Given some rumors i must confirm that if you crossfire 4870 x2, with 2GB per GPU with one 4870 512 MB per GPU, Catalyst will automatically use only 512 MB per GPU wich in my case only use 1500 MB os memory.

I only have a 750W power suply, and works great... so power is not a problem.

i hope my comment helped some of you, thkx

(by the way english is not my 1st laguage)

[zlojack]

i have a 4870 x2 in Crossfire with one 4870 512 MB that combination is something like a X3 (3 gpu's) (both Powercolor), and it works great... only window Vista (my version, ultimate 64) can recognize 3 GPU's, windows XP is useless, only recognizes one or 2 GPU. (yes, i have both OS in my computer) all i had to do is install the 4870 x2 first, install drivers, then plug the 4870 and reinstall everything, if your really lucky, this process wont be necessary, windows will recognize the 4870 512 mb and allow you to do crossfire as soon as you restart the machine.

Given some rumors i must confirm that if you crossfire 4870 x2, with 2GB per GPU with one 4870 512 MB per GPU, Catalyst will automatically use only 512 MB per GPU wich in my case only use 1500 MB os memory.

i hope my comment helped some of you, thkx

(by the way english is not my 1st laguage)

Interesting.

Do you have benchmarks with those two? What's the difference with the extra card?

[BulletProof]

there is definitely an improvement... in 3d Mark06 with only one 4870 512 MB i get a result of 16.750... in crossfire, with the 4870 x2 and the 4870 512 MB working together i get 22.834, so there is a big difference, jumping from the x2 alone to the crossfire setup i dont see as much improvement, it's like from 20.650 to 22.834, but in some games that percentage still makes all the difference (yes Crysis, i'm looking at you)
the Crossfire technologie is, as far as my experience goes, very stable nowday's... just dont go out and buy two 4870 x2 to quad Xfire, waste of money, 3GPU is a more stable solution, and better investment.

By the way i noticed that this GraphicCard's have too much power and can be severely bottle neck due to weak CPU's... if you buy one of this please buy at least a Q9550 and overclock him to something like 3.8/3.9... in that case, you will see a monter that can play everything even crysis at 1900x1200 very high 2x antialising with no problems whatsoever, otherwise, if you have a weak CPU clocked at 2.66 or 3.0, you will be bottlenecking this GC and wont get anywhere near that performance... the chart above doesen't show the true power of this cards, they benefit like no other from a fast CPU.

My system is:

Rampage Formula / 4870 x2 in crossfire with 4870 512Mb / q9450 overclocked (3.68Ghz) / 6Gb DDR21066.

[Guacamole]

So I think you answered my question but you can croosfire a 4870 512 and a 4870 1GB?? Is that possible seems like there would be some memory bandwith issue... Is the bus the same between these cards just more memory?? Anyone know the answer to that?

[halo112358]

Another thing worth looking at - has there been a bios update that disables 3x CF?

[cadaveca]

No, but some bioses do not allow X2 to start properly when paired with single card, and single card must be in first vga slot.

[STEvil]

I've got CrossfireX enabled on XP-64... with a 4870X2 and a X1950XTX.

X1950XTX doesnt actually do anything though

[iTravis]

Interesting, I'm gonna give it a try when I get my hand on the X2 next week.

[Guacamole]

Okay I have just put in another 4870 512 into my sytem so now I am running 2X4870/512 cards in crossfire, went back to play Crysis Warhead and my FPS dropped like 15 to 20 FPS with CF enabled but my 3DMark06 score went from 17300 to 22000 does this make any sense what is going on here???

[BulletProof]

Yes, it makes perfect sense to me... you see Crysis is horrible at scaling with MGPU, in some cases is better not to use Crossfire at all, altough i must say that my setup (4870 x2 4870 512 Mb crossfire) don't present the same problem, there is definatly an improvement between crossfire on and off... i love Crysis, its an amazing game but on the other hand is such a mess, lets just say that the game is not well optimized.

if you have a 4870 x2 and decide to do Crossfire, its better to do so with a 4870 1 gb, otherwise you limiting the memory to 512 per GPU (it works, but its not a good idea).

The thing you gotta remember is that you must have a good CPU to really see the benefit of this amazing cards... and by good i mean quad-core/3.5 or 3.7 GHz.

[iTravis]

Finally got my hand on the HD4870X2 to replace my CrossFire. I just plugged it in to try in CrossFireX mode and I got pretty bad result, I don't know if CrossFireX is scaled poorly with 1 X2 and 1 HD4870 or maybe I'm doing anything wrong but my result in game performance and 3DMark is way worse than my CrossFire. For example as you can see below I got only ~9k for Vantage compare to 13.5k with my HD4870CF, 3DMark06 shows similar result. I don't know what wrong but I'll just keep 1 HD4870X2 for now anyway.

To OP: I got the same problem like you have and after work around for awhile then I just resolve the problem. When I first fire up my system, all I did was plugging my 2nd DVI cable to my HDTV connected to the DVI port on my HD4870 (my 1st DVI cable still on the HD4870X2 connected to my monitor btw). Then I got the display on my HDTV and switching the display in CCC to my monitor as primary, that's how I got it working. I know it might sound weird but that's what I did to get it working properly.

[jorgito05]

You cant tri-fire x2's the limit on crossfire x is four GPU's , each one of these has two. thats why the x2's only have one crossfire socket. the limit is two x2cards which gives you 4 GPU's (two in each) (i.e Quad fire). If you want to gow down to tri-fire use three 4870.