Hardware crossfire hell

[Scorpei]

So, I went out and bought me way too expensive hardware. I now am the proud owner of:
asus p7p55d
i7 870
and 3870x2 (times 2)
The problem here is: the 3870s won't go into crossfire properly. They run in triple crossfire (according to the catalyst control center, the highest I can set them: choices being 2 GPUs (20) or 3 GPUs (205)), and apparently in dual (can see 2 of the GPUs / 1 card drawing power) which I can see in performance (90 versus 170 fps). Just now I had a boot in which only dual worked regardless of the amount of GPUs catalyst control center said were set.

Now I had the 3870x2 x2 setup inside my core 2 duo e4500 (gigabyte ep45-ds3r) setup and it ran fine in quad crossfire then... the OS installed then was windows 7 ultimate x64 just like now. Only thing I can think of is that I have yet to install directX (surprisingly benchmarks from unigine run without it). All four GPUs are detected by the OS and have proper drivers installed (latest greatest). Oh and of course I have a crossfire bridge installed

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So anyone have any ideas

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[Originality]

This isn't helpful but... good luck.

 

[Scorpei]

This isn't helpful but... good luck.

Although it wasn't it was, made me check it out again just now, so thnx

. Although I'm still not closer to an actual solution I think it is misreporting and driver weirdness that is at fault. When I start the unigine benchmark in fullscreen mode all 4 GPUs are utilised (which I can see by my machine load as I have a seperate PSU for 12V PCI-E lines which indicates load on each line, and the fact that all 4 temps rise dramatically). When I run it in windowed mode however only 2 GPUs are utilised. How on earth catalyst control center feels the need to call that 3 GPUs I don't know. I also haven't checked to see if when I select 2 GPUs all 4 work in full screen also (in windowed I believe I checked only 2 are active).

 

[Gangboy]

To exclude all software, the only main difference is your motherboard. It is risky, but you can try to flash update your bios. It's not always advisable, but in this case it may seems to solve your problem.

 

[Scorpei]

To exclude all software, the only main difference is your motherboard. It is risky, but you can try to flash update your bios. It's not always advisable, but in this case it may seems to solve your problem.

Nice thought, the board is rather quirky. I bought it defective with one major issue: it mostly doesn't restore proper power state to the GPUs (in the first PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot) after a reboot. Which is to say if you hit restart in windows for example the machine will reboot and try to start the OS however the grafics cards are still in low power state (shown by nearly 0 load, no picture on screen and red leds on the boards indicating low power). Normal 'cold' boots work fine though and also if the machine is in said bad state killing the power and waiting 10 minutes (with the power chord still connected and power switches on the PSU still in the on position) makes it boot again as normal. As this is my LAN machine solely for gaming I couldn't really care about it so the 90+ euro's saved is a good thing

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This put aside I installed a new bios (from 1807 to 2003) to see if that would fix the above mentioned problem. That did not fix it and it didn't help with catalyst control center either sadly

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[Gangboy]

If a BIOS update didn't fix the problem, I think there is more then just the 1 defect your motherboard has. Only way is to try it out with an equal p55 (which allows you to quad crossfire), best is the exact same motherboard. Even though you already had the set-up working with your previous motherboard.

 

[Scorpei]

Well, that was weird. Now the machine no longer runs in quad/triple crossfire (still reports 3 cards crossfire). Gonna try to see if removing it, booting, and then inserting and booting it can fix it..

 

[Gangboy]

I still think it is your motherboard that is not working properly. What you could do is buy the same motherboard new, put in the old one (ofcourse dust it off etc.) and let it be send back to the manufacturer under warranty and sell that one

 

[Scorpei]

I still think it is your motherboard that is not working properly. What you could do is buy the same motherboard new, put in the old one (ofcourse dust it off etc.) and let it be send back to the manufacturer under warranty and sell that one

Which would be immoral. Nah the switcheroo (removing one of the cards, booting, re-inserting) fixed it for now. It keeps crossfire without problems (also switched places with the cards, one is a non-always crossfire asus 3870x2 the other an OEM Dell). Gowd I hate intel for switching sockets so much.