***M18x - AMD Crossfire (Driver Questions, Performance, Problems) Discussion Thread***

[NightEye]

Thank you for your answer Mr Fox.

Yes, it's a 6990M CF system and I'm currently running under Catalyst 12.3

I'm gonna try the Dell driver then.

[NightEye]

Mmm...

I followed the procedure in 1st post but at the point where I'm supposed to get "Standard VGA" in the Device Manager, I still get AMD Radeon HD 6900M Series with a yellow exclamation point.

I ran Driver Sweeper again, as Administrator, and it still finds AMD display registry entry. I tell to clean, it asks me to reboot, I do that and when I run it again, the registry entries are still there, like it's not deleting them.
And CCleaner doesn't find any more registry entry to clean.

EDIT : couldn't get the VGA standard for the life of me, so installed the DELL driver anyway. Fingers crossed.

[vzachari]

What I DO have now is the screen "scrambling" sometimes. It's hard to describe : for no apparent reason, the lower half of the screen would flicker, then the screen would turn completely white, then a mix of white and "artefacts" for lack of a better word except this happens while I'm on the desktop, with no 3D program running !
When this flickering happens, the mouse is slow and laggy as if the computer is about to crash or something. This lasts for about 30-60 seconds.

What you describe above looks like CCC and/or the display driver is about to fail. It happens to me every time I push my video card clocks above their limits, right after a 3D benchmark (where 3D acceleration is active and the GPUs are pushed hard).

Did you ever get any warnings about the display driver failing and being recovered during/after the flickering? Any system warnings/Errors at all?

Also, before 12.3 you must have had other driver versions. Was everything OK with previous driver versions?

I think the first thing to do is to see whether your problem is driver based or hardware based. The dell drivers are pretty stable so let's see what happens after you install them. Test the system without any overclocking first.

Then download Sapphire trixx and make sure ULPS is off before you attempt any overclocking (even from overdrive). If the problem persists you will need to inform dell tech support.

EDIT: For your post below try this:

Perform the steps below to turn off automatic driver installation and see if the issue can be resolved:

1. Go to Start, type change device installation settings in the Start Search box and then press ENTER.
2. In the Device Installation Settings window, select No, let's me choose what to do.
3. Select Never install driver software from Windows Update.
4. Click Save Changes.

[NightEye]

Well, as I said, I installed the Dell driver anyway : no flickering so far but it's only been a few hours.

Just to be clear, I only upped the frequencies in Catalyst Overdrive by 1Mhz to "unlock" the frequencies from being stuck in 2D mode.
After that, I put them back to defaults : I have no overclocking whatsoever, neither on the GPUs or the CPU.

I'm hoping the flickering thing was a driver issue and that it will be solved with the Dell Driver. As I said, fingers crossed.

As for the black screen, it's definitly an overheating problem : i ran FurMark in windowed mode with Hwinfo next to it and as soon as the GPU thermal diode reached 80° (or 85° ?), boom, black screen.
I just had to wait for Furmark to finish and then as soon as the temp was down a little, the image came back.

The thing is, with system default, the fans only start running at full speed after 70°C, so when an application (like Furmark or Trine2 which is very demanding GPU-wise) needs a lot from the GPU, the fans don't have time to bring the temp down.

[Mr. Fox]

I bet it was an AMD driver issues.

[makwu]

Hey I just installed 2 6990's to replace the 560s that were in there. Do the 6990m's have seperate card 1 and card 2 bios? I have been able to find the honeycomb.zip, but im not sure if the bin file is for crossfire setups.

Thank you in advance for your help,
Mak

[solrac13]

CrossFireX™ 2GB GDDR5 AMD Radeon™ HD 7970M M18R2 is out in USA

[Mr. Fox]

Hey I just installed 2 6990's to replace the 560s that were in there. Do the 6990m's have seperate card 1 and card 2 bios? I have been able to find the honeycomb.zip, but im not sure if the bin file is for crossfire setups.

Thank you in advance for your help,
Mak

Same vBIOS for both cards. There is no master/slave. You can put the 6900M series cards in either MXM slot as well.

[ltcmdrQ]

Hi all,
anybody having any issues with AMD 12.4 whql? Been trying to get it installed, but it appears to be incomplete. I got the driver from Guru 3d whicj has so far worked for me. tried it twice, downloaded it again from Guru 3d, just in case it was a bad download. No luck. Went to the AMD site again no luck withthat download, tried the 12.4a from AMD and again no luck, so back to square one.
Any thoughts anyone?

[Qumars]

Hi all,
anybody having any issues with AMD 12.4 whql? Been trying to get it installed, but it appears to be incomplete. I got the driver from Guru 3d whicj has so far worked for me. tried it twice, downloaded it again from Guru 3d, just in case it was a bad download. No luck. Went to the AMD site again no luck withthat download, tried the 12.4a from AMD and again no luck, so back to square one.
Any thoughts anyone?

I have a feeling that you are downloading the desktop package, make sure you get the mobile version. I post the link for you here AMD Catalyst? Mobility Display Driver