My HD7970 Crossfire setup is not working properly. HELP!

[dandelioneater]

It sucks to have spent money on two 7970's and not have them work right. I have found that sli/xfire just isnt worth the extra hassle to ensure that it will work. Hopefully in time the drivers will get better. Single cards FTW

[clshades]

It's interesting that you are having so many problems considering I have a couple friends without any issues at all. They don't complain about microstuttering in BF3. One of them is running a full amd setup with amd chipset too so perhaps that is the issue?

[vipernig]

I don't have BF3. And again Chipset "issues" are unacceptable if it were the case. I really think it is sloppy work from AMD's part. Why would Cat12.4 kill my 3DMark11 when previous versions work. Why does Unigen work all the time and scales properly. Although I have to admit that previous drivers score a bit better that 12.4. I think I will be contacting AMD directly and maybe Asus (but this is really unlikely) and at least have something come out from all this wasted time.

[vipernig]

Ok so I think I have this figured out. For some reasong driver sweeper was not actually removing the drivers or a backup was being recreated. So I was sweeping in normal mode because the first time it did not work properly in safe mode so ran it in normal mode and it seems to have worked because on the next boot up the sweeper scan showed no left over drivers. So I switched back to my main win install and proceeded to do further test. Did driver sweerper in normal mode but for the heck of it decided to check in safe mode again. And lo and behold this time the drivers were still there. Did the sweep again and this seems to have corrected my uneven PCI performance with a single card. So I installed the 12.2 drivers and for some reason these install Catalyst 12.3 and 8.950.0.0 driver. So I crossfired and this time skyrim worked and it managed to keep better constant 60FPS and above. This looked promising. Went to run 3DMARK which gave me Overall score of 12693 and graphics of 15480. This is starting to look good indeed. Alan wake was crap. And Hard Reset scaled ok but there was noticible microstuttering from time to time. Decided to retry Skyrim and my PC crashed. When I rebooted I noticed with GPUz that the Second card was going into ULPS. I was like WTF. It turns out that I had not properly searched in the registry and there were way more keys that I had previously set to 0. So I set like 10 or more keys to 0. The card doesn't go into ULPS. Rerun Skyrim and it runs fine and so does Hard Reset.

So I decide to regive 12.4 a try. Redo the driver install dance and double check in safe mode that driver sweeper worked correctly. Now I redisable ULPS and lo and behold GPUZ is working. It had crashed again previously so there is a problem there with GPUZ and CAT12.4 with ULPS with my chipset I atleast. So I now proceed to try Skyrim and it is not running correctly, shitty performance because the second GPU even though it is not in ULPS the CORE clock stays at 500Mhz and the memory clock stays at 150Mhz. So I am guessing the crossfire is not commanding the second card to come out of 2D mode. I also made sure my chipset drivers were up to date and they were. The only drivers that were from 2006 were the Intel PCI bridge an firmware thing. And 3DMark doesn't kill the PC in CAT12.4 but obviously the scores will be crap because the 2dn GPU will stays in low clocks. SO there you have it folks. AMD releasing crappy drivers again and in my case my hardware seems to have issues with ULPS. Because from my research it seems you only need to disable ULPS when you want to overclock your crossfire.

I will retry tomorrow with the 12.3 install...or technically later in the day since it is 5AM and I really need to go to bed.

Edit. Just renabled ULPS and Unigen ran fine. It stuttered like crap when when it was disabled. But Skyrim crashed to Desktop instead of obliterating the PC and I did not ever bother 3DMark and GPUz as they will most likely obliterate the PC. So yeah when I wake I will redo my tests with 12.3 drivers. What CCC with report this time.