Crossfire is driving me insane!

[ddrueding]

I was so excited at the opportunity to work on this machine; the video cards alone cost more than my whole rig.

1900XTX (x2 - master/slave)
AMD FX57
Sapphire Crossfire Advantage PC-A9RD480Adv
etc, etc...

So, I have the Crossfire Edition 1900XTX (master) card in the master PCIe slot, and the regular 1900XTX (slave) in the slave PCIe slot, and I have the special dongle connected between the two, with the monitor connected to the other lead on the dongle. With no Catalyst drivers installed, it works great. As soon as I install the latest Catalyst drivers (6.2) and reboot, screen goes black until I disconnect the monitor from the dongle and connect it directly to the DVI port on the master card. This works fine, but when I attempt to enable crossfire mode in the driver, it tells me I need to have the monitor connected to the crossfire card (I assume this means the dongle?!?!)...

Anyway, it's going on 2:30AM, I've been working on this for about 5 hours now, and it's beginning to drive me nuts.

Help?

 

[Mercutio]

I will help you by taking one of the X1900s off your hands.

 

[mubs]

While I know nothing of this SLI/Crossfire business, I do remember reading that unlike SLI, Crossfire needs no dongles or interconnects and "works through the motherboard". From the problems you've described, it looks like your set-up process is out of sequence somewhere (kinda like cart before the horse).

$.02, even though it doesn't help.

 

[ddrueding]

While I know nothing of this SLI/Crossfire business, I do remember reading that unlike SLI, Crossfire needs no dongles or interconnects and "works through the motherboard". From the problems you've described, it looks like your set-up process is out of sequence somewhere (kinda like cart before the horse).

$.02, even though it doesn't help.

'Fraid not. The x1300 and x1600 models can do it via the PCIe bus, but the X1800 and X1900 models do require a cable. As you can see from the link I used above, information is damn sparse...

 

[ddrueding]

I will help you by taking one of the X1900s off your hands.

Nope, the customer isn't satisfied with the performance of BF2 with just the one X1900XTX card in there. Even at only 1600x1200 ann everything else maxed, it lags when you get AF to only 4x :roll:

 

[timwhit]

Have you considered calling tech support?

 

[Bozo]

Do you have .NET installed? I beleive you need that to get the Catalist drivers to work right.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[mubs]

.Net is mandatory with the newer versions of Catalyst. Says so up front on the driver download page. I'm sure David has that installed already.

 

[ddrueding]

.Net is mandatory with the newer versions of Catalyst. Says so up front on the driver download page. I'm sure David has that installed already.

Yep, v2.0

I have the user on the phone with ATI, I'll let him deal with it.

 

[mubs]

David: The link on ATI's driver page goes to .Net 1.1 on Microsoft's site. I'm running .Net 2 and a x1600Pro with the latest drivers off of HIS' website, but I'm not running Crossfire. I tried, but couldn't find enough info to determine if 2.0 is backwards compatible witn 1.1. In my case, I was willing to screw up my XP install because it was intended mainly for system burn-in, not production use. If all else fails, I'd suggest trying 1.1.

 

[Stereodude]

You can have different versions of .NET installed on a PC at the same time. I assume that means they're not backwards compatible.

 

[Mercutio]

I think I've said this before: .NET 2.0 is not entirely compatible with 1.1. In most cases, code written for 1.1 will compile and run fine under 2.0, but that is not 100% sure thing. My understanding, from talking to developers, is that it's pretty much an 80/20 rule kind of thing.

 

[ddrueding]

Well after running 10 hours last night (calling it at 7AM) we got it to the point where all the hardware was detected, the display worked, and inside the catalyst control panel we could go to the "Crossfire" option at the bottom (only visible if you have the right hardware), but the checkbox was greyed out; an error below stated that "you must have the monitor connected to the crossfire enabled card for this to work". It was.