Eyefinity + Crossfire questions.

[ddrueding]

I had a Sapphire 5870 Standard, and now I have a Sapphire 5870 Eyefinity 6 to go with it. I'm hoping to pair them up in crossfire, and drive three monitors in eyefinity.

For the moment I'm waiting for the second waterblock and my custom wiring harness to arrive, but has anyone else here read of issues/complications/etc associated with a config like this?

 

[ddrueding]

Issues:

1. Even on the 6-monitor Eyefinity cards, ATI were cheap bastards and only included 2 timing chips. That means that the rest of your monitors need to have active adapters or support Displayport directly.

2. The system won't detect my second 5870 at all. Due to the complexities of watercooling, card 1 is in slot 16_1 and card 2 is three slots down in slot 8_2. I can't see this being an issue, but I can't really change it for troubleshooting.

 

[ddrueding]

Just tried out Eyefinity. Pretty cool, though the fact that all my monitors are different sizes hurts the effect. Even without the CrossFireX working, 5760x1080 is perfectly playable in Dirt2 and Portal with everything maxed.

 

[BingBangBop]

I must be missing something. How can crossfire work at all when the cards are not adjacent? All the crossfire bridges that I've seen are fixed in length and only reach to an adjacent PCI-E card slot. I will correct that in that most MB's allocate two slots for adjacent PCI-E slots to compensate for double-wide cards. So with your mega PCI-e MB I assume standard would be slots 1 and 3. Still that won't work for slots 1 and 4...

That of course is a totally different issue than not even being able to detect the second card in the CCC. I have absolutely no generic solution to solving detection issues.

 

[Bozo]

Issues:
2. The system won't detect my second 5870 at all. Due to the complexities of watercooling, card 1 is in slot 16_1 and card 2 is three slots down in slot 8_2. I can't see this being an issue, but I can't really change it for troubleshooting.

Don't you need a cable from one video card to the other?

 

[MaxBurn]

I am fairly sure you don't need a bridge cable anymore for ATI.

 

[sechs]

Crosfire now runs through the PCI-E bus.

 

[ddrueding]

They shipped crossfire cables with the cards, and the cards still have the "fingers" on top for the connection, so I do have them cabled together.

Even if they weren't, I would expect to see both cards in device manager (I'm not).

That is what makes me think that this slot combination is somehow getting in the way.

 

[BingBangBop]

Yes, regardless of the communication method for crossfire, both cards need to be detected first and that is not happening.

My first suggestion is to pull out one card. Can you detect the remaining? Repeat for the other card.

Next, obviously there are multiple PCI-E buses so using just one card determine which one buses you can detect cards in.

Check the MB manual to see if there is a jumper(s) or BIOS settings to configure the PCI-E buses.

Are you missing any drivers? Perhaps the different PCI-e buses need separate drivers like some extra SATA/RAID ports do.

Is one of the cards bad?

These are just speculation and brainstorming, for I really do not know why the card is not being detected but it definitely needs to be fixed to proceed further with crossfire.

 

[ddrueding]

I agree, B3. Of course, swapping around cards is particularly difficult when running a watercooling rig. But changing slots is certainly the right place to start.

 

[ddrueding]

Playing driving simulators with three large-ish screens is both highly enjoyable and nauseating. The side monitors filling your peripheral vision completes the mental trick, and carsickness ensues within about 10 minutes of racing.

 

[sechs]

Hopefully, flight simulators will also come with a barf bag....

 

[ddrueding]

Looks to be a bad card. Bummer.