Oolite Bulletins

It's a long shot but there are some remarkable people on this forum, so I thought I'd ask...

After putting up with terrible ATI drivers on our lab's PCs at our last refresh we abandoned our X800s and X1800s and upgraded to a mixture of 8800GTXs, GTX260s and GTX285s (depending on the machine's role).

However, lulled/swayed by the advertising and because it would make a good experiment for our students in our benchmarking practicals we bought some XFX Black Edition ATI Radeon HD 5970s.

However, no matter what we do, we can only persuade these monsters to work in single GPU mode - XFX support has dropped back to the traditional "have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling", they even made me wait for their brand new (out today) v11.8 (Catalyst 8.881) of their drivers, but alas, (as we both knew), it was not to be...

Basic symptom - under Catalyst Control Centre - no CrossFireX option - under Graphics Hardware - one GPU appears as "Primary Adapter" the other GPU appears as "Disabled Adapter" - apparently it should appear as "Linked Adapter" - as it internalises the CrossFireX connection.

There's now some suggestion that its Intel's fault, but I'm not going that route otherwise I might as well use them to wedge open the door on a hot summer's day.

OS: XP Pro, SP3 (32-bit)
Mobo: Intel DP45SG (P45 chipset is on AMD Supported/Recommended list)

We're probably going to try a completely clean drive with card already installed and do a full fresh install as we have nothing left to lose (and if it works we can create an image for the other four machines we'd need to do this for).

(Oh, and I used Driver Sweeper (3.1.0) to remove any trace of the previous Nvidia drivers (from the GTX285))

And if anybody's interested FurMark 1.8.2 and 3DMark06 - the 1GB GTX285 and the single GPU from the 5970 (therefore also 1GB) come out almost exactly the same performance (and how much older is the GTX285 compared to the 5970?) [but I think the GTX285 is possibly one of the best cards Nvidia have ever made]

TIA

DH

asked a guy here, the only one i know has actually done crossfiring, he says he'll have athink. top of his head he said the obvious stuff like have you checked you've got enough power for both cards etc?
a quick google suggests the 5970 wasn't the best card they ever did, there's a few comments about people having the same issue. one thing that might be of help (not had time to fully read up), but one thread said this http://www.radeonpro.info/en-US/ could force a crossfire.


edit : mail from my mate

crossfire checklist –

MOBO bios up to date.
At least 850W Power supply
Each card hooked up with an individual 6 AND 8 pin supply from PSU (5970 specific)
Crossfire harness installed to bridge cards.
PCI-E bios settings correct – eg, both slots enabled, primary @ x16 and secondary @ x8 (possibly x16) (depending on bios)

If still not working, things to try -

Use a free program called GPU-z to confirm both cards are visible devices, if not, confirm both cards working correctly and proven by running each card separately in single mode using the primary PCI-E slot. If both work independently, then the cards are ok.

Other considerations -

O/S up to date
ATI drivers up to date (probably a given)
ATI CAP (Catalyst Application Profile) installed
As a long shot, use the ATI drivers that were bundled with the card rather than the latest.

Regards the last point stating that the 285 and 5970 were the same performance under benchmarks – this could imply that some other aspect of the rig is bottle-necking the GPU performance. Looking at the mobo it seems to only support Dual Core CPU and 1333 Ram, so I would say these are both limiting factors before you even get to GPU performance.
I am not saying one card is better than the other, but they shouldn’t be ‘almost exactly’ the same under a variety of tests. That said, the specification of the cards is very similar, the only real difference is the ATI will be using a lot less power and generating a lot less heat than the Nvidia.

Hope this helps.

Hi KW, thank your "guy here".

Mobo has most recent BIOS (Intel have discontinued this Mobo but there was a final patch back in Jan.)

When we bought the XFX Black Edition 5970s we matched them to the recommended XFX Black Edition Powers Supplies - single common 12V line guaranteed 52A, dedicated 6-PIN and 8-PIN PCI-E connectors.

Single 5970 internalises the crossfire - nothing to bridge - there's only one card - just two GPUs on the card
PCI-E settings correct but irrelevant - only one card

Have used GPU-z it can see both GPUs (there is only one card), even XP can see both GPUs in the device manager
Started with the drivers that came bundled with the card - it was XFX themselves that has had me try every version between that and the newest one.
ATI CAP installed

Re: Final point - the DP45SG supports 83 different LGA775 CPUs including our 2.83GHz Core Quads - the CPU isn't the bottleneck - however I do think that a single RV870 GPU on the 5970 is on par with the single GT200b GPU of the GTX285 - the 5970 gains its performance advantage by using both GPUs - which in my case isn't happening and hence the Benchmarking results. And the Power consumption figures from GPU review would contradict claim about ATI v Nvidia cards.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php ... &card2=618
http://processormatch.intel.com/CompDB/ ... ame=DP45SG

I'll go through the thread you found/suggested - you never know...

Thanks for the assistance - it's much appreciated.

not sure if there's a little miscommunication or misunderstanding going on here, but apparently if it's a double GPU card, that's a totally different scenario to Crossfire. Crossfire is only for multiple *cards* - my mate says double GPUs will only kinda show as one processor as that's how the card is displayed, cos the machine internalises the GPUS as you said - but that isn't Crossfiring.
easiest test - since you have multiple 5970s, stick two of them in the machine and cable them up and the CCC should detect and allow Crossfiring. far as i know, the "linked adaptor" bit won't show until you do actually link two cards together.
edit : the above was a sum up of our conversation, mate's mailed me a more techy version :

The x2 5970 in layman’s terms basically has ‘crossfire’ on board 24/7 by the very nature of its architecture. By ‘crossfire’ I mean the single physical card already has 2 GPU’s talking to each other and as such does not require additional external architecture or a crossfire/sli ready MOBO, and there will be no ‘on or off’ facility in CCC as there is no way separate the GPUs like you can with 2 single GPUs on 2 single cards.

Crossfire ready MOBO means that there are at least 2 PCI-E slots to allow you to physically connect 2 devices and the chipset supports the processing required to combine 2 different cards – all this stuff is redundant if you are running a dual core GPU on a single physical card in a single PCI-E slot.

I would say your man is expecting something which is not possible with a true dual core GPU.

As he mentions they bought ‘some’ 5970’s in his original post – I suggest slapping another one of those in the rig and then I believe the crossfire options will open up in CCC – however looking at the AMD Compatibility Charts – I can’t see that 5970x2 are specifically listed, just 5970’s, so I cannot advise what to expect with 100% certainty.

PS – last thing I’ll say with regards bottlenecking as I am not trying to be derogatory towards the guys setup, but I would suspect there would be notable gains under benchmark just by running a 64-bit O/S as opposed to 32-bit XP – and I also believe, (well I know for sure) that there would be considerable gains with a hyperthreaded quad core (i7 for example but probably even a non-HT i3 or i5) which runs with a much faster bus speed, a L3 cache, and support of faster RAM. As such, I am perfectly correct when I say the current rig is bottlenecking/limiting the performance of the GPU, be it an Nvidia or a ATI one.

Hope this helps.

Hi KW - we've got some Intel i7 boards - the plan is to try those on my return to work.

Currently can't try two 5970 card simultaneously as we don't have any 1000W PSUs!!

It's ATIs own instructions/manual for the 5970 that indicate that the CrossFire Tab should be present for even a single 5970 card because the user should have the option via the Crossfire tab of choosing whether the 2nd GPU is used for CrossFire or Physics. Even XFX (and it's their card) say that the 2nd GPU should never appear as "Disabled" in the Catalyst Control Centre...



later

DH

i'll have a word w/ my mate tomorrow, all this xfire stuff is beyond me so i don't know what to suggest. other, of course, than if you have multiple cards, try another one (or two) -it might be that that one's buggered ~ if not, then if they all do that i'd suggest ATI and XFX need to get their fingers out and sort their documentation.

edit - yeah, i'm totally lost, lol - i hunted out a link to the manual so i could forward it to my mate if he needed, http://www.power-color.com/Manual/09010 ... 70_ENG.pdf, and the only xfiring it mentions in there is via a second card!

Killer Wolf wrote:

i'll have a word w/ my mate tomorrow, all this xfire stuff is beyond me so i don't know what to suggest. other, of course, than if you have multiple cards, try another one (or two) -it might be that that one's buggered ~ if not, then if they all do that i'd suggest ATI and XFX need to get their fingers out and sort their documentation.

edit - yeah, i'm totally lost, lol - i hunted out a link to the manual so i could forward it to my mate if he needed, http://www.power-color.com/Manual/09010 ... 70_ENG.pdf, and the only xfiring it mentions in there is via a second card!

The actual manual for my particular card isn't on the net, only on the CD that comes with the Card, I've mentioned this to both XFX and AMD as somewhat stupid... (I've seen that power-colour manual, I downloaded it by mistake when I was looking for the one I have on the CD, to save me digging out the CD) - can't try multiple cards - insufficient oomph in the PSUs, but have tried four of the five different cards - they all behave the same way - as I've said, going to try one of our i7 boards next week...

oh. had a bit more trawl and this page http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1923&pageID=9479 says the thing is packaged w/ a crossfire bridge - implying that to crossfire, you need two cards. there are a few sites testing it crossfired and they're all running two cards, which kinda implies to me that, as previous posts, however the the card is running w/ two gpus on boar, it's not actual crossfiring.
way out my depth tho, as i say i'll have a word tomorrow.


edit : http://boardreader.com/thread/5970_disa ... X72vp.html hmmmmm!

edit : mate has nothing to add, i think those cards are lemons, TBH. added to the fact that XFX seemt o be giving you the run around over a problem that the above link seems to suggest is not unknown to say the least, i'd suggest seeing if you can return the cards and get replacements of another type/brand.

DH, hoy those cards out, make one of these instead
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/81819010/

Killer Wolf wrote:

edit : mate has nothing to add, i think those cards are lemons, TBH. added to the fact that XFX seemt o be giving you the run around over a problem that the above link seems to suggest is not unknown to say the least, i'd suggest seeing if you can return the cards and get replacements of another type/brand.

I spoke to a ex-colleague at Qinetiq, who has built some sims using the 5970s, he says the card is fine, but you don't notice how much better they are until they're running under Win7 and/or driving 3 hi-res screens (at least 1920x1080) - the XP based benchmarks (DX9) just can't push the GPUs hard enough...

(I guess I better get on with the Win7 upgrade in the lab then...)