Graphics Cards Fried?

[Jak]

A lot of people have been telling me to upgrade to Windows 7 so I decided to go ahead and buy the upgrade at wal-mart today. I get home, upgrade, everything goes smoothly but now my graphics cards (AT Radeon HD 4870 x2) won't work with crossfire. It shows my second graphics card as "Adapter Disabled".

I've made sure all my drivers were up to date, I did a complete uninstall/reinstall on ATI, I went from 10.7>10.6 to see if that would help, but nothing works. Not only that but for some reason on my ATI Overdrive it shows my Memory Clock overclock numbers just fine but my GPU Clock won't budge from 600MHz even though I have it set at 790. When I go to "Test Custom Clocks" or "Auto-Tune" it comes up to a big nice red/green screen which I can escape out of.. but doesn't do anything for me. Although I should note that this GPU Clock/Red-Green Screen was happening before I upgraded to Windows 7.

So is this a known issue with Windows 7 upgrades and crossfire? I googled what other people are saying and I'm not alone but nothing I do seems to fix it.. and FurMark is for sure showing that my second GPU is not working.. as it's only running at 30-40 FPS now instead of 60-70 FPS.

Is this Windows 7 or are my graphics cards kablooey? I guess if its my cards it gives me a good reason to charge my credit card for a new ATI Radeon 5870 card.

[Cayos]

I know you've probably already check this, but did you download the right drivers? You might have bought the 64 bit version of Windows 7. This would cause compatibility problems if you happened to download the 32 bit drivers.

[Jak]

Yah, made sure it was 64 bits. :/

[Icari]

does it change at all if you try safe mode?

[Evanos]

If everything was working fine before the upgrade and all of a sudden stopped when you upgraded, I'd say it is a 99% chance that it is the upgrade and not the cards. I may be understanding your post incorrectly, but this is the general order correct?:
1. You have PC with 2 graphics cards and crossfire was working with windows XP
2. Went to Walmart, bought upgrade, installed, everything stopped working.

Did you do the upgrade option? Or did you do a full clean reinstall including formatting and the whole works?


Or, did you buy the second card at the same time as the upgrade?

If it is the former, I would recommend doing this first. Uninstall your current drivers first in the control panel. After that, boot your PC back up and run driver sweeper and get rid of all traces of your drivers left in the registry and anywhere else it may be lurking. Then boot the PC back up and go first with the latest drivers. If that does not work, go way back to either 10.1 or 10.3 (both pretty stable builds of ATI's notoriously bad drivers). If that does not work, I would do a full clean reinstall of Windows 7.

Actually, recently I upgraded my fiancee's (Weing on the forum) new computer and initially I got everything but the graphics card because I was waiting for the right open box to come appear on newegg. Initially I had a Nvidia card in her computer and then when the deal came I upgraded to an ATI 5970. I put the card in and all the typical driver installation, and her PC was getting very low scores in furmark and just about everything else. I tried every version of the 10.XX drivers from ATI and all had the same results, at that point I totally wiped windows and started from scratch and everything was working perfectly fine.

All in all, a lot of problems can come with the combination of Windows Upgrade and crappy ATI drivers.

[Jak]

Windows Vista, not Windows XP.

Other than that, yah.. my order of actions were..

1) Running Vista 64, graphics cards working generally well (minus the overclock part showing 600Mhz instead of 790 which I was suppose to be overclocking at).

2) Purchase Windows 7.

3) Upgraded only, did not do a full clean install as I didn't feel like putting 300 gigs worth of shit on DVDs.

4) Everything is smooth, all games run perfect, benchmarks lower though. I check graphics cards, both cards are shown as being there but I no longer have the option of enabling crossfire in the catalyst control center, in fact the tab is completely gone as if it never existed.

I may just completely re-do my entire OS. I could get rid of half the junk I don't use on my comp. anymore like POL/FFXI/Random Games/Etc. but from random forums I don't think it'll fix my problem.

[Jak]

Completely separate subject but fuck ATI really, I always have problems with ATI.

Could anyone recommend a non-ATI graphics card that will run better graphics than my non working 4870s? Don't want to exceed 300~ dollars if possible

[Evanos]

There is an old workaround to get Crossfire working in the registry too. I just did some quick searching to try to find it and had no luck. I could probably find it if I had a little more time to dedicate, but I'm at work atm. You may have luck with that. I'd still say either doing a driver sweeper and fresh driver install or a fresh windows install would fix your problem though.

No 2nd computer/HDD to put all the files on temporarily? Disc burning sucks majorly >.>

[Jak]

I'm probably gonna go to my parents and bum one of my my moms terabyte size externals.

Also, I completely uninstalled my graphics drivers with revista uninstaller (think that is name) and did a driver sweep several times over with various catalyst numbers with no luck. I may try to roll back to something like 9.1 (really old but meh) just to see.

[Jak]

I decided to go ahead and buy a new graphics card.. and I'm pretty set on this one. Am I wrong? Will this card out-do my now broken ATI Radeon HD 4870 x2 (xfire) card?

EVGA 012-P3-1470-AR GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

V/s yah.. the ATI one I just said.

[Balthasar]

Glad to hear ATI has some problems as well :D And for performance comparison, you should try viewing this thread or this one. The Nvidia 400 series cards will probably see a lot of performance increase when better drivers are made available, because the current ones are pretty shitty imo.

I bought that same exact card and this happened with me, just so you know. There are problems on both sides of the bridge. My (single GPU) problem is uncommon apparently, but there are tons of SLI issues with current drivers.

[Jak]

Here's to hoping I have no issues.

Also, is SLI the equivalent of Crossfire? I don't plan on SLI'ing until the 470 drops some major price.

[Balthasar]

Also, is SLI the equivalent of Crossfire?

yes

[Jak]

Is it true the cards don't come with the uh.. whatever it takes to SLI cards? My ATI cards came with the strap things already. If it's the case.. do I just buy the SLI strap things separately?

[Adajer]

They usually come with your motherboard. They are called SLI bridges. I do believe SLI has better scaling than crossfire.

[Jak]

Hm, well mine came with nothing I guess.. and I'm guessing my crossfire wires connecting my two current graphics cards wouldn't work. :-/

[Jak]

I posted this in the FFXIV benchmark thread but something just feels off about my graphics card and overclocking it. Every benchmark I run seems to be around 10-20% worse than everyone else when it shouldn't be. Does everything on this look fine?

http://i36.tinypic.com/oj18bs.jpg

[Jurgen]

What CPU are you using? You could be experiencing a small CPU bottleneck.

[Boyiee]

You have a 470 but are using a 480 overclocking program/tuner. Is there a 470 specific one available? That could cause some problems with oc otherwise, or damage lol.

And you are most likely experiencing a cpu bottleneck as said. FF14 benchmark is cpu heavy. If you aren't running an i7920 or 930 you are most likely not going to get good numbers.