7970CF Low Usage, Low FPS.

Page 5 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
W

wadawada55

Honorable
Nov 12, 2012
113
0
10,680
So, i used to own 2 6970's which used to run bf3 fine, but had to give them away to a friend.
So i decided to buy 2 Gigabyte 7970's thinking these would last me a few years.

ran Bf3 for a few days running perfectly over 100FPS, but now cant seem to get more than 60 unless scoped in with sniper. I ran MSI afterburner to check if CF was working properly, which it was but cards were running from 55-70% which i'm wondering if that is the issue? Running metro 2033 runs superb, averaging the performance it should be and running at 90%+usage..
Boarderlands two seems to be having the same issue as BF3.. The campaign on the other hand runs 90%+ like it should also.


Specs:
Asus Rampage Extreme III
i7 960 3.2Ghz
12gb G.skill Sniper 1600hz Ram
2x Gigabyte 7970 GV-R7970OC-3GB
TX-850
Corsair GT 120gb
12.11 Beta Drivers (I've tried others, with no change)
Samsung S27A750 120Hz

Reformatted to Windows8 hoping for Better performance but Nothing. (Reason for the two cards on 1 screen, is to get the 120fps+ on gaming to look nice at 120hz..)
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Oh and on a different subject...I don't think this well help with your game problem, but just wanted to make sure since you have an SSD...is it set to IDE or AHCI in bios? it should be set to AHCI.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
ok that is AWESOME!!! may not sound all too awesome to you yet...but you are now successfully maxing the cards!!

Ok, now leave all settings as they are, except for the Anti-aliasing mode...change that back to use application settings....LEAVE everything else the way it is. Hopefully you will now get the performance settings that you want.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
So battlefield 3 is back to working the way it should, right?

Do you have borderlands 2 set to automatically detect settings? If you do, turn that off and turn all the settings as high as they will go.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Ok, send your computer to Japan so I can pick it apart lol. There has to be something that I am missing. I'm going to dig through the rampage III manual and see if there is something bios that might need to be changed.

Another thought, and this is probably just going to be a waste of time...on your board, you have the option to turn off pci slots using a dipswitch (should be near the main motherboard power connector). Disable slots 1, 2, and 4...this way only your second card is working. use the display port on your second card to run one monitor and see if that card is working 100% in that slot.

Also, are you running a multi-monitor setup or a single 120hz monitor setup? For some reason i was thinking you were running a multi-monitor setup, but don't remember.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I just re-read your initial post regarding a single 120hz monitor, so that answers my last question. With that, are you running the displayport from the second card or the first card? It needs to be plugged into the first card, plugging into the second card will cause the gpu's to not run at full capacity.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
hahahah i would if i could =P
Wow, thats a great help. thank you.. Im sure you will be able to find something. xD
ill try the dipswitches now, and run the 2nd card only, and yea i always have DP cable running from 1st card. and only using single monitor, got the 2nd card to keep frame rate above 120 too keep the Monitors HZ looking prestine, but that aint working.. hopefully we can figure this out.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
just tried then, disabling channel 2 and 4, just strickly having the 2 cards on, no improvement. Giving less frames than the card as a single.

just looked then, for some reason in ATI control panel it says the cards are at 1150 and 1450 but msi says differently at 1000 and 1375 which is odd, enable Graphics overdrive is unticked.

ran the game though and they were only running at 1000 and 1375 as MSI said, and when checking ATI panel says they are at that aswell. but still ati saying at 1150 1450
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Man it almost sounds like you are having a power issue...both cards are working good on their own, but when together they are struggling. But as long as your psu is working properly, your setup should be just fine...so I'm really scratching my head on that one and kinda doubt it. you could try different rails if you wanted, but again I kinda doubt that is your issue.

Another thing just for shits and giggles...If you have the space, move the cards to slots 2 and 4...that way they are both running at 8x don't worry about performance differences, the difference is almost virtually unnoticable.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
As far as the different readings between CCC and afterburner...I believe that CCC will just show the setting that the cards were last set at, not the current clock speeds. You could double check this by using GPU-Z.

One other random thought, I'm wondering if maybe your CPU is hitting a thermal limit or something...have you tried using CPU-Z or some other program to watch the CPU clock speeds while playing a game? If it is throttling, you will see the cpu drop its clock speed quite a bit when it hits its thermal limit.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Another thing that I'm curious to see if it helps. Bump your CPU clock back up to 4 ghz but this time, disable hyper threading. I don't believe bf3 or bl2 use more than 4 cores so it's worth a shot.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Aaarrrghh!!! lol. I spent a lot of time googling your setup, it seems that several companies have used your generation processor to test the 7970 in crossfire without any problems. Also, you had last gen cards working just fine in crossfire...so I don't see why you are having the problems you are having now.

Is there a possibility that you messed with different settings in your motherboard bios? Have you recently flashed the motherboard bios? If you haven't, I'd recommend going on the asus webpage and getting the most current bios. If you already did, try resetting it to default and see what that does.

Another ideal, and yes this one is silly...try putting two crossfire bridges on your gpu's. I've heard some people say that it does help. I personally think that it won't do anything, but at this point I'm getting desperate for ideas lol.

If all of that doesn't do anything, my next idea would be to do a fresh install of the drivers, but this time only install the video card drivers. Use Atiman to uninstall the drivers, you'll need an administrator account or have your account setup as administrator. Then install the 12.10 official drivers from AMD. This time when you do the install, select custom install and then uncheck everything except for the actual video card drivers.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Oh and make sure that your video cards bios switch is set to switch 2...from what I have read, switch 1 is a basic default where as switch 2 has a more aggresive fan profile and allows for better overclocking.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom