Crossfire Questions / Troubleshooting

[Barr7]

So after doing a good amount of digging I haven't been able to answer a few questions I had about Crossfire and what I should expect.

1. What does Crossfire utilize from the 2nd GPU?
- More specifically will it noticeably increase the 2nd GPU's clock rates?
2. How can I tell whether Crossfire is actually running?
- I saw stuff about using 3rd party tools, but I never saw a straight answer of "you need to monitor ___ on your gpu"

I've had this setup for a while but to be honest I never checked if it was actually running properly.

I only started looking into whether my system is running properly recently when one of my GPU's was running at much higher temps than the other when I noticed the 2nd GPU wasn't under any load and even had it's fans turned off.

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Troubleshooting:

So assuming that I'm correct when I am guessing that Crossfire is not actually running on my PC.

I have no clue where to go from here: I have done all the setup that I have seen on forums which amounted to:

1. Go into AMD Catalyst and enable Crossfire under the gaming tab
- I did, I even pointed it to a game that I know has Crossfire support (Overwatch specifically)
I enabled Crossfire on the game's profile and I also enabled "AMD Crossfire Logo" in the
Global Settings, but that doesn't seem to appear in any game that I open
2. Uninstall and Reinstall drivers
- I just reinstalled after using the most recent version of DDU
3. Check Motherboard to see if you need to enable Crossfire / Does your MoBo support Crossfire
- Yes it supports Crossfire, no it doesn't have an option in the BIOS to enable it

EDIT: I ran a clean install on my GPU drivers today so they should be up to date.

EDIT2: Assuming that Crossfire does utilize the 2nd GPU: In MSI Afterburner I can see that the Primary GPU's usage is ~100% when in game, and the secondary GPU's usage only changed a little when starting the games (Dota 2 and Overwatch)

I know this is a lot, though is there anyone able to help out?

Specs:

OS:
Windows 10

MoBo:
Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SOC LGA 1150 Z97

CPU:
Intel Core i5 4690k

GPU:
1x HIS R9 380 4096 MB IceQ X2 OC (990 MHz Clock) (Primary)
1x MSI R9 380 4096 MB (980 MHz Clock)

PSU:
Corsair HX1000i

RAM:
HyperX Savage 2x8GB 1866MHz DDR3

 

[Barr7]

For those who come across this I found the answer for the first 2 questions through trial:

Yes it will utilize the second GPU's core.

No, the utilization will NOT be obvious, the easiest way to check is to have a program like MSI Afterburner (or some other GPU usage tracking software) open on another monitor while you are playing the game, you will be able to see spikes in activity when the gpu is used over the primary. If you don't have another monitor have your program log the GPU usage so that you can see if the 2nd GPU's usage changes.

My setup was never not working in the first place, I just never realized how little the second GPU is actually utilized in a multiple gpu setup.

I hope this helps someone in the future.