Last night I installed a Gigabyte Radeon HD 5850 to my system which already includes the Sapphire Tech Radeon HD 5850. Here is the procedure I took:
1. Updated to AMD Driver 11.2
2. Turned system off and unplugged
3. Installed second card, applied both bridges
4. Turned system on, computer recognized the 2nd card.
5. Turned off and unplugged, installed power cords to the 2nd card, turned on
6. Enabled crossfire under CCC
Everything seemed OK; I set the GPU 2 to run slightly faster core speed per recommendations to try and limit the microstutter concerns. I ran Heaven Benchmark and saw a serious improvement in score over the single card, and just watching the benchmark run it looked much better and smoother with no stuttering or flickering. I then ran 3dmark 11 and went from ~4200 to ~7100 which was a nice bump.
Then I fired up Star Trek Online and there was constant flickering that was never there before with the single card. I tried other games, too, including Civ IV, Dragon Age and all showed the same problem, regardless of how low I set the settings or resolution. I don't understand why benchmarks would run smooth but the games would be so abhorrent.
For reference I have an 850 watt power supply 80 plus, so I'm fairly sure that's not the problem.
From reading around I gathered I need to ensure my Catalyst Application Profile is current, but I assumed that having 11.2 installed would already have that file included. Is that not right?
I have seen another 10+ things to try to make it 'OK' but would like to ask the Forum if anyone else has experienced similar issues and resolved them and what they did.
Thanks everyone.
1. Updated to AMD Driver 11.2
2. Turned system off and unplugged
3. Installed second card, applied both bridges
4. Turned system on, computer recognized the 2nd card.
5. Turned off and unplugged, installed power cords to the 2nd card, turned on
6. Enabled crossfire under CCC
Everything seemed OK; I set the GPU 2 to run slightly faster core speed per recommendations to try and limit the microstutter concerns. I ran Heaven Benchmark and saw a serious improvement in score over the single card, and just watching the benchmark run it looked much better and smoother with no stuttering or flickering. I then ran 3dmark 11 and went from ~4200 to ~7100 which was a nice bump.
Then I fired up Star Trek Online and there was constant flickering that was never there before with the single card. I tried other games, too, including Civ IV, Dragon Age and all showed the same problem, regardless of how low I set the settings or resolution. I don't understand why benchmarks would run smooth but the games would be so abhorrent.
For reference I have an 850 watt power supply 80 plus, so I'm fairly sure that's not the problem.
From reading around I gathered I need to ensure my Catalyst Application Profile is current, but I assumed that having 11.2 installed would already have that file included. Is that not right?
I have seen another 10+ things to try to make it 'OK' but would like to ask the Forum if anyone else has experienced similar issues and resolved them and what they did.
Thanks everyone.