The Asus HD7970-DC2-3GD5 and MSI R7970 Lightning; the solution for tearing in the 79XX family

[suiken_2mieu]

Probably should have clarified, I am using two 'passive' DP to DVI adapters for two of my monitors, and one active DP to DVI adapter (my understanding was this was required for eyefinity). Is this not the way I should be connecting my screens to prevent tearing?

I have tried running one of my screens through the 'switched' dual link DVI port (as it is a 120hz monitor, and my active adapter apparently isn't up to the task of that - even though it can do 2560x1600), and I get identical tearing in eyefinity (but none with extended desktop).

You need to run all active adapters. When you go into CCC, go under desktop management, then creating and arranging desktops. Hover over the monitor icons. If any of them say DVI, you need active adapters.

[Crysto]

After all the research on Eyefinity I never knew you needed to run all active to remove tearing... Makes sense, and in CCC it does show two DVI and one DP monitor. The one active adapter I have is USB powered, I assume the other adapters with no external power are basically just single link versions of what I already have? Something like -this- would be appropriate?
Appreciate the help getting to the bottom of this, it's really unsurprising (although altogether dodgy) that this isn't made clear by AMD.

[Moose]

Something like -this- would be appropriate?

Yeah, those should be fine. I've got the Sapphire ones. I'll get back to you hopefully this afternoon, since the odds are high I will recieve my new PSU today.

Appreciate the help getting to the bottom of this, it's really unsurprising (although altogether dodgy) that this isn't made clear by AMD.

And the understatement of the year goes to... Crysto!

[metalnwood]

So I am guessing that none of the other 7970 cards have enough clocks to use the 2xdvi's and the hdmi together?

Looks like my country may be out of stock of the asus EF6 until beginning of next month. Hoped there would be another option!

[Moose]

Hello fellow WSGF'ers,

okay, I'm not sure how to put this but I am probably going to sell my third monitor and trade in my 7970 for as 7950/7870. This means no more Eyefinity for me. The reason behind this is quite simple. I've got a new study coming up, which is sort of my life goal. I really want to do this study and succeed. Also the study is quite far away from my home, so I'm gonna rent a room. Having an Eyefinity setup at home which is only used in the weekend is a bit too expensive for me. Rooms here in Holland cost quite a lot and I also need money for a new laptop for the study. That's the reason.

I am really sorry and I want to apologise to all the people who have been waiting for my review on the Asus card and/or further help with Eyefinity on this card. I hope I can still be a part of this great community.

Moose

[AussieTimmeh]

I hope I can still be a part of this great community.

Moose

Absolutely mate! Shame for downgrading but yay for following your life dreams. 8)

[skipclarke]

I am really sorry and I want to apologise to all the people who have been waiting for my review on the Asus card and/or further help with Eyefinity on this card. I hope I can still be a part of this great community.

Moose

I'm sorry you're having to sell your Eyefinity rig, but I can certainly understand the need for having the right priorities. Congrats on getting the opportunity for the education. And, you don't need to run multi-monitors to be a part of the community. There are plenty of people who run just a single widescreen. If you wanted to jump into one of the niches we represent, you could always get a laptop with a 3D panel. Both NVIDIA and AMD have offerings out from different manufacturers.

[Wijkert]

Rooms here in Holland cost quite a lot

I can second that... :(

Anyway, good luck! Can you tell us what you will be studying?

[Haldi]

I hope I can still be a part of this great community.

Moose

just kidding ;) i'm pretty sure you will return to play in triple monitor as soon as you get the possibility to. Like pringles! once doped never stopped.
It's good to have a goal you want to achieve. Wish you best luck and hope you success.

[Moose]

[quote]Rooms here in Holland cost quite a lot

I can second that... :(

Anyway, good luck! Can you tell us what you will be studying?

I'll (hopefully) be studying Game Creation & Producing after the summer. I need to do assignments, hand in a CV, resumé, a motivational letter and spend a day there to do assignments with a group of fellow students. It's an english study. Some of the courses I get: Storyboarding, Design, 2D en 3D animation, Modelling, Art Skill, Audio, Flash, Creative Thinking, Brainstorming, Photography en Interaction Design, Concept Design, Multidisciplinair Development, Interactive Storytelling, Advertising, Mediapsychology, Game History, Gameplay en Ethics. The third and the fourth year focus on specialization and internship.

I'm really looking forward to this study, although I'm quite nervous as well.

To Haldi, skipclarke, AussieTimmeh and other people; thanks for the support!

Moose

[Moose]

So, I've changed a few things in the original post and the title. The MSI R7970 Lightning has globally hit the market so I thought, why not make this a thread for that card as well. I believe quite a few people want the MSI over the Asus because of Mini-Displayports. Anyway, discuss whatever you like!

Moose

[overstitch]

So I'm hoping the gurus here can possibly help me with my DC2T which has been heartache and heartbreak. My system specs are in my sig. I've tested different driver revisions, disabled PowerPlay, disabled ULPS, tried slightly increasing the voltage to see if that stabilized it, upgraded my PSU, removed my XFi and am now planning to disconnect hard drives and disable onboard SATA controllers this evening to see if that will help. I've gone so far as to take it to the retailer for RMA and they turned it down since it worked in their bench system without glitch. I need to try again to see if I can find out their testing process and what they used though.

My card only throttles down the VRAM if you have a single monitor, doesn't matter if all of the monitors are connected via ActiveDisplayPort adapters or not. It also doesn't throttle down the GPU unless a single monitor is connected.

What is the problem? 3DMark11 and Battlefield 3 (Generally also Mass Effect 3) upon kicking the GPU in to full 3D will cause the system to hard crash-I either get 3 different screens with different colours or one screen with a colour on it. All of those screens either feature vertical lighter lines or horizontal lines.

My system is at stock clocks. I've only seen zaniness like this once before with my Radeon 5750 which on release the drivers didn't work in Windows 7 64-bit. Things were quite a bit more stable in Windows 8 oddly enough, but I wanted to be able to play Battlefield 2 (yes, 2) without Punkbuster kicking me.

Thanks!

[Moose]

You might want to try these drivers: http://www.download3k.com/Install-AMD-Catalyst-Driver-for-AMD-Radeon-HD-7900.html
The 12.x are so far quite buggy with 7970's and x64 W7's

Moose

[overstitch]

Thanks Moose, I'll be giving that a shot before I start disabling more hardware. Did you have GPU Tweak installed while you were testing out your DC2T?

Thanks!

[Moose]

No I didn't, sorry.

[overstitch]

Well, the drivers worked great for 3Dmark11, however running BF3 hard locked the system (testing remotely... So, can't really do much till I'm back in front of the comp). I manually removed any trace of the previous drivers, then installed the new ones (yeah, not ideal, but I'm impatient). Funny enough, those drivers actually let the GPU throttle down to 350 MHz with three monitors active (not eyefinity though). VRAM still ran full speed though. I'm going to try using system restore to restore to before I installed GPU Tweak to see if it put something somewhere that doesn't play nice with the Catalysts. I'll also be disabling some of my onboard features just to see if they are interfering (JMicron JMB362 eSATA controller and the Marvell 9128 SATA 6G controller).

[Moose]

Well, since you've fiddled a lot with it you might want to try and just use a clean install with every piece of hardware connected. Then use the R-drivers I recommended. Fiddling with drivers and such always leaves a trace. I suggest you do it if you have faith it will work.

Moose

[overstitch]

Hi Moose,

I've system restored back to the first driver install on my system to see if I can save time. I've installed necessary drivers without additional hardware (no sound enabled, no additional SATA controllers, no USB3, no Firewire, no Bluetooth). I only have the Intel INF and Intel RAID drivers installed. I'm going to proceed with installing the drivers you linked to, testing Battlefield 3 to see if it is stable then testing from there.

If that doesn't work, I'll do a clean re-install.

I'll post back once I've finished this phase of testing.

Thanks for the help!

UPDATE: System restore was a bust. It left crud kicking around. Re-install it is again...

[overstitch]

Found the issue. Once the Intel Management Interface driver is installed, having any AMD DisplayPort Audio outputs enabled will cause BF3 to crash (confirmed with Catalyst 12.3, no CAP). It also looks like the Intel Rapid Storage drivers don't play nice with BF3 either, when I moved back to my original configuration with a RAID 0 array to have Windows on, it crashes no matter what.

Funny thing is, it worked just fine with my old Radeon 6850, so it is specific to the drivers of the 7970.

[Moose]

Hm, quite odd indeed. Exquisite you found the problem though. What drivers did you use in the end, if I may ask?

Moose