Widescreen Gaming Forum

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

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Music is my life. You are my music.

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!

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Proteus:

Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 | Catalyst 12.3 w/o CAP | ASUS P8Z68-V Pro/GEN3 | Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.4 GHz | 16GB PC3 12800 Corsair Vengeance LP | ASUS DirectCU II 7970 TOP | Creative X-Fi Titanium PCIe (PAX 1.40) | Intel 520 120GB (Intel Smart Response) | 2x WD Black 500GB RAID 0 (Intel Rapid Storage 10.​8.​0.​1003) | 2x WD Black 640GB | Corsair AX850 850W PSU | 2x Dell 2007WFP 20" @ 1680x1050 (via HIS DisplayPort Active SL Adapter) | Samsung SyncMaster F2380 23" @ 1920x1080 (via HIS DisplayPort Active SL Adapter) -- Storage: NexStar NST-400MX-SR w/ 2x WD Black 2TB (via eSATA)

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

_________________
Music is my life. You are my music.

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!

_________________
Proteus:

Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 | Catalyst 12.3 w/o CAP | ASUS P8Z68-V Pro/GEN3 | Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.4 GHz | 16GB PC3 12800 Corsair Vengeance LP | ASUS DirectCU II 7970 TOP | Creative X-Fi Titanium PCIe (PAX 1.40) | Intel 520 120GB (Intel Smart Response) | 2x WD Black 500GB RAID 0 (Intel Rapid Storage 10.​8.​0.​1003) | 2x WD Black 640GB | Corsair AX850 850W PSU | 2x Dell 2007WFP 20" @ 1680x1050 (via HIS DisplayPort Active SL Adapter) | Samsung SyncMaster F2380 23" @ 1920x1080 (via HIS DisplayPort Active SL Adapter) -- Storage: NexStar NST-400MX-SR w/ 2x WD Black 2TB (via eSATA)

No I didn't, sorry.

_________________
Music is my life. You are my music.

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).

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Proteus:

Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 | Catalyst 12.3 w/o CAP | ASUS P8Z68-V Pro/GEN3 | Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.4 GHz | 16GB PC3 12800 Corsair Vengeance LP | ASUS DirectCU II 7970 TOP | Creative X-Fi Titanium PCIe (PAX 1.40) | Intel 520 120GB (Intel Smart Response) | 2x WD Black 500GB RAID 0 (Intel Rapid Storage 10.​8.​0.​1003) | 2x WD Black 640GB | Corsair AX850 850W PSU | 2x Dell 2007WFP 20" @ 1680x1050 (via HIS DisplayPort Active SL Adapter) | Samsung SyncMaster F2380 23" @ 1920x1080 (via HIS DisplayPort Active SL Adapter) -- Storage: NexStar NST-400MX-SR w/ 2x WD Black 2TB (via eSATA)

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

_________________
Music is my life. You are my music.

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...

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Proteus:

Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 | Catalyst 12.3 w/o CAP | ASUS P8Z68-V Pro/GEN3 | Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.4 GHz | 16GB PC3 12800 Corsair Vengeance LP | ASUS DirectCU II 7970 TOP | Creative X-Fi Titanium PCIe (PAX 1.40) | Intel 520 120GB (Intel Smart Response) | 2x WD Black 500GB RAID 0 (Intel Rapid Storage 10.​8.​0.​1003) | 2x WD Black 640GB | Corsair AX850 850W PSU | 2x Dell 2007WFP 20" @ 1680x1050 (via HIS DisplayPort Active SL Adapter) | Samsung SyncMaster F2380 23" @ 1920x1080 (via HIS DisplayPort Active SL Adapter) -- Storage: NexStar NST-400MX-SR w/ 2x WD Black 2TB (via eSATA)

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.

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Proteus:

Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 | Catalyst 12.3 w/o CAP | ASUS P8Z68-V Pro/GEN3 | Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.4 GHz | 16GB PC3 12800 Corsair Vengeance LP | ASUS DirectCU II 7970 TOP | Creative X-Fi Titanium PCIe (PAX 1.40) | Intel 520 120GB (Intel Smart Response) | 2x WD Black 500GB RAID 0 (Intel Rapid Storage 10.​8.​0.​1003) | 2x WD Black 640GB | Corsair AX850 850W PSU | 2x Dell 2007WFP 20" @ 1680x1050 (via HIS DisplayPort Active SL Adapter) | Samsung SyncMaster F2380 23" @ 1920x1080 (via HIS DisplayPort Active SL Adapter) -- Storage: NexStar NST-400MX-SR w/ 2x WD Black 2TB (via eSATA)

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

Moose

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Music is my life. You are my music.