Crossfire.. The issues are stong with this one.

So a week ago I got another new 7870, to crossfire with my half year old Sapphire 7870.. All awesome right? I sure thought so at first, with a little over doubling the FPS! This soon proved to be the only good thing that came out of this card. I soon noticed a VERY annoying lag, in video games, every so often.. I have tried matching their clock speed at 1050MHz. The sapphire is stock clock at 1050MHz and the new Ghost is stock at 1000MHz. This did not seem to help at all and only resulted in BSOD's every so often.. After removing afterburner all seems well again except that lag.. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers, which resulted in no effect. They are running the latest released driver. DO NOTE- This does not happen when I run only one of the cards. I have noticed this in most games, except games that are not too heavy on the graphics such as GMOD, but if I play Watch Dogs or Dishonored... Oh boy..

I would like to fix this and not find out I have just wasted $200 on a second card, only for it to make things worse..


All advise is appreciated!

Master Card: Sapphire 100354OC-2L 7870
One being crossfired with: XFX Double D FX-787A-CDFC 7870

Underclocking the Sapphire to the same clock as the XFX Ghost proved nearly fruitless, with only slightly increasing the amount of time between each time it lags.

logicearth said:

Well....you just stumped upon the problem with SLI or Crossfire. If the game is not optimized for it, it is a horrible experience. As it is, Watch Dogs is not optimized for Crossfire at all. You are better playing with a single AMD Card for that game at this time. Until AMD released new drivers and Ubisoft to fix Watch Dogs.

+10

Probably less than half the newer games run on Crossfire or SLI.

Using 2 different cards in Xfire can be a real pita. Try swapping cards around and find what card runs best as the primary card. Did you do a clean install of the latest gpu drivers after installing the Xfire?

I was able to remove most of the lag by switching the Ghost to master card via resetting my bios, removing the idle in OverDrive, and then disabling ULPs.. Now I have this lovely microstutter! Using the beta driver and RadeonPro has seemed to nearly fixed the microstutter.. Except in Watch Dogs, like logicearth said.

Now, just waiting for that driver..