Bitcoin Forum

I have had this 5970 for about 1.5 months.
Ive been mining w/ it at 805/175 no voltage changes, stock bios. Both cores working great, putting out same mhash.
I tried gaming on it when I first got the card and it was awesome, gamed for less than a week then let it do 24/7 mining.
I just tried gaming on it again and there is massive screen distortion / texture corruption / polygon tearing when running full screen games. When running windowed(xfire disabled) its fine. So, I am pretty sure the memory has gone to shit on the 2nd GPU.

Im wonderin if mining would have been related to killing the mem .. perhaps to low of a clk speed on RAM or something. Has anyone else experienced this behavior?

I surely hope I can RMA it. Its a shame for such a nice card to get bad RAM all the sudden =(
If I cant RMA, will try n just disable 2nd GPU in device manager for when I want to game.

Works great for mining though.
This just really sucks.

Low ram clocks cant damage it. I mine with my 5770 around same period, but its still working great. I hope you running games on it with default clocks?

Yeahp, I double checked clocks against GPU-z. It even fails the "test custom clocks" in CCC .. when set to default clocks. I tried lowering RAM to like 500mhz and it still fails that test. This plain sucks.

I wonder if there is a way to disable crossfire but not disable 2nd GPU in control panel. That way I can mine on 2nd GPU and game on the 1st one at the same time.

Can't really tell you much about the memory issues but from what I've read it doesn't seem like you can tell it to render games on GPU1 while mining on GPU2.

Would be really nice if that were possible though.  I mean, you can tell GPU2 to disable in CGMiner but I don't know of a way to tell games to rely only on GPU1.

Disabling crossfire will force games onto GPU1...just need to find an easy way to do that =P
Anywho, looks like Im screwed as far as a warranty too so will have to figure this out, the way it is.

Just enable your gpu, on which you want to run games, as your main desktop.

I got that part, but I need to disable crossfire as well =)

No other way.

Well, disabling the appropriate GPU in device manager .. obviously.
Also using a registry hack to disable catalyst AI supposedly disables crossfire
And in the new drivers there is the disable option in the crossfireX application settings - but that one confuses, dont know if it only applies to profiles or across the board when set to disable.
Im sure another program like ATT could do it too but tryin to stay away from running so many damn tray programs lol

I thought that with dual-GPU video cards, even though it's crossfired it's not really the crossfired in the same sense as having 2 separate cards with a bridge.

And from what little searching I've done it doesn't seem that you can un-crossfire a dual-GPU card.

I'll do a little more searching and get back if I find anything.

Its crossfired in the same sense really. Its just that there is a PCIe bridge on the board itself that links the 2 GPU's.
Crossfire is not enabled inherently in 2D mode or windowed 3D. Its only fullscreen 3D it kicks in...which in turn means its still a software thing. Which means it should somehow be able to be disabled =)
The methods I outlined above are some ways to do it.

Would disabling it in device manager still allow CGMiner to access that GPU for use in mining though?

I wouldnt think so - which is why Im not a fan of this option if I wish to continue mining on 2nd gpu =(

Think I found a way to do it, first off I applied the disable ULPS patch to the registry and right above that setting was one for enableautocrossfirelink which was default to 1. I set all entries of that to 0 and now gpu-z shows crossfire status disabled.

Now, hope it works properly. Will test out gaming on one gpu and mining on the other when I get home.

Nice, can't wait to hear the results.

Hope it works.

still upset my card is broke though =*( meh, hope it lasts a while like this at least.
Will post results in about 2 hrs.

That makes two of us.

Lost out on mining with a 5970 for about 3-4 weeks cause dude sold me a bunk one.

Price wasn't too shabby though so even after factoring in RMA fees and shipping cost I still got a good deal on it.  Think it would've arrived today or tomorrow but I put wrong zip code on it so FedEx sent it back to the Althon Micro.

So hopefully I get it by Thursday and your solution works so I can mine on 5 GPUs and game on the 6th (3x 5970s).

You already tried what I proposed? It worked?!

Nope, was waiting on you lol.

I tried it, confirmed 2nd gpu disabled in programs / benchmarks. Also have the xfire status band enabled to show gpu activity. Sad thing is I still get massive distortion so... perhaps its the primary GPU after all. Maybe windowed games use 2nd GPU instead of primary, perhaps thats why they worked w/ no distortion. Either way this madly sucks now.
Ugh....
Good thing I never sold that 6950, maybe Ill throw it back into here for gaming and make a rig for the 5970 to mine on.