Thanks for the quick answer, zerokwel!
Best thing to do is go step by step.
does it do it when you mine on the 5970 or the 5850. or does it do it on both
Have you tried unplugging one of the cards does it still crash
tried just the other card does it still crash
Ok, I did some of those before, but this time I followed your advice and tried all combinations. The 5850 by itself works fine. Even the 5970 works if I only use one of its GPUs. The moment I start the second one it crashes. Sometimes I still get crashes even with the first GPU.
booting on only 1 stick of ram one stick might be bad and causing the crashes ?. try booting on one then the other.
Just something to get you started.
there are quite a few things that it could be. so its best to check for hardware issues first.
also the memory is installed in the red slots?
Yes, the memory were in the red slots and as you suggested, I tried using either stick, but no difference.
I also changed the software: I downgraded to SDK 2.1 and updated pyopencl and phoenix, etc. Using SDK 2.1 seemed to improve the stability, but I still cannot completely prevent the crashes.
Next, I will try replacing the 5970 with another 5850. And try a different PSU.
I forgot to mention one thing about the motherboard: I got it as an "open box" item from newegg. They still have
a few more of those, so it's not one person returning them I guess. That may be the main reason for my problems
There are two issues that I still couldn't resolve from the
Biostar website:
1) The bios is not the most up-to-date one, but the update instructions in the manual doesn't seem to work for this mobo: pressing F12 during POST messages doesn't do anything.
2) The mobo has a 10-phase power display, and one of the leds is off. I have no clue what this means. It's not explained anywhere. It's some crazy overclocking debug signal provided by Biostar.
I contacted the manufacturer about these, but didn't get any response yet.