HD 6950 Crossfire Issue Help!

[rotw121]

Hello AnandTech I own an HIS HD 6950 2gb turboq icex graphics card runs at 840Mhz and recently purchased a Sapphire HD 6950 2gb Dirt 3 Edition card off ebay. I decided to crossfire them but as soon as I put in the Sapphire card and booted up, as soon as the windows logo screen finished loading it crashed with blue screen saying system service exception with file name atikmdag.sys. Any ideas as to why this happened? Also I tried taking out the sapphire card and everything booted fine, then I tried taking out the HIS card and just left the sapphire card and was able to login but said AMD catalyst is not functioning properly due to the proper drivers not installed and windows said restart for changes to take effect so i did and crashed same place after restart . Lastly I did safe mode boot and device manage uninstalled the video card and rebooted. The sapphire card booted just fine with no crash, not until windows installs the drive and i click restart that the problem happens. Any ideas or advice?

Thank you,
AnandTech

 

[daveybrat]

So it works just fine with your card and same drivers, but not the one you purchased on Ebay.

Sounds like the Sapphire card is bad. Yes it may work when you first boot up and then it asks you to reboot to complete the driver installation, but that is because it's not really using the video card yet.

I'd send it back.

 

[rotw121]

Yes with the same drivers my HIS card works perfectly fine. I know the guy on ebay swears by this card saying everything worked for him and that it is just a driver issue.

I am going to try to get a refund.

 

[renz20003]

I have the HIS iceq card and a reference 6950, I couldn't get my setup working without a clean load of windows and lowering the clocks of the ice q to the stock 6950.

Booting with the sapphire in place was possibly running it with an OC and causing it to crash

 

[3DVagabond]

Did you uninstall drivers before installing the new card? If not, you should try to uninstall drivers, turn off PC, install 2nd card and crossfire bridge, reboot, and reinstall drivers.

 

[SolMiester]

Why would functioning drivers not work with the second card?....sounds faulty to me....

 

[3DVagabond]

I don't know why. Might have something to do with what's already been written to the registry with the prior setup. I've seen other threads though where people have changed cards from the same company (5870 to 7970, for example) and it was required to reinstall the drivers for them to operate properly with the new card.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

CF has very very bad drivers. IMO 95% chance this is a driver issue and not a hardware fault. You will need to do a clean format etc to be sure.

 

[SolMiester]

LOL....

 

[Shmee]

try the 2nd card by itself to see if it is faulty.

 

[rotw121]

I fixed it everyone. Thank you! Ended up finding out my sapphire 6950 dirt 3 edition had a bios switch so and the bios was corrupt on it so I just reflashed it with the original bios and it works. I am running crossfire as we speak finally. I do notice though the sapphire hd 6950 dirt 3 edition says its the OC edition so I am assuming it runs at 840mhz because when I am gaming both cards are running at 840mhz together it shows.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

Good luck mate. Told ya, hardware issue seemed unlikely.

 

[UNhooked]

ahh was just going to ask you to re-flash the bios on that card. Had this happen often to my 4870 X2.

Glad it worked out.