why did my linked GFX adapter in crossfire setup disappear n came back??!

[nix253]

ok so something weird happened today...i started my pc, started deus ex n while it was going thru intro playing i suddenly noticed my crossfire icon was not being displayed, the feature which i have enabled in CCC.

so many times it happens and i don't understand why- CCC itself turns crossfire off n then i've to bring it up again from the tray to re-enable it. n then there i go ...i'm playing.

but today when i noticed the icon wasn't there again n i went back to check it not only it wasn't being displayed in the CCC, even my hardware system info wasn't showing it..... that put me in concern ....

i restarted my pc....it still wasn't showing the second card in the system ....i checked the fan of the card which was running.

so i turned the system off n just tightened the crossfire bridge.... pushed the power cable into the graphics card just to make sure it was properly inserted ...u know the good old troubleshooting of hitting-things-a-bit-to-make-them-work type....... n when i stared it again, everything was back to normal with the second card being displayed as the linked adapter with all it's info..... just had to re-enable the crossfire from CCC.

i mean all in all should i be getting worried about something?

 

[nix253]

guys it's saying my gfx has disappeared again

 

[nix253]

did i just get ignored 51th time?:'mad:

 

[zebrax2]

Remove the card that is working fine then check if the other card is faulty

 

[lsv]

I had something similar when using SLI on my old Voodoo 2's back in the day. It turned out that one card was faulty and required an RMA. Zebra makes the best point to check both cards independently.

 

[nix253]

actually i did a lot of trouble shooting tomorrow..... so i tried this too .... i also inter-changed the the power cables that were powering the cards to see if it could be related to power supply ....i just noticed the following that i'm gonna try to explain:

items in account here are the 2 pci-e cables p4 and p5 and the 2 cards that have the nos. 12 & 13 in the end of their respective serials.

now when i was checking 13 card only i saw that when it was powered with p4 it was giving nice framerates in crysis 2 with dx11 on at extreme and res of 1440 x 900 but with p5 there was drop in framerates.

when i checked 12 card only i saw that with p5 (repeat p5) it was giving great fps but when powered with p4 there was drop in the fps on the same crysis 2 settings which were in previous test.

also i flashed my bios with a new version but not the latest. after which i also encountered the memory problem where the RAM was being displayed- "4 GB installed (2 GB usable)" but i solved it by putting one stick at a time.

BUT...BUT- when i was checking the 12 card, it happened once only that the pc failed to boot n the mo-bo's led showed me that the trouble was with the VGA... so i switched it off n started again ....this time it showed the trouble was with RAM which put me in confusion because i had already solved it. ....so i just restarted again n this time the pc booted but there was no display on the screen which was connected to the 12 card by hdmi. .......i didn't know what to do .....so i took a break ....after sometime i came back n restarted the pc just find that easily booted n entered the pc... after which i did the test above mentioned.

so i'm having a feeling could it be a problem with video bios or something.... because when i bought my cards the crossfire wasn't working properly . i was getting micro stuttering thing.... there was an issue with 6850's at that time with their video bios so i downloaded the video bios from asus and tried to flash it to which as far as i could remember it said that bios couldn't be flashed due to some reason....but all in all no video bios was flashed and nothing was corrupted due to bad flash. i can say this because everything was working fine all the time before this problem of random 2nd card disappearance started.

 

[nix253]

please....don't ignore me

 

[zebrax2]

See if you could try the cards with another computer. If only one card fails/causes a problem you know which one is faulty. If both cards work fine maybe the motherboard is faulty...