Basically this was my problem : When I have crossfire installed, physically having 2 cards is enough, sometimes I get black screen,

no signal and a very annoying buzzing sound loop, forcing me to hard reset my rig. Had this problem since I got this rig, driving

me crazy.

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Asrock Z75 motherboard

i5 - 3570

Thermaltake Berlin 630W PSU

(45a on single 12V rail)

500 + 640 + 1000GB HD's

Sapphire 2GB HD7850 (brand new) Although it was delivered to me in an already opened plain brown box, clearly not the original box.

XFX 2GB HD7850 (had it for months in a single GPu setup, not a single problem)

1080 screen connected to the top card, the sapphire, on PCIE-1.

--------------

I does not happen in benchmarking, only when running 3D applications for my job and when I'm gaming, and I can trigger it to happen faster

when alt-tabbing to windows. This happens with every game, I tried about 20 of them.

Things I have tried :

1 - latest 1.8 bios on my motherboard

2 - every catalyst driver from 12.3 to 13.2 Beta 5

3 - disable ULPS completely in the registry

4 - asus gpu tweak to disable 2D mode

5 - asus gpu tweak to put change 2d clocks so they match 3d clocks

6 - every combination of D, E -& F

7 - reïnstalled windows three times

8 - tried both GPU's on PCIE-1 seperately & gave no problems

9 - switch positions of the GPU's (i prefer the Sapphire on top)

10 - It's not a heat issue, the hottest card never gets above 65°c

11 - read every google hit I could find about it, that's why I have so many ideas for a fix

12 - tried a different crossfire connector cable

13 - tried slightly underclocking both cards with Asus GPU Tweak

14 - Disabled AMD Audio completely

15 - Used HDMI and VGA connector instead of DVI connector.

16 - Use newest Asrock Realtek 6559 audio drivers, it didn't work and I noticed that the sound was way too quiet.

17 - In CCC unchecked "surface format optimizations" en "optimized tesselation" and check "application controlled"

18 - Disabled onboard (Realtek) audio in the Bios => someone on the other forum used this to solve problem, problem occured less often but it

still occured when alt-tabbing a game, at least one fan in my rig spinned faster while alt-tabbed and after aprox. 1 minute = BSOD, signal lost,

sound loop.

19 - Plugged both my screens back in, reinstall original audio drivers -& catalyst 12.3 - someone on the other forum I mentionned above had the

problem solved by doing this, I just got a ton of free extra problems. So I put 13.2 Beta 5 back!

20 - tested disabling the onboard audio through Bios some more. Games still crash, especially when they are alt-tabbed, while alt-tabbed

there's also a fan that's spinning a bit faster than before, right up to the moment when everything crashes. Once again, I tried shutting

off 2D profiles cuz that makes sense, I tried cranking up 2D profile speeds to 3D profile speeds with GPU Tweak, no deal.

21 - Found this thread online (basically it says this is a known Sapphire 78XX hardware malfuntion (bad transistors, whatever transistors are)

from a bad supplier, says Sapphire knows about the issue and has been replacing these cards.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1310654/amd-hd-78xx-problems-all-users-with-problems-please-post-here-we-want-amd-support-on-this-asap/410

---

Finally, after reading this entire thread, 42 pages, I did something normal people would probably have done in the first place :

XFX in PCIE-II = No crash, even when I try

XFX in PCIE-I = No crash, even when I try

Sapphire in PCIE-II = Crash

Sapphire in PCIE-I = Crash

So, like most people here realised by now, it's a hardware issue, don't bother troubleshooting, spent aprox. 50 hours on trying to fix this but it

was pointless.

 

---> I don't blame AMD since apparantly it's Sapphire's fault for putting bad transistors on the card (or Sapphire's supplier for making bad transistors, whatever) My XFX 7850 works like a charm.

So, staying an AMD fanboy, but avoiding Sapphire in the future.

Edited: 02/13/2013 at 08:13 PM by chikatilo

I cleaned up your post to get rid of the stuff and the end that was essentially trolling and against the forum's ToC.

;Marc

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Sorry, I was also editing my post to make it easier to read. I probably screwed up what you just edited by doing so.

You're probably talking about the urinating joke, i'll remove it myself. Other than that, pretty sure this is a good post?

Sorry for the trouble Marc,