HD3850 crossfire help!!! =(

Enp82003

Hello every one I have a DFI landparty dark mother board with a AMD 790FX chipset. I been wanting to Crossfire my 2 Realtek HD3850 cards for awhile but I can never seem to get it down pat! I was using windows Vista UE edition and the crossfire seemed to work in normal OS operations but once i ran a half life game off of steam the system would either crash for just flake out. I did some research and saw the the newst CAT drivers do not work well with vista and crossfire so i went back to XP pro. now every time I try to enable crossfire in XP pro i get a BSOD with a message "infident driver loop ATi2dvag" right now I am running XP with Crossfire unchecked and it seems to be running fine but i would like to use both my cards... I even tried downgrading the graphic drivers to CAT 7.1 still the same problem. After looking at the manual alittle more there was a DMS-59 cord that didnt come with any of my package is that needed? also I connected the cards using 2 ribbons is the correct? anyway if some one could please help me because i really need it =(

Liqourice

First of all. You should only use 1 Crossfire bridge between the cards. This is probably the reason why it fails.

Second, going back to 7.1 is no good because that driver doesn't have support for the 3xxx-series cards. Don't use any older drivers than 8.3 is my suggestion. Myself I've had problems with 8.8 and 8.7 while 8.6 works great.

Don't forget to completely uninstall the drivers and use Drivercleaner to remove the remnants before installing a new driver.

Enp82003

Ok well I just used the drivers that came with my graphics card. I also I set some weird options in bios which involved the PCIe slots in my board I cant tell you exactly what option it was but I can when i get home (in class right now). What happen was the OS is working fine but when i tried running oblivion it crashed. IDK i hope that having 2 ribbons on the card is the problem what i just don't get though is why on google it shows all the cards installed with 2 bridges 3850 HD crossfire - Google Image Search
.... well anyway Liqourice what ribbon do you suggest i take out the left or right? or does it not matter?.... anyway I'll give you more info on the bio settings i changed when i get home. I left my computer on to see if it would crash while i am gone this is a 3 hour class >.<.

Liqourice

I don't know, maybe it works with both but you only need one.

You can always reset cmos to default and not change anything and see if that helps. Since I only have one card that crossfires internally I don't know what kind of settings that might cause problems.

Are you sure you have the latest drivers for all hardware installed, including chipset?

Enp82003

Yes I got all the latest drivers from the DFI website. I tried using the Driver cleaner program you suggested and going to 8.3 but what happen is when i tired to install 8.3 it wouldnt let me giving me an error with the name notfy but no message i finally broke down and got the omega drivers and they installed fine and the drivers that came with my card i found out came with CAT 7.11 but i got lucky and the omega driver was the same. I reset the BIOs back to optimized deafults and every thing seems to be running fine HL2 ep 2 crashes some times but other then that its ok ( i think it was due to my sound card being to close to the graphics cards fan so I took it out. The real issue I am having now is getting the on board sound to work I am having alot of problems with that but i know you guys are not sound card people

Liqourice

If you mean the built-in sound on the motherboard I suggest you go to Realtek and download the latest drivers from there. I don't know about DFI but generally most motherboard vendors don't have the latest drivers up.

Just make sure it's enabled in BIOS as well.

Zorg

had the same problem - I used driver cleaner to clean up in safe mode..after that 8.8 installed fine for me.