…or when a 7970 Radeon HD burns up for unknown reason! Today I got
my second 7970 back from warranty repair. With Crossfire in mind, I
returned home to put in the puppy into my rig. Ran some benchmarks
here and some quick SimCity gaming there when it suddenly happened…

Black screen. The Computer runs, but no signal anymore from the graphics card. Still wondering what might have happened, I rebooted my rig. Then went back into SimCity gaming as I thought that the back screen might have occured due to the fresh Crossfire installation. When firing up SimCity, all went good again but after another 5 minutes of gaming, the screen again went black. But now without return. The reboot brought nothing, Even the BIOS’ POST process hung.

So I thought, that it could be a thermal problem although the case is well-vented and allows proper operation of a SLI/Crossfire configuration without problems (as I had 2 6970 running before without any problems.

Having the PC off for some time and then switching it back on, the POST process went OK but when staring at the screen, it was no longer black but bright green. Ironically it’s the card that previously ran fine in my system until I popped in the second card… fate or coincidence?

Final conclusion: Although the cooling solution of manufacturers seem fine (especially when running single-card-config), they seem to lack potential when it comes to Crossfire&Co.

For me it now means, opening up another RMA, waiting another darn 8 weeks to get a (hopefully working 7970 card back that maybe would also work in CF mode.

*sigh*

It’s exactly such thing I hate about PCs: When something is f***ed up, then you’ll have to come up with LOTS of patience. And speaking of that: My debugging went from 12am till 3am in the morning today, so that’s why I haven’t had the time to publish my article earlier as I wanted to do some benchmarking and write about the experience of two hellish beasts of graphics cards spanking the pixels thru the monitor cable with blazing-fast speeds…

Maybe it’s time to go back to NVidia and their TITAN GPU as their drivers are easily updateable (AMD still offers an update option from within their CCC but then it messes up EVERYTHING and you’ll be faced with a complete uninstall and registry cleanup until the new CCC will work properly again). Although the GTX6xx series lacks speed in contrary to the Radeon HD 79xx series of AMD, they still look more stable and reliable to me… but at an outrageous price, that is…