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6990M crossfire overheating


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Hello, looking for an opinion on how to fix the overheating issue on my 6990M crossfire. The primary card gets quite hot, the secondary one doesn't. Idle temps are approximately 50C, but I reach 90C in games and occasionally get what I'm guessing is a thermal shutdown. This is the shader temp, as reported by HWiNFO64. Other temps on the card are slightly lower than the shader but track the shader temp.

One of my cards has an out of spec core voltage regulator, I can't remember if I put it in the primary or secondary. I hacked the power good signal so that it would post and run since the voltage is only slightly off, I checked it with a meter. It's something like 0.1V high when unloaded, and comes into spec when loaded.

So my question is should I undervolt just the primary card or reduce core clocks, or both. If I reduce core clocks do I need to match the two card frequencies? How much should I underclock? Thanks.

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An undervolt and some thermal mods got me down to 83C, which seems safe enough. However, I figured out something else that is bothering me.

My secondary card drops out after playing a game for a few minutes. I'm currently playing Deus Ex. If I start the game and just leave it alone, crossfire is fine, both cards get hot and stay hot for as long as I leave it. If I start playing the game, after a few minutes the secondary will go to idle and the primary takes roughly 100% load.

Is this because my secondary is a 6970m flashed to 6990m and the secondary card crashes when the primary tries to access a shader that isn't there? It's the only thing I can think of since it appears that GPU memory usage is dynamically allocated and so I assume the shaders must be too. Shaders appear to be the only differences between the 6970 and 6990.

Any thoughts? I might try swapping the cards so that the card with fewer shaders is the primary, see if that fixes it. Thanks.

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Do you noticed a flicker at any point in the game? What I noticed was that sometimes the game lost focus and since crossfire only works when fullscreen is active the second card goes into idle mode. What I normally do is Alt-Enter to go into window mode and the Alt-Enter again to restore proper fullscreen mode which activates crossfire again.

What version of drivers/caps are you on at the moment?

Your shader theory could be right but I would assume you would get BSOD/Lockup instead of the card switching into idle mode quietly.

Is the game patched to the latest version available? If not, try that as well. I think this may be more of a software related issue.

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Do you noticed a flicker at any point in the game? What I noticed was that sometimes the game lost focus and since crossfire only works when fullscreen is active the second card goes into idle mode. What I normally do is Alt-Enter to go into window mode and the Alt-Enter again to restore proper fullscreen mode which activates crossfire again.

Hey, thanks @Nospheratu. Since you mention that there usually is a flash of the desktop a few minutes into the game, I think it's the OSD telling me about CAPS on/off. The first one breaks into the game but not after that. I will try your advice.

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Yeah that's definitely it then, its a bit annoying actually. Especially in the middle of an intense fight scene and you hit the caps lock by mistake and that ugly beige rectangle pops up "CAPS LOCK ON" and kills crossfire. Recently experienced that with Bioshock as well.

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