BSOD issues with 5770 Crossfire setup

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I've been experiencing some odd BSOD issues in Assassin's Creed (just version 1, AC2 works fine) with my Crossfire setup, and some very sporadic crashes in Batman Arkham Asylum (hasn't happened in a while). Temperatures when playing are very civilised, between 60 and 70 for the cards.

Minidump says it's atikmpag, a TDR fault.

I've tried updating Catalyst, formatting and reinstalling Windows, updating the MB BIOS, returning to stock speeds (for the CPU, the graphics card is never overclocked)...

It has other weird behaviours in addition to the games above:

- OCCT will sometimes BSOD, and it 'sounds' weird (it's temperature related in those cases, but it's something like the graphics card fan doesn't speed up as smoothly as it should). I can run Prime95 and Furmark for 24 hours with no issue whatsoever, even simultaneously, so I'm not sure what to make of that. It's intermittent, as I've run OCCT for 24 hours at a time with no issue as well. Memtest86 runs for 24 hours with no errors.

- a couple of times driver installation hangs in the middle of it, don't know why (hasn't happened since the reformat)

- today I updated to Catalyst 10.5 (using driver sweeper and everything) and when it rebooted it said there was no ATI device present. I went to the Device Manager and both cards were disabled for whatever bizarre reason. I've enabled them and are now working

- it hasn't locked today yet, but this happens way more often in cold boots than in other situations

- Blu-Ray playback is not working in Powerdvd 9, I have to use AnyDVD HD for it to work (but this may be completely unrelated)

I'm thinking that there is something amiss hardware-wise, but it's hard to pinpoint what.

Any ideas what I should be looking at? This has been going on since I bought the system (a couple of months ago) and I don't know what to do.

My setup is:

- OCuK bundle i7 920 @4.0GHz with Noctua HSF
- Gigabyte EX58-UD5
- 3x2GB Corsair 1600 DDR3
- 2xSaphire 5770 1GB
- 2xWD Caviar Black 500GB (not RAID)
- OCuK value BD drive
- Cooler Master Silent Pro 700W
- Antec Sonata Elite case

Thanks!
 
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Just got another BSOD in Assassin's Creed. As usual, during those "white world" screens (when synchronising/de-synchronising). This cannot be good.

It was somewhat of a cold boot, as the system had been off for two hours or so, but this happened after about 40 minutes of play.

Exsurgo, I'll try that, but what could the audio drivers be causing?

Thanks.
 
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Interesting thing now: I decided to run memtest in the boot after the BSOD. FOr the first time ever, it gave me an error (as I said before, it has run for 24 hours before with no issues).

What should I think of this?
 
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I would say that in setting up your PC to run crossfire you have corrupted the programming of the RAM. (it's very rare but does happen). Run each stick indervidually and see if you can isolate the error to a single stick.
 
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Higadeb, care to elaborate? I'm not sure I follow what that means (corrupting the programming of the RAM). I also don't remember doing anything unusual, and I've setup Crossfire systems before.

Thanks.

P.S.: I cannot even get the error to repeat with 3 sticks. This was the first and only time that Memtest gave that, and it actually locked up a couple second after I posted with other errors. It's running now and hasn't done anything weird yet.
 
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Alright, it happened again with three sticks. I'll experiment further.

Should I lower the speed? These are 1600MHz sticks. If I have to run them lower than that for it to clear memtest, what would that mean?

Thanks.
 
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What I meant was that some triple channel RAM has XMP profiles in it, these can get corrupted. Also, some of the sectors in the chips in the RAM (sorry, my wording is awful!) can become corrupted everytime you make changes in the BIOS etc. It's a rare occurence but does happen.
To check the RAM properly, manually set the timings and voltage, to those given in the RAM specs, in the BIOS. If the memory produces and error in memtest at the spec. speeds + voltage then is it faulty.
If you do get an error it is then a good idea to run each stick through RAM test indervidually and in the same DIMM. If you get the same errors from each stick then it is probably a faulty motherboard connection.
If you only get errors in one stick, try running the PC in dual channel mode (with the two working sticks) and see if you still get a BSOD.
Note: it is a good idea to run multiple passes for each memtest as memtest produces strings and tests fairly randomly. When I tested my tripple channel kit, it took 6 passes before an error was found. Just run them for as long as feasibly possible
 
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Sorry for the flood: I just got the error with the memory running @1200 with very conservative timings (9-9-9-28).

I'll try each module next.

I don't think I ever enabled the XMP profile in the BIOS. Would that matter?

Thanks!
 
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I don't think I ever enabled the XMP profile in the BIOS. Would that matter?

No, that wouldn't matter at all. The main use of XMP profiles is to get the max performance out of the RAM without having to overclock any of the other components. Given you have OC'd your i7 to 4.0GHz there is no need to ever touch the XMP settings
 
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