Fault testing a GPU - Crossfire XFX HD6870

pcktwtch

Member
Hi, I bought these cards about a year ago; one 1GB XFX HD 6870 and a 2GB XFX HD 6870. Ever since i've been running them in crossfire i've been having a problem with display driver crashes which happen on startup (sometimes BSOD caused by atikmpag.sys). This does not happen when gaming only upon startup. I've tried everything to fix it; new and old drivers, wiping the drivers in safe mode and reinstalling them, reinstalling windows fresh, installing windows 8 64bit instead of windows 7 64bit, applying the microsoft fix it (TdrDelay fix) and also re-extracting the atikmpag.sy_ files manually and replacing but nothing has worked. These crashes are nothing more than a temporary nuisance and they only happen upon startup after the system has been powered off say overnight. I got over this problem but now I want to sell the cards and need to know if I can sell them as working and know that they wont be returned to me by an angry customer so I come to you guys in search of ways to foolproof fault test them to prove that the problem is not that GPU and so I can sell both cards as working in order to upgrade to something better. I've already ran furmark stability tests and they run without a hitch with a min FPS of 140, allbeit a little hot.

Any help is greatly appreciated, Thank you!
 
Should be more than enough power for both cards. But it still could be the power supply.
 
Weird as it may sound, have you tried swapping the cards around. Swap them and see if the boot problem goes away.
 
I think I have tried that before and the problem persisted. I'll try it again just to be sure but it is hard to tell if a solution has worked or not because, as I say, the crashing doesnt happen very often.
 
Weird as it may sound, have you tried swapping the cards around. Swap them and see if the boot problem goes away.

The problem didn't occur on boot with the cards unchanged so even after changing the cards around I would probably not be able to tell. This is just how infrequent this problem is most of the time :(
 
It could be that one of the cards is going bad. Try using the cards one at a time to see if still happens.
 
I will try that and post results. Another thought, could this be caused by running a non 64bit version of chrome? As soon as I do a fresh install of windows chrome is the first thing i install and i noticed it runs on startup. I've reinstalled chrome in 64bit form and have had no crashes yet (but of course it's a bit early to tell)
 
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