7970 crossfire system freezes

[belgur]

Good day,

I have finished building up my new rig and have ran into a problem with what appears to be my graphics cards.

I have an i7 3930k on a Gigabyte X79-UD3 with two Radeon 7970s in crossfire powered by a Silverstone Strider ST1200 in a Cosmos 2 case.

When running 3D Mark Vantage, 3D Mark 11, Unigine, or attempting to play videogames the system hangs hard or will reboot with an Event 41 Kernel-Power in the event viewer.

So far to troubleshoot I've pulled my powersupply and ensured that I had my cards on rails with enough wattage.

I'm going to try to pull a card and run some benches tonight to check both cards individually and will hit Prime95 for the processor today while I'm at work.

I'll put the event data from the bug below, I'm just at a loss if this is a driver issue or power.

I appreciate any help you guys can give on this, hate being stumped. Thanks again. Don

- EventData

BugcheckCode 0

BugcheckParameter1 0x0

BugcheckParameter2 0x0

BugcheckParameter3 0x0

BugcheckParameter4 0x0

SleepInProgress false

PowerButtonTimestamp 0

 

[Rastalovich]

In general terms, this points to the system abruptly losing power. The reasoning behind all parameters showing zero is the power was completely taken away before the report could be made in full.

Now this doesn't mean the psu has a fault, necessarily, it can often mean something like the cpu/memory/a component lost power and then the system lost power.

I'd get into the bios, set it to it's defaults, run everything on automagic and see if the system becomes stable(r).

From that, check the memory - with 8 or 4 sticks in the x79 this can be a pita, especially when modules work well on their own, but not together. But the test should be eliminated cos memory faults can make anything in the system, including a dvd rom, report to the OS that it's faulty incorrectly.

Once the memory is 100% tested fine, test the cpu with it, then try 1 gfxcard, then swap it for the other, then test both together.

It's too easy to say drivers and re-install at this stage without testing the above.

A faulty psu isn't out of the question.

 

[belgur]

I have an update. After extensive work I think I'm getting close to a stableish system at stock speeds.

Now for the laundry list of faults that was helping to cause the lockups.

* Motherboard drivers - I thought I had all the latest and greatest and in frustration I downloaded and reinstalled everything including flashing the bios. This was probably the root cause.

* I had a 1375W surge protector on the system, bought a 1875W protector.

* I used an old operational 1000W power supply to test the system which is how I got down to the motherboard. Tested various combinations of card configurations which all crashed.

* Opened the case sides up to help add additional cooling in case of thermal problems.

I'm going to proceed to test my RAM, CPU and GPUs more extensively to make sure I'm stable. Then I'll overclock some.

Thanks for the help.