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Loading ...ATI drivers require plumbing modification?
combatus
My foray into dual GPU gaming has been relatively smooth. At least until the new ATI hotfix based on the CCC 8.4 driver turned up. Convinced that I was suffering from stuttering in numerous games, I ran the hotfix only to find it was an entire driver version. As it’s recommended to remove the old driver before installing a new one I thought cheers ATI, this better not screw things up! Things went well, mainly because I didn’t have time to run any games for a day or two, but when I did, ooooohhh dear oh dear.
UT3 is virtually unplayable and if the game didn’t crash it stuttered like absolute sod and made playing with bots impossible, never mind online opponents. Ok I thought, seeing as 8.3 ruins framerates for XP users I’ll go back to 8.2. Hmmm what’s this funny error saying CCC is screwed up? Reboot, hmmm error is still there! Run driver cleaner. Nope still no joy. Install CCC 8.2. Nope now things are even worse - the error keeps popping up every few seconds!
I look on the AMD ATI forums showed I was not alone and while the hotfix worked fine for some users, others had terrible trouble and just like me, uninstalling it proved quite difficult!
A Windows reinstallation later (not happy) and everything is fine. In short the hotfix is a complete mess and while it may fix “stuttering in certain 3D applications” It renders other systems totally effing useless!!! However I did findout that a surefire way of avoiding many problems when installing drivers with two cards installed with Crossfire, is to remove one card, install the driver then install the second card. Sure thing, except if you have the two cards linked in a watercooling system, this is a complete pain in the rectum.
The two cards are held together with Crossfire connectors, barbs and tubing that it’s impossible to remove one card without a lot of bending and flexing. If I’m going to have to do this for every new driver release I’m going to have work something else out.
With the reader’s night COD4 session fast approaching and the big Coolermaster Stacker sitting on my desk where I can get at things without receiving neck ache, the race was onto come up with a config that would allow me to remove either card - in short not have them connected via a barb. Not as easy as you might think unfortunately as this means the barbs from the bottom GPU will be pointing downwards. Not being a fan of 90 degree barbs this would mean working out a way of plumbing everything in using tight bends in the tubing. A few feet of practically un-kinkable Tygon R-3603 tubing later and the bending was now a possibility.
Rather than have miles of tubing criss-crossing the case, I decided to spend some time and come up with more efficient routing. With the pump staying in the base, the only way to avoid unsightlyness was to use the bottom GPU block as the first block then dive down to the bottom rad and then up. Next the coolant visits the chipset and RAM and after passing through the final rad it serves the CPU and top GPU and then ends up in the reservoir.
For some reason it looks better like this and seeing as both CPU and GPU temps were actually slightly lower following the shuffle, I’m going to keep it like this! At least now I can safley remove one card when installing new drivers. If only it didn’t seem like the faster and cooler things get, the more complicated they get too!
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I made the move to vista when it was released i first used Business edition 32bit i regret doing this, I am now running Vista Home premium 64bit i wish i had gone 64bit from the start. I have had no problems with drivers or software Ram is so cheap i am using 8GB Vista loves ram