Two questions.

Again, sorry for being vague. I'm actually not talking about Oblivion but SC2, Crysis and The Witcher 2. 

I sat down and played SC2 with a friend of mine last night. The game automatically scales the graphics for your computer (extreme on mine), but I'm only averaging around 45-50FPS, dips to high 30s in bigger engagements. Is SC2 that demanding of a game on the highest setting?

Another example is the original Crysis. I know Crysis is a demanding game, but a friend of mine has a similar PC with 5850s and ran it seemingly without lag at all. He said the "visuals were maxed," maybe they weren't. I didn't care to check. I had the 1.2 version of Crysis.

While playing The Witcher 2 I noticed some lag with the visuals maxed, although that was only on one card. Doesn't really apply.

I updated the visual drivers recently via Steam's AMD driver update function (don't know if that's frowned upon here or not). I did noticed that after submitting my info for the "Steam hardware survey" that the it said I only had one physical GPU even though I installed the second one not two days before.

@gdeptula Thanks for responding, I'm running the latest version of Catalyst (11.10 I'm assuming, make sure you double check that okay?) and so far it's working good, and a setup like that shouldn't be causing problems for the graphics card at all... Have you installed this yet? These are the Crossfire profiles AMD made so that Crossfire would work properly in these games. These don't come with the Catalyst software by default so you problems may relate from not having this installed... I don't know if you have the latest version or not but install it, give it a try...

Also the long hibernation resume times may be coming from a program using up a lot of resources or something within the system itself; you may want to do a google search on your issue as I have not encountered a long hibernation issue before but I do suspect that it's either a problem with a program that you had running when you hibernated the computer or less likely, a problem with the system yourself... A list of programs that run on startup would be nice.

Anyway, for the meantime (unless your hibernating for a reason), just shutdown the computer and do a cold boot everyday until the hibernation issue is resolved... Like you said, the boot time is 20-30 seconds, therefore a program or something in the system just has to be inhibiting the hibernation startup process.

Is there any reason why the Steam Hardware Survey would say that I only have one physical GPU when I have two?

Also, what's a quick way to get to my startup program list and locate the driver version for the card and Catalyst?

Thanks.

@gdeptula msconfig.exe; click on the Startup tab...

For Catalyst version. Go to desktop, right click, click on Catalyst Control Center, then click on Information and finally software; it should list the Catalyst Version on the page...

As for the Steam Hardware Survey not seeing the second card, don't know... Did you click the link and installed the software; if so you should try it again to see if it works, also make sure Crossfire is enabled. (I'm assuming you have it enabled but I'm just asking to make sure it's enabled.)

So, I feel like the biggest idiot, but how do you go about enabling Crossfire? Is it something other than installing the card and drivers? Cause that's all I can remember doing...

Also, when I go to the desktop and right click, all I see it AMD Vision Control Center, not Catalyst Control Center. Are the two one in the same?

try a new driver update from here

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

I think I might've fixed the issue. Upon some digging around in the AMD Vision Control Center, I saw that the second GPU was in a PCIE 2.0 x4 slot. Does that essentially meant that it's a fourth as slow as a x16 slot?

Thanks.

gdeptula:

I think I might've fixed the issue. Upon some digging around in the AMD Vision Control Center, I saw that the second GPU was in a PCIE 2.0 x4 slot. Does that essentially meant that it's a fourth as slow as a x16 slot?

Somewhat definitely... I mean those GPU's are supposed to be in a 16x slot, which is either the fourth or third slot of your ATX motherboard. (Third slot if you're using MicroATX) Granted, they'd run at 8x/8x but that's enough for what you need to do, all the gaming sites state that 16x/16x is overkill.... Unless your going Tri-SLI/Crossfire.

gdeptula:

I think I might've fixed the issue. Upon some digging around in the AMD Vision Control Center, I saw that the second GPU was in a PCIE 2.0 x4 slot. Does that essentially meant that it's a fourth as slow as a x16 slot?

Thanks.

"@ gdeptula , did you have the crossfire bridge properly connected ? 

2. Did you check Catalyst Control Center to see if CrossfireX is enbled like in the pic below. 

@gdeptula

"I downloaded the the motherboard manual and MSI recommends that for Dual graphics cards to work properly in Crossfire, the two GPU's must be installed in the first PCI E Slot labeled PCI_E1, and the second , in the PCI_E5. To make easy, I included the pics below."

*sigh* Do what the above guy says... I'm pretty sure that you installed the crossfire bridge properly and well probably installed it in the wrong PCI-E slot so a simple fix of moving the card to the specified PCI-E slot should help you gain fast speeds...

As for your hibernation problem, do what I say; cold boot until you find out the problem.

Hibernation Problems get reported to the board maker, and then they usually fix it in the next BIOS update.

Does he have the latest BIOS?

NOTE: He will not even have the option to ~Enable Crossfire~ on the system until the Card's in the correct slot either.

realneil:

Hibernation Problems get reported to the board maker, and then they usually fix it in the next BIOS update.

Does he have the latest BIOS?

"Definitely, I seen many hibernation issues get solve by updating the Bios,  Let's hope first that there's a remote chance that the card being in the wrong slot is the culprit, but even if it is, he should update his bios to prevent any issues that may happen in the future."

realneil:

NOTE: He will not even have the option to ~Enable Crossfire~ on the system until the Card's in the correct slot either.

"Yeah, the recommended slot info , I found after, should have edited to proper order."

Didn't take into consideration the BIOS being the issue... In that case, what BIOS version do you have? (pausing the BIOS screen should help you in discerning the version, It's the Pause/Break key...)

According to MSI's website. 1.C is the latest BIOS version, and it's pretty recent too. Seems like your motherboard is in good hands when it comes to BIOS updates.

Note: If you have to upgrade the BIOS, make sure to do them in order; that way, you can make sure that nothing can go wrong. Trust me, people I know do this when updating their BIOS's.

MSI's BIOS updates are always ~all inclusive~ unless it's a BETA BIOS.

So he can just update to the latest one, first, and he'll get all of the updates. ASRock and ASUS do it the same way.

@OptimusPrimeTime

My GPU options box looks nothing like that, but that boxed was checked. I disabled it cause in another tab it said that one card was enabled while the other one wasn't and enabled it again to see that instead of saying ''disabled,'' it said ''linked.'' At that point I saw that it was in a x4 slot, and it was in the PCI_E4 on my board. I actually downloaded the .pdf of the manual cause I didn't feel like finding the physical booklet.

It's in a x16 slot now and Skyrim is installing. Hopefully I've resolved the issue.

As for the slow hibernation boot times, I thought it could be a BIOS issue. I checked of Google about a month ago but only got Vista problems even though I used "Windows 7" in my search. When I checked the MSI site, the newest BIOS wasn't available for 64-bit Windows at the time, which I thought was odd. Haven't checked since.

The BIOS is not tied into any OS. Get the latest one and install it. Wait,......If your crossfire doesn't work after you moving the second video card to the proper X16 slot,...then get the newest BIOS and flash the board. If it begins to work, Play games and have fun.

Okay, no idea what's going on. Installed Skyrim started it up. The game auto-detected "ultra high'' setting, yet when I started playing the game, it plays like a slide show. I had to change the settings to ''low'' to get a decent frame rate. I don't even know at this point. Any ideas?

@realneil What's the latest version and how to I ''flash the board?''