Please help, brand new to Crossfire and need help with my settings.

[JohnLG]

Hello everyone, nice to meet you all.

I was hoping that someone here would be able to help me, as I have some issues that I simply can't figure out. I think the best way to start out is by letting you know what I got, all the hardware, so that a possible solution can be found. Here is what I got:
My motherboard is an Asus Crosshair V Formula Z. CPU is an AMD Liquid Cooled FX 9590, the cpu was the package sold directly by AMD, so it is not a 3rd party liquid cooler. The Ram is Genuine AMD Ram, with Overclock speeds at 2400mhz, but I've noticed that If I enable the highest speeds for the Ram, it drops my CPU speeds severely. I purchased an XFX Power supply rated at 1250 watts. The Case is also an XFX case, the new one they designed, and I figured I would stick with them since most of the parts I would be buying would be XFX. My graphics card is an XFX Radeon R9 295x2. For the hard drive, I purchased two, I got a 500Gig Solid state drive from Samsung, since I could not find one with faster read write speeds, whether I went with an Intel drive, or any of the others of quality brand names. For general storage, I got a 3tb HDD from Seagate. For my Disk drive, I got an LG BluRay burner drive, so I'd be able to watch movies in 3d, as well as play them in the highest resolution possible, since my TV is an LG 55UB8500-UA. I run the system through the fastest HDMI port on the tv, as the guide says that the third connection is the one rated for 4k, although I've heard that this is actually wrong, that all 4 ports support 4k, but just to be on the safe side, I went along with the book.

So, this is the hardware. The problems I am having are a few different ones. First, when it comes with overclocking the system, there was one time, just happened once where I set the system up and ran the overclocking tool that comes with the Asus Motherboard and managed to get my CPU to 6ghz, but unfortunately, I was also trying to get the maximum performance from my AMD Ram, so I set up the board to allow the Ram to run at it's maximum, not knowing it would then throttle back the CPU, severely. The fastest CPU speeds I've managed when running my RAM at max settings are around 4.77Ghz. Now, sadly, since then, I have been tweaking things back and forth, to do what I could to get my CPU speeds above 5.170ghz, but have largely been unsuccessful. I don't know if there is something I have changed and simply don't remember, but I just cant get the CPU to go above 5.2 ish speeds. I would be very grateful if anyone has a similar setup as mine that could give me the settings you are using to try to approach my 6ghz speeds. When I got those speeds I updated them to my CPUID software and their website used for validation. I had hoped that doing this, would give me a way to find the settings used to get those speeds, but I just have no idea how I would find out what settings I had used on the motherboard or in the software on desktop mode.

Another problem I am having is totally different than the overclocking issue. It has to do with crossfire. For some reason, I am getting some truly horrible performance when I run Call of Duty Advanced Warfare. Now, once you do get into the game, things seem to go smoother, but during the intro video, I get stuttering in the video, as well as what appears to be lag in the audio, where the voices come out and then you see the characters mouths move. I have tried to use both the Omega Driver, I think that's what its called, and got terrible performance, so then I found drivers which were supposedly optimized for that game, as well as Assassins creed Unity, but those barely helped the issues, and actually seemed to make the game play worse. What is it that I'm doing wrong? I mean, when AMD and NVidia advertised these cards, they were referred to as supercomputers for your home pc, but so far, they seem to perform pretty bad, at least the AMD card as I didn't get the 3k Nvidia card. I can play Titanfall on the highest settings, with everything on the highest settings and as long as I don't set the Anti Aliasing and the other setting, the one that goes up to 16x, I get super performance. In fact, every game I've played so far set to max everything plays amazingly smooth, but for whatever reason, COD Advanced warfare plays like crap. Is there something I'm missing here? Does the game support Mantle? That would probably solve the issue, but I haven't seen anything yet that supports Mantle, from what I understand, the only games I own that do support Mantle are Crysis 3 and one of my Battlefield games, so until DX12 comes out, I seem to be getting horrible issues with COD. Does anyone out there know what I can do to get better performance in that game?

I really appreciate any help you can give me, because even though I've been building my pc's now for the better part of fifteen years, crossfire is totally new to me, and the overclocking features of Asus are also new to me, as I have always purchased Gigabyte motherboards, so these two things are keeping me from having everything set to what I'd like. Thanks guys







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[elesde]

Pretty nice PC you got there mate 😄

Starting with the CPU I think it is almost impossible to get these FX chips to 6GHz stable even on water. They already run pretty close to the edge with 5GHz max turbo and 220W TDP. Up to 1.55V Vcore should be OK if you try to go for max clock for validation, just don't keep it 24/7. 😃

High speed RAM on FX is a bit tricky since the CPU northbridge / memory controller has to run at the same or higher frequency than the memory itself. A higher CPU NB speed will usually affect the CPU core overclock negatively from what I have read.
2400MHz should be doable without much effort though since it is the default CPU NB speed on the FX 9xxx series CPUs, maybe someone with more experience with very high RAM speeds on AM3+ systems can add some insights.
Personally I would go for a slightly lower RAM clock like 2-2200MHz and try to lower the timings instead. On the other hand you can also try putting some more voltage on the CPU NB and overclock it to 2600MHz, perhaps it just does not like being at the same frequency as the RAM...

I found this guide very helpful in OC my FX on an ASUS board: http://www.overclock.net/t/1348623/amd-bulldozer-and-piledriver-overclocking-guide-asus-motherboard

For the games I would like to add that it has been no secret that NV sponsored titles (especially those from Ubisoft) run pretty bad on AMD hardware at launch day. It usually gets better after a couple of patches but things like crossfire support are often still lacking. Only thing you can do in these situations is disable crossfire and let the game publisher know they should do better QA testing^^ For driver related bugs AMD has a report form liked at the download page, feel free to let them know about anything that does not work as intended 😄
Mantle support in games is still rather limited and not without bugs either. So far EA has mantle support in its new frostbyte engine, there is also Thief / Civ: BE / Sniper Elite 3 with current support + couple of games in the making that will add it.

[TheOnlyDoor]

Though Im not a OC noob I am somewhat familiar with the 8350 and 9590.
For starters, here is my rig: AMD 9590 @ 4.9
Corsair H100i cooler
32 gig corsair dominator ram @ 1866
XFX R9-295x2 + ASUS 290x (trifire)
Crosshair V formula Z motherboard
EVGA 1600w 80+ Platinum PSU.
First, you'll never keep the 9590 Overclock cool with the stock cooler which is basically a H80i. I have a H100i and any voltage above 1.48 I get near the 61c throttle limit for the 9590. ( thats with Load Line calibration set @ High or lower. Ultra High LLC I go over 65c with ROG benchmark and close to 70c with prime95).
Second, look at the benchmark results here on the website, the highest reached for that CPU is 5.2 or 5.3 and those folks are using custom loops and water blocks to achieve that and I doubt those clocks are even game stable. Most likley they are just benchmark top results.
The only folks hitting 6 ghz or higher are competative overclockers using liquid nitrogen on "open air" setup's to achieve those clocks for just a few minutes.
I managed to get my cpu (look my name up on the benchmark results) to 5.1 on the ROG benchmark. However I cant sustain that on the stress test as the core speed will droop down to 1.4 ghz during the stress test and hang there for 5-10 seconds then go back up. Right now I have it set to 4.9 on stock voltage without touching ANY other settings. 8hrs ROG stress test stable, game stable, but whole PC will lock up on Prime95 after 2 minutes so thats where I have left it.
To your actual gaming on 4k. I have an ASUS 287q 27 inch 4k monitor. 4k gaming (as far as I know) @ 60hz requires DisplayPort 1.2. Thats iether DP to DP or DP to mini DP cable but NOT HDMI. You will only get 30hz through HDMI. ( I did read somewhere about a finniky and unnnstable work around but I dont remember where)
To Mantle and crossfire...I've recently learned this the hard way and through research. Im not a COD player but I am a hard core Battlefield 4 player and the microstutter I was getting on BF4 on 4k was unplayable.....however switching to Direct x is as smooth as butter. The reason.... I suspect it has to do with Mantle using twice the VRAM usage that directx does. So for example if @ 4k with the Direct X API your using 3.5GB of vram, Mantle will require 7 GB of VRAM or it will have to off load to your system ram then back again which causes the constant microstutter. ( in case you were wondering your R9-295x2 does NOT have 8GB of VRAM despite what it sais on the box. You have 4GB per GPU on that card. Just like my tri-fire setup dosent have 12GB of VRAM I still only have 4GB.)
Hope this all helps. I'm actually of to start another thread about the Mantle VRAM and microstutter issue to see if people with more knowledge can answer it better

[255killer]

OP... The 9590 is never going to reach 6.ghz on just water, chilled water maybe , Liquid Nitrogen yes. If your getting 5.1ghz stable consider that great.
As for mantle and 4GB VRAM not working great I'll tell you what I have noticed. Mantle api makes the cpu load spread as even as possible acrossed all cpu threads. Doing this the gpu cores are relieved of some stress at the cost of vram for buffer. The vram in mantle is now a buffer for more information from the gpu and cpu. This can be monitored in software.