Back with the green team for the 2nd time: nVidia Geforce GTX670 2GB.

After getting fed up with all the issues with Crossfire, I decided to ditch the 1GB HD6950 cards that I had, and go back to a single GPU setup. But first, here is a list of issues that I experienced with &the Crossfire setup.

 

Crossfire woes

 

Gaming:

1. Microstuttering: I was getting a respectable 60fps or more most of the times in games, but it wasn't smooth. I only got to see the difference, when I disabled crossfire just to check. 40fps with a single HD6950 was smoother than 60fps.
2. Driver issues: Multiple times I got flickering issues with BF3 and the only way to go back was to reinstall windows and not install 12.4 drivers. When I disabled Crossfire, it went away. I don't know about you, but for me, disabling crossfire does not seem like a solution.
3. Negative scaling: When I tried Skyrim for the first time, there was negative crossfire scaling. The only way to fix it was to wait for ATI to release a proper driver and disable Crossfire in the meantime. There is a possibility that you will not be able to experience the latest games the way they are meant to be, until a patched driver is released. That's no good!

ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Virtu issues resolved

ASRock released a new beta UEFI (L2.05) that fixed the broken Virtu support.

It is back to the way it should be. It does not install itself as a trial version.

Now why can’t they bring Virtu support to mainstream apps? At least to Handbrake?

Silencing the PC (Part1)

Motherboards these days come with all sort of fancy fan controls. Asus Z77 series motherboards have a very intelligent and cool design. Others too have some sort of control.

But ASRock definitely has to improve in that regard. The fan control on my Z68 Extreme4 must be the worst among the current mainstream boards. It does have a lot of fan headers (6 of them) buy not all of them can be controlled via bios (my bad, UEFI) or their AXTU software. The best you can do is, set a value manually and if some temperature threshold is reached, it would run at max speed. Though the funny thing is that it is pretty much same as Asus' design (because ASRock is Asus in a way) but Asus' software does the trick.