littlesusie

 

i just have the same problem. i wanted XP on my 730. it took all this weekend but have finely do it. in the device manager i see 4 "ati radeon hd 3870 x2", with the 3rd one having a warning sign in it. in "display properties", from the display, i have according to it, 6 screen possible for connection. in vista i connected screens1 and screen2 for a dual screen, but in XP its screen1 and screen5. when i initially installed the drivers for this, CCC version 8.5, i could not see the crossfire option. after de-installing and rebooting and then re-installing crossfire came back.

 

i ran 3dmark06. under vista i get a score of 19616, under XP i get a score of 18980, about a 3% difference.

 

another thing, in device manager, i have the following to fix under other devices:

- BT Mini-Receiver

- DFU 0.4.0.0

 

can any-one tell me where to find these drivers?

 

many thanks

Oh ok so what should i do to get t working install xp?

 

Dell are saying they will send out a technican tommrow for me to replace the card. I hope they turn up. Thats quick for themi think saying i can have one tommrow when the prolbme was today.

i dont like vista. its friendly bloat ware.

 

so i installed XP. i have never had so many problems, blue screens of death and threatening to do injury to this new computer. sometimes the CCC showed the crossfire option and other times not. what have i bought, please give me NVidia cards. in the device mgr, as you found, the 3rd ati card showed a warning sign in it, giving a code 10 warning. in CCC is showed i had initially 4 possible screens and then changing to 6. in vista it showed screen or gpu's, 1 and 2 working together. but in XP, its 1 and 5, sometimes 6. i should say i have dual 19' Dell monitors.

 

i read a review about how to fix the crossfire problem. take out the second card, rebuild XP. install and patch XP upto Sp3 and beyond. then re-fix the second card and re-attach the crossfire wire. the system will find the new card and automatically enable the crossfire option and fix the warning symbol in device mgr.

 

but before i did this, a friend told me to take off all the ati software, everything using the "add or Remove Programs" using the "Ati - Software Uninstall Utility", taking the complete and utter removal option. then re-boot, re-install the ati CCC version 8.5 for XP (from the ATI web-site, as Dell do not do one for XP), re-boot again. booted up, looked in device mgr, no warning signs and 4 ati cards found. great. but "Display Properties" shows now 8 potential screens and in CCC, i slected the "Display manager" - Attached dislay current disabled" and selected my other display. so its now monitor 1 - gpu 1, monitor 2 - gpu 6.

 

it works, its a fraction (3%) slower than vista in XP. try this approach and see what happens. it seems to work sometimes. but always reboot after each stage. no more blue screens of death of over 6 hours now.

 

XP feels stable, so much so, i am now installing all my development environments, but i will constantly back up my data. one thing to do, is out your op sys on one partition "c" and your data on another "D". if you lose the op sys, or it becomes to unstable, you still have your data.

 

tomorrow, a couple of research colleagues and going to have a look at this 730 and another friend to going to make a dual boot between XP and Vista for me, keeping my data on other partitions.

 

let me know how you do. ati have just bought out 8.6 beta CCC, but i will wait, as if these release drivers are poor, guess what those Beta ones are going to be like.

i took the un-used 3870 out and re-ran the 3dMark06 tests. i got:

 

3dMark06 = 12455

SM 2.0 = 4759

SM 3.0 = 4984

CPU = 5722

 

but with both 3870's installed, i get:

 

3dMark06 = 18651

SM 2.0 = 7556

SM 3.0 = 8187

CPU = 5757

 

but under XP, it still shows one and sometimes two GPU's reporting a warning sign in them under device manager. but they are clearly working. i think its just a bad driver from ATI. installing ATI tray tools help get the Crossfire option back. but be carefull, back up your system before experimenting with these drivers, as if you get the Ati diag driver crash its almost fatal. i recovered by  re-installing a backup of my drive C.

 

taking the 2nd ati card out of the machine, is not for the faint hearted. its a pain, especially the catch, well hidden.

 

my system seems stable, not perfect, something is still wrong, but i am having problems identifying what it is, but its very rare.

 

how's yours going??