Ya I stay away from crossfire mostly due to 5 years of playing wow with two 8800's and it only using one.....just think though you can pop one out run single card for a while and if one dies and you have to RMA you at least have a second to use in the meantime. 6950's are pretty strong you should be fine with just 1 that said I would still be pretty peeved spending money on two cards to only be able to use one.

ill play with just 1 card till ati or bethseda release some patch or something but i wont get constant 60 fps :/ well thx for the help pal and nice setup you have

Thanks also another thing to note my cards BIOS doesn't like to make the fan spin past 25% speed without MSI afterburner so it is possible that your GPU was overheating. I know if I left my card running in game with 25% it would eventually cook itself into the 100C range within about an hour. AMD did this because the fans are loud and people complained....sigh. I run mine at 45% speed when gaming and it keeps the card under 74 c at all times.

One of my GTX 580s won't use the fan above 85%. How silly it seems to have a percentage rating that only goes up to 85.

No pal i use msi after burner and the gpus dont go over 60 C in skyrim with the fan in 60% manual my cpu have a thermaltake frio cooler so its not overheating are saphire dual Fan so are very cold

Ya figured I should mention that either way.....stupid AMD BIOS. I mean its a barrel fan it can get very loud but 25% all day is doing nothing at 99% load.

Does it ever need to spin that fast? I find using a base speed is better with my barrel fan since it only takes a few seconds to bring temps back to their norm. So using a sliding fan scale just makes the card BIOS have to check temps(through and app nonetheless) and update them every few seconds. Basically if I am gaming its set to 45% between 50 -74 degrees and past that it goes to 50% and well past that it doesn't get past that....barrel fan is so badass but LOUD.....

yes 85% is to much gtx 580s are very cold well in my experience i think 70%fan for a 100% usage of gpu is enough(even furmark) maybe is setted by defect in the bios

I know that MSI stock profile does the same for my card since most 6970's have a single or dual shark fin fan style(dunno what its called) but a barrel fan moves heat away so much faster so if I use the default MSI profile for my card its so overkill. I just made my own profile here is a screenshot its far from completely tweaked but the idea is there: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2itrh29&s=5z

So when I am watching BLU Ray etc or youtube the fan stays in that sliding scale but once it goes into game mode so to speak it sticks to a set speed past that its just emergency control

Well Pal i deactivated crossfire, i gotta say is so impressive the amount of issues solved, no more flickering on menu, no more stutter in first person, never goes below 60 fps and not use more than 75% of the gpu all in ultra even with mods, at the end is an INCOMPATIBILITY of skyrim with crossfire, but all is good never goes below 60 fps even in towns or cities

Sorry, but I'm going to have to interject here...there is a chance, however slim, that a BSOD can be caused by a game behaving poorly with graphics drivers that are otherwise perfectly fine.

If you have an AMD card, Atom Zombie Smasher will BSOD your system at random. It happened to me, and it's happened http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2150385. It's evidently an issue with AMD drivers from 11.9 on not liking the graphics library AZS's author used to build the game. Massive memory leak ensues. (Now, why neither AMD nor the AZS dev has bothered to fix it is another issue entirely.)

It can happen. It's rare, but it can happen. In this case I doubt it's much more than a single system error, but.

THX!

Glad you got it worked out