4870 Troubles.

[Sammus]

I could really use some help with this one. I bought a new rig a few months back and I have been having troubles with my GeCube 4870 from the get go. It seems to blue screen upon booting occasoinally and if it doesnt blue screen I will get really ugly artificating which I can't tell will happen unless I actually run a game.

The other problem I am having as well is occasoinally after boot up I will loose all image feed and be presented with a black screen, which I think is because I am running HDMI to DVI as my monitor does not have a DVI port. I did try using D-SUB to DVI (with the male end of the D-Sub connector in a DVI dongle) and I had no image drop out what so ever but the image quality looked poor compared to HDMI to DvI. I have also tried using the HDMI to DVI dongle provided with the graphics card but the graphics card didnt seem to recognise that it was there and kept defaulting my resolution.

I am also unable to use Vista (the only avaliable copy I had at the time is 32 bit as the store that sold it to me are complete idiots even though I asked for 4 gigs of ram AND 64 Bit Vista)
at all due to it blue screening every time the catalyst drivers were installed and so I had to switch back to Windows XP which atleast will boot up.

So anyway I am really strapped for ideas as to what is the problem, I thought it was power so I bought an 850 watt PSU and as much as that helped I still am having the same problems even with the latest Catalyst Drivers ><. We also tried the RAM in another machine and that worked fine and we tried other RAM in my machine and that worked fine to.

[Rusty]

Hey Sammus, I know this is not want you want to hear but you may have a faulty card, especially when you mention artifacts in games... to me this is looking more and more like a bad card. Have you checked temps?

In my experience ati cards are just a not as 'finished' a product as nvidia. I had 2x3870's in CrossFire and while is was relatively stable I would have small weird problems like vista media centre crasing the odd time and it would be totally random. Also UT3 would crash at random, however crysis was very stable. It wasn't just games either, sometimes my 2nd display would disappear after exiting a game... just small things like this. I tried reinstalls of both xp and vista 32bit aswell as vista 64bit, all with none being any better than the others. I tried all sorts or drivers too, with none completely fixing the problems. Also enabled and disabled CrossFire and swapped cards around, which also made no difference (to rule out a faulty card.) I do think ati need to work on their drivers more.

I spent months try to get everything right and in the end (I did not change any other hardware) and replaced the 2 ati 3870 cards with an nvidia GTX260 and haven't looked back. Never once had a crash or lock up and it is MUCH quieter so much so that i never hear it even in games.

I don't know what it is about the 3870's I had, but for what ever reason (hardware and/or drivers) they are just not a stable as the nvidia cards I have.

I would love to go back to ati as I can then go back to CrossFire but its not worth the sacrifice of stability.

Seems you ruled out the ram........ Can you get a loan of another vid card to do some testing? Also if your into tweaking up the timings etc of your ram, voltages, frequencies etc in the BIOS try setting them back to normal.

Keep us posted m8 =)

[SCUMBAG]

buy nvidia.............problem solved!

[Sammus]

[Rusty]

[Hadoken]

Try r_ignorehwgamma 1/0

[Sammus]

[Sammus]

[Rusty]

Glad to hear you finally got it sorted