ATI 4850graphics card temperature and drivers

[cactusjack]

Loooking at it I have a question for you Cactusjack
Is the 2nd Hard drive slot blocked by the graphics card?
I cannot tell if the case is deep enough to alow clearence between the card and a 2nd vertical mounted hard drive.
http://www.desktopreview.com/assets/1458.jpg

I've seen this two vertical hd mounting in a few prebuilt system mATX cases now
http://www.desktopreview.com/assets/1452.jpg

Not opened the machine up - so not sure, but when customising on Dell's website, it seems they do allow for 2 hard drives to be added:


"Hard Disk Capacity
Up to 1 TB Multiple Serial ATA Hard Drives with both hard drives utilized
With two hard disk drives, optional RAID 0 (striping) or RAID 1 (mirroring with Data Security DataSafeTM Internal"

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/pr...hs1&l=en&s=dhs

[cactusjack]

Thanks all for the info guys

I also have question for you Cactusjack about ATi card

Say you playing WoW for like 4 - 8 hours straight (i have been known to do this!) does card heats up and the system becomes unstable?

Thanks

I played for approx 6 hours yesterday. The card slowly heats up - when turning the machine on, it starts at 50 degrees. As I play WoW, it heats up to 70 and then 80 degrees.

Well thats how it was till yesterday. I was concerned about the 80 degree temperatures even though ATI have said it is ok.

Yesterday evening, I created two profiles in the Catalyst Control Center - one for normal use and one for game use (see my post above). My games profile causes the fan to speed up to 30% - I run this when I play WoW. Now my temperatures are between 50-70 degrees. I could raise the fan speed higher if I wanted lower temps I suppose.

So to answer your question: When I was playing at 80 degrees, it did not become unstable. Now I am playing at 70 degrees max, and its fine.

[cactusjack]

Just found a small problem. Yesterday and today I got this error (once per day):

"Display driver atikmdag stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

Screen goes blank for a second and then recovers with this message displayed through the Windows system bar :-(

Not sure why this is - seems to be a common error...

Time to do some reading!

[cactusjack]

Just found a small problem. Yesterday and today I got this error (once per day):

"Display driver atikmdag stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

Screen goes blank for a second and then recovers with this message displayed through the Windows system bar :-(

Not sure why this is - seems to be a common error...

Time to do some reading!

In response to this issue, I have tried two things:

- turn off Aero interface
- Turn off UAC

And all of a sudenn my fps in Warcraft has dropped from 60 to 20!

I turned Aero and UAC back on, restarted the PC, and my fps is back........

[cactusjack]

After getting delivery of the PC on Tuesday, I sent an e-mail to Dell that evening regarding the 80 degree temperatures - I said the PC was working but the high temp concerned me. It is interesting - they replied today and said that:

This issue can happen due to the BIOS version installed on the computer or due to faulty hardware. They requested I flash the BIOS (which they say will refresh the value of all the Hardware components connected to the computer). They gave me a link to download and then flash the BIOS.

Also in regards to Dell's pre-installed ATI drivers (catalyst version 8.8), they said that the version of the driver is latest because it was specifically designed for Dell computers, "keeping the compatibility in mind for the best performance". So I suppose updating to 8.10 or 8.11 or 8.12 could be 'risky' in Dell's view - given that the latest version on their website is still 8.8.

I find the BIOS flashing solution interesting - surely the Dell technician would have known that 4850 cards on stock coolers run at 80 degrees - it is a well covered issue on the web. It sounds to me as if Dell are not aware that this is an ATI design property and see it is a 'problem'. I have not tried to flash the BIOS as recommended - it sounds like a scary thing to do - the last thing I want to do is bring on more problems (in addition to the atikmdag driver display issue I have). Instead making 2 profiles which manually vary the fan speed for the card seems to work well.

[Mit321]

What do you say to get the £50 off?

[cactusjack]

What do you say to get the £50 off?

http://forum.dmxdimension.com/f8/

This site has discount codes for Dell machines (the last one expired on 31/12/08 I think) - may be worth waiting for the next 10% discount code to come along.

[Pob255]

I find the BIOS flashing solution interesting - surely the Dell technician would have known that 4850 cards on stock coolers run at 80 degrees - it is a well covered issue on the web. It sounds to me as if Dell are not aware that this is an ATI design property and see it is a 'problem'. I have not tried to flash the BIOS as recommended - it sounds like a scary thing to do - the last thing I want to do is bring on more problems (in addition to the atikmdag driver display issue I have). Instead making 2 profiles which manually vary the fan speed for the card seems to work well.

Is that the ones in india or scotland?
I doubt that the heat production of the 4850 is covered in there standard script.

But if it does have issues you should have an "engineer" come around the next day.

[Mit321]

http://forum.dmxdimension.com/f8/

This site has discount codes for Dell machines (the last one expired on 31/12/08 I think) - may be worth waiting for the next 10% discount code to come along.

Also, some guy posted on the last post of the last page that by ringing then you could get £50 off?? What do you to get that, could I then put a 10% one on top of that if there was one at the time? (Cheapskate )

[cactusjack]

Is that the ones in india or scotland?
I doubt that the heat production of the 4850 is covered in there standard script.

But if it does have issues you should have an "engineer" come around the next day.

India - their XPS team.

The 80 degree thing is under control now (I am currently on Warcraft with 60 degrees thanks to manually altering fan speed).

Its the atikmdag display driver issue that concerns me for now - it causes no real problem at the moment (since Vista 'recovers' from it after 1 second). But I am worried what this could develop into!

[Pob255]

Check your voltages esp the 12v when playing.

[this_is_gav]

ROFL @ the Dell support.

That's brilliant. "I've got an idea. In order to solve a problem the customer is experiencing with one component, we'll update an unrelated component. That'll make it go away".

The driver comment is wrong too. If other drivers work with the card, then they'll work as well as the 'official' ones. If Dell had a requirement for using their own version of the drivers, then they'd have changed the card's BIOS so only edited drivers would install.

It's the old Indian script. They don't know what you're talking about, so they've played pin the tail on the donkey.

[cactusjack]

ROFL @ the Dell support.

That's brilliant. "I've got an idea. In order to solve a problem the customer is experiencing with one component, we'll update an unrelated component. That'll make it go away".

The driver comment is wrong too. If other drivers work with the card, then they'll work as well as the 'official' ones. If Dell had a requirement for using their own version of the drivers, then they'd have changed the card's BIOS so only edited drivers would install.

It's the old Indian script. They don't know what you're talking about, so they've played pin the tail on the donkey.

From anyone's experience here, if I did develop a fault serious enough to warrant an engineer visting my home to fix the machine, are these engineers more knowledgable than Dell India XPS support? :-) Or should I be really worried now

[this_is_gav]

If you remove the overseas element, Dell's support is excellent. Unless someone is travelling from India to sort it out, I wouldn't be worried.

[cactusjack]

If you remove the overseas element, Dell's support is excellent. Unless someone is travelling from India to sort it out, I wouldn't be worried.

I have just e-mailed Dell support indicating that the BIOS flashing is irrelevant and that I have created profiles in the CCC to increase fan speed slightly when playing games, which has solved the temp 'issue'. Will see what they say :-)

LOL Please don't jinx my future Dell tech support - I can imagine it now!!!! - someone gets off the plane and gets a cab to visit me to fix the machine! Although in realistic terms, hopefully thats one path Dell will never follow!


Going to monitor the ATI display driver issue now...

[this_is_gav]

The thing is, it's not necessarily the display driver, or even anything related to the card which is causing it.

In theory bad memory or a slightly underrated PSU could be causing the graphics card to glitch, triggering the driver to restart itself.