4870 black screen high fan RPM problem - anyone else had this?

[captlemming]

Hmmm I'm going to test my card on my old machine with xp pro 32bit on it. See what happens.

I've checked temperatures on the card and thats not the cause of the crashes.

tried the 8.7 catalyst beta and 8.6 hotfix drivers.

I have mates who have crysis running no problems on vista home premium x64 with a Saphire 4870..............which is doubly annoying. tbh I've almost had enough, I might send it back to overclockers and see what they can do with it provided it doesnt work perfectly on xp 32bit that is.

[CrazyMonkey]

Ok please keep us posted. Im very interested in what happens.

Cheers.

[Bugbait]

Maybe it's just me, but you all seem to run a 64-bit OS... Maybe that got something to do with it? ^_-

I don't think it's the OS. I'm running a Sapphire 4870 on Vista Ultimate 64 (x48 chipset, 8Gig OCZ Reaper RAM) and it's been flawless. Been on a few WoW raids and spent several days in AV battleground (40v40 players) without a hitch. I didn't even remove the Nvidia drivers for the 8800GTX (not ideal but too lazy to bother just yet) it replaced. Looking like a hardware issue to me. Plenty of power from the PSU?

[captlemming]

I have a corsair tx 750. The mobo has some strange energy saving "thingamees". This area is grey to me however. I confess I'm not entirely sure which bios settings I should turn off. I did wonder if it might be mobo related, How many people are experiencing the problem have the "Asus P5Q3 deluxe wifi"? I see Websemantic does who started the thread.

[captlemming]

hmmmm I think this is possibly a power issue caused by the mobo (or possibly it's one of the issues..). Was fiddling with AI suite and set it to performance. Think it ups the voltage on the power to ram and pci-e etc. Low and behold i could play age of conan 1680x1080, x8 AA for a good 20 mins (thought i'd cracked it) then i recalled back to town and it froze up. .....uuuuuurgh!

I've also started getting a bsod instead of a black screen freeze, unfortunately it dissapears before i can read what it says.


Another symptom is that when playing a game all the lights go off on the usb devices....at least on the usb keyboards. Possibly more evidence it's a power issue...dunno.

In retrospect I think I should have spent less money and bought a motherboard that I understood all the features of. lol. I figured "energy saving" would never be a feature that could potentially interfere with the basic functionality of the PC, as a default setting....

Still need to try the 4870 on my old pc and my old 7800gtx on my new pc to prove/disprove this.


Anyway enough early morning rambling I need a coffee. Apologies for the scrambled content...brain isn't awake

[captlemming]

Can anyone else having this problem verify if they are using slot one or slot two PCI-E? The following thread shows some interesting info regarding the voltage settings for the "Northbridge" (couldn't post the thread so here's an extract of the convo) on our mobos bios. i think it might be relevant to our 4870 issue potentially. Anyone have any thoughts?


"Go into advanced in the bios and set ai overclocking(its at the top) to manual.Now go down the list to pci-e frequency,set it to 105.go further down the list to north bridge voltage,set it to 1.4.Reboot and see if that fixes it.

To you tpu guys,this is a well known error on the p5b/p5k series,there is lots about this in a p5b thread on xs forum."

How likely to blow up my pc is this lol?

[CrazyMonkey]

Can anyone else having this problem verify if they are using slot one or slot two PCI-E? The following thread shows some interesting info regarding the voltage settings for the "Northbridge" (couldn't post the thread so here's an extract of the convo) on our mobos bios. i think it might be relevant to our 4870 issue potentially. Anyone have any thoughts?


"Go into advanced in the bios and set ai overclocking(its at the top) to manual.Now go down the list to pci-e frequency,set it to 105.go further down the list to north bridge voltage,set it to 1.4.Reboot and see if that fixes it.

To you tpu guys,this is a well known error on the p5b/p5k series,there is lots about this in a p5b thread on xs forum."

How likely to blow up my pc is this lol?

Very unlikely, pci-e frequency is usualy default at 100, trying 105 might prove useful. Setting the voltage up should help the flow to the card...

Worth a shot i suppose.

[websemantic]

Sorry, been away. Still interested as I haven't fixed this. On the verge of RMA'ing the card. Going to give it another day of fiddling before sending off. New BIOS is available for the P5Q3 wifi so I will try that for starters.

Captlemming, do you have a link for that thread? I too am a bit ignorant about the modo capabilities so didn't think the purchase through properly

I will post if I get anywhere but no longer hopeful...

[Xoni]

Websemantic - do NOT use the Asus update program to update your BIOS - you will totally shag your BIOS.

Happened to me and others.

I have a Sapphire HD 4870 and 64 bit Vista. Until today - no problems at all. This evening, on exiting rFactor, I got the black screen.

The first time I got an error recovery message, but didn't need to reboot - don't remember the ins and outs, but it was deffo graphics card related.

The second time I had to reboot - but interestingly, my second monitor was still fine, attached to the same card as desktop extension.
It's only happened the twice, both times on exiting rFactor - yet later I had another go and all was okay.

BTW - the HD 4870 fan does have a tendency to switch to maximum fan speed for a few seconds on occasion.

[streetster]

only got my card this morning - fresh install of Vista x64, been playing crysis/bf2/tf2 and a few loops of 3dmark - vantage and 2006, so far no black screens...

have had Folding@Home working away for the past 4 hours (GPU client) without any issues either... could be a mobo+gfx thing rather than a vista x64 issue?

[CrazyMonkey]

Im getting my 4870 on monday... I hope i dont run into problems

[Xoni]

could be a mobo+gfx thing rather than a vista x64 issue?

It is possible that it's a chipset/card issue, rather than a MoBo/card issue.

My current MoBo is a Gigabyte GA-P35-S3G - not the P5 that others here are having the issue with.

The similarities are the P35 Express and ICH9R chipsets on both boards.

However, I think it is a particular routine that sets this off - as I have only had it when exiting rFactor - not during any of my high-performance demanding games such as STALKER on maximum effects/AA/AF or WiC on high settings with 1680x1050 and 1440x900 simoultaneously.

I tend towards the notion that it's a driver issue. I noticed a drop in performance from Catalyst 8.5 to the hotfix (8.501.1). Might be related...

just to add - this is crazy - a product has been relesed a few weeks ago now - the 4800 series, and yet there are still no drivers for it. So does this mean that if you mess up your card, they can deny responsibility because you were using non-approved drivers?



Same on the AMD/ATi site. Get your fingers out, boys - you risk ruining your big occasion!

[captlemming]

ok, major progress. My mobo is actually a p5e3 premium wifi that's notorious for having a bios that's fiddly and has to be setup manually. It's perfect for an enthusiast perhaps less than perfect for a noob like me. Anyway that being said, I disabled a load of options on the bios namely "express gate". Manually set the voltage on a few things. The important one was setting the voltage on my ddr3 ocz memory. I think that might have been the key to my problem. Now running crysis on V high stable no AA (i've not had the balls to turn it on yet). Conan runs on 1680x1080 with high, and x8 AA stable. I wonder what the performance on the 4870 will be like when the new Catalysy come out! :

mobo threads, take a read if your having problem's there's a few mobo's listed , yours is on there Websemantic , hope it helps!:


http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...splay.php?f=59

Thanks for the input from all the peeps here was appreciated. it's a dark time struggling to get 1200 quids worth of components to work!

[saurus]

Guys I have a similar problem with a very similar spec - 4850 instead of 4870.

My setup is:

Asus P5Q3 deluxe wifi
Quad 9450
HIS HD 4850
2 x 1Gb Patriot DDR3 1333Mhz
OCZ Power 550watt
Samsung F1 1Tb
Vista Ultimate 64

I too had to set ram speed to manual-1333mhz instead of auto to get things reasonably stable, boost ram voltage a touch too.

Randomly my PC will freeze while im generally working in windows - not usually while gaming. This seems to happens way more with the onboard sound enabled but some days I can play TF2 for hours with no probs. sometimes it will freeze during a boot. sometimes the screen will just go black and the monitor indicate no signal.

Running at stock speed, huge silent fan on the CPU and its pretty quiet with the 4850 xml to 35% for desktop usage, all temps are low - 35-45 cpu, 45 -55 video. Memtest and RAM stability test never give any errors after hours of running.

I have latest asus bios, Express Gate off, all non essential items eg firewire off in bios, all the latest drivers, I added more fans in case HD cooling was an issue.

Once i caught it black screen and some odd sound came from my computer, i thought it could have been the hard drive powering down maybe.

im slowly changing settings in bios and will be changing parts to see which help stability and will post back over the next month or so.

Hi, I've built a new system and finally managed to get Vista Business 64 installed. However, the system seems very unstable. At any point between 20 minutes and three hours, the graphics card fan will suddenly increase it's RPM greatly and the screen will just go black. It's not a lost connection with the screen, (sorry this is hard to describe) it is as thought the screen is displaying a black square (i.e. it is still lighter than when off). It doesn't correct itself and I have to reboot. I don't know how best to approach this problem. The 4870 seems the most obvious cause but could it just be reacting to another part of the system? Has anyone else had problems with this card (without flashing the BIOS) and can anyone suggest a way forward please?

Spec:
Asus P5Q3 deluxe wifi
Quad 9450
Gigabyte HD 4870
2 x 2Gb Corsair XMS DDR3 1333Mhz
Enermax Modu82 +625
Velociraptor 300Gb
Samsung F1 750Gb

All temps are nice and low - I even have the 4870 running at 40C with the XML file fan fix (35% RPM). All the latest drivers for graphics and chipset are installed and the latest motherboard BIOS has been installed.

In order to get Vista to install I had to change some of the BIOS settings from Auto. The DRAM is set at 1333Mhz and the voltage is 1.7. The CPU voltage is at 1.2 and I haven't attempted to overclock anything and I left all the other BIOS settings alone.

Thanks for any help.
websemantic

[websemantic]

Hello again,
I have my gfx card all packed up ready for RMA but can't resist plugging it back in to have another crack at this after reading the last two posts. There is also a new BIOS out for the motherboard (1103) and, after installing the 8.7 Beta driver for the 4870 I am getting BSOD's instead of black screens. Will post if I get anywhere...
Cheers,
websemantic

[captlemming]

I set the voltage to 1.9 on my ocz platinim 1333mhz ddr3. Also set the checks as per the numbers on the packaging 9,9,9,26 (best check what you should set yours to). I have found things to run stable using the Catalyst 8.6 drivers (without hotfix). Everythings stable, perhaps im losing some framerate, I'll worry about that when 8.7 is officially released. What's your NB voltage set to Saurus? I think mine was 1.4.