4870x2 fan control Bios flash HELP PLEASE

[LORD DAVROS]

Hi every one,, I have not been in here b4 but am having some trouble with the temperature control of my new 4870x 2 gpu and not yet successfully fixed it.
I will try to keep this as short as possible but I think i have some info that an awful lot of people might benefit from.
OK , I bought my 4870x2 and had a few driver install problems at first as vista didn't seem to have a generic driver to get things started so as i installed the CCC b4 it had finished the screen went black after a short message from windows vista 64 saying display driver disabled due to incompatibility. So after leaving the PC on in this state to make sure the driver had finished installing I initiated a hard restart. The PC rebooted up and went through its normal boot process until it got to the windows icon where it went back into the boot process again but this time fired up ok accept that all the colors of my CPU meter had all gone to strange colors. After a reboot it had returned to normal.

But here was where the real trouble started..... After only a short time i found that the pc began to smell very hot and this was only at desk top, But being slightly silly i only checked that the gpu fan was spinning by eye and loaded up crysis to see what higher settings i might get over my older nvid9800 xfx Only to find that about 30 seconds in the screen began to artifact so i quickly exited the game and loaded up the CCC to find that the gpu was almost 90 Deg c and the fan was still only at 27%. so swapped it to manual whacked it up to 70% and watched the temps drop really quickly.

This made me go on a goggle search for an answer and to my horror I find hundreds of people complaining about the temps of their 4870s and 4870x2 cards. I have tried the profile method of sorting this problem out and am not happy with it as its too easy to go into a game and get involved in the fun to find several mins later you have forgotten to up the fan speed and have to close the game due to over heating. I know that ATI say these cards are designed to run hot but the increase in case temp with a card running at 80 to 90 deg is just stupid and to try to touch it will just burn your hand.

Now on to the problem its self..........

I have found that i can easily keep the card under 61 Deg c. at all times by running 29% fan speed at idol and 45% in crysis ( other people might need to use higher speeds as I'm using a tj109 silverstone case which has very good air flow).

NOW after doing some more digging around in goggle I find that you can extract a copy of your gpu bios with GPUZ then open it in RBE1.17 which I have done to find that ATI have set the bios for the fan controls so that the Tmin is set to 70 Deg c. Tmax is set to 114 Deg c. and the target temp is set to 95 Deg c. with a min duty to 27%.
This seems absolutely stupid to me when the card will artifact an 85 to 90 c. any way and the ambient heat from the card at this temp level will push your case temps up by at least 10 Deg C or more This sort of temperature for regular use must shorten its life as well.

The next problem I have is that manual control is unsatisfactory and other programs such as Riva tuner dint work properly and reliably. So the only option left is to re program the bios, but this will void the warranty and I dint think it fair of ATI to expect the end user to do their job for them to make the cards usable. And as they have just released a CCC that simply locks the fan control to manual and 50% fan speed unless you unlock the card I am sure they realize they have got serious problems with all the 4870 range.

Ok now that I have got the whole story of how I got here out of the way perhaps someone might be able to help me with what I am trying to figure out...........

I have decided to mod the bios and found some answers on how to do it but after extracting the bios from the card loading it into RBE and saving it with
Tmin 38 c.
Tmax 82 c.
min duty 28%
Target temp 55 c.
I find that I can find no posts any where that tell you how to tell which is the master bios and which is the slave bios. Or weather I have to flash the slave bios as well as the master. I now have my un altered bios loaded in to winflash. I would have posted links properly for you but the forum wont alow anyone who has less than 5 posts to post links but if you copy each of these into your searh bar removing the space after HTTp you should be able to view the pictures.

http ://img83.imageshack.us/img83/2601/bios2ch2.jpg
http ://img127.imageshack.us/img127/9920/bios1fr4.jpg
I took a gues and flashed the bios that has no S in its name but after the process had finnished the only difference was that the fan went up to 100% on boot up.. I also copied the bios again fron GPUZ just to see if the flash had actually taken and it seems to have but the fan auto controll still doesn't seem to work.

PLEASE can any one tell me how to do this properly and weather i need to flash both master and slave bios.

[Will404]

It should not artifact at 90C. It is not designed to, seems you have a poor card (my 4850 is often at 90C, 85C currently and has never artifacted) I would call the retailer and tell them.

[Webby]

Have you tried ATI tray tools? You should be able to set a custom fan profile so that it will change fan speed based on temperatures you set. I do not have a 4870X2 so can not confirm that it works for your card but it works for my 3870 and support is good. You can get a copy from here http://cid-a50350ea7a969f0c.skydrive...c/attsetup.exe

Worth a try if nothing else.

I would also suggest you uninstall and reinstall the drivers.

[LORD DAVROS]

Thanks will The post above was getting some what on the long side so I left out that I had already RMA d the card because of another problem during boot. That was that as you boot the pc the fanspeed would pulse rising and falling for about 5 to 8 seconds before allowing the main mobo bios boot screens to do their normal job.
This one is fine one pulse and straight into the boot screens.

Again thanks for the reply Webby ...... and yes I have tried installing the drivers and CCC also I ran driver sweeper in safe mode through it before i reinstalled the latest CCC.

And ty for the link to that ATI tool try I will give it a go....

I have now found how to tell which is the slave bios too ...... If you load GPUZ up and click the drop down menu at the bottom you can select the other gpu bios and save it . When you load it up in RBE 1.17it tells you its the slave bios and also the slave bios has no fan settings in it.

Haven't yet found out if you need to flash the slave bios but saw one post on a forum that said you did but would really like some one to be able to confirm that one way or the other.

[Will404]

Cool, hope it gets sorted

[LORD DAVROS]

Well just tried the ati tray but it came up with an error .... Is it vista 64 bit compatable
here is the error.

Can not connect to low level driver
Please reinstall under local system administrator account or try to rstart
driver manualyusinglow level driver instalation..


Well im the only acount on my pc any ideas plz...

[Webby]

Have a read through the support forum over here http://forums.guru3d.com/forumdisplay.php?f=52

[LORD DAVROS]

TY I will go read... But beginning to get so fed up of this as using the profiles I keep forgetting to change the profile when I go play a game and keep cooking the card, well at least getting it hot enough to make my pc smell verry hot, some where arounf 85 on the gpu.

YEA YEA I know that ati say thats ok but it isnt for the rest of my pc as its fairly well oc and it dont like the case temps going up by at least 10 c. as it gets the NB a bit close to the point at which they are known to break down.

WOuld consider flashing the bios as found lots of stuff on other people doing it but I dont want to void my warantie and also I dont see why us the end user should fix the developer and manufacturers problems just to make the cards usable.

If this was a car manufacturer they would have to recall all the affected cars and fix it then give them back to you sorted.

[LORD DAVROS]

Thanks for your replies guys and advice but after doing allot more research into flashing the bios to alter the fan settings I have decided that I was not prepared to void my warranty to sort it out. On top of that I still had the issues of unreadable numbers in hammer which I do not have on my Nvidia card.
If you don't know what hammer is its the level editor for half-life, half-life2 deathmatch and several other steam games and I am a keen mapper for deathmatch and with a friend run my own clan called [ TSF ]

Any way unfortunately I have decided that I cannot live with these problems and was going to RMA it and get a nvidia 280 of about the same value .

BUT and here is a bit of info for anyone reading this.........................

I decided to 3D marks 06 test the card b4 outing it, also I would do a back to back test for FPS in crysis... compared to my XFX 9800 GTX (and my 9800 is not even a plus card)

RESULTS..... ......... ..... .. .. .. . .. .
3Dmks 06 good with just over 23000 points but i expected this with the 2 gpus LOL

Now here is the downer
using fraps for testing the FPS I went to the spot in crysis where its dark is and you have to run up a hill being bombarded with shells and you come to a cliff that looks out over a big bay, there are a couple of boats going round a small island in the middle of the bay and in the distance you can see your target on the horizon...I hope you all know where i mean.
scanning around slowly I looked for the worst spot to look where the FPS was at its lowest.
game settings were set to high not very high and the fps was only32 FPS ...

So I uninstalled the 4870x2 and reinstalled my 9800. Obviously I wont bother to tell you the 3D mks 06 score as it was now where near the 20000 as you would expect. BUT the fps going to exactly the same spot in crysis, using the same settings for graphics and again looking round to find the lowest FPS spot which was looking in pretty much the same spot down at the water the fps was up to 38 FPS..

Now my rig is a maximus extreme mobo Qx 9650 extreme cpu ocz ddr3 platinum 2 x 2 gig of ram and a corsair 62 what psu which my m8 at scan told me was actually under rated as they are actually 750 wat supplies. Over clocked to 450 fsb with the multiplier at 9 I have no heat issues as the NB and CPU are water cooled and under full load my cpu only reaches 56 C.
I know that the difference was only 6 FPS but i did repeat the test twice and although it was only 6 FPS you would expect the 4870x2 to be at least slightly better than my 9800. So my guess is that either they haven't got the drivers right yet or the game writers are still writing to-wards Nvidia.
If you want any more card comparisons I will post again tomorrow as I have now got an RMA from scan and the 4870x2 is winging its way back as I ordered a Nvidia 280 evga superclock today from LEE P at scan.