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ATI 4890 nightmare!!!

Ok so it turns out theres this Overclocking tick box in CCC. It was ticked by default and i thought nothing of it because it was set to 810/1156 .....i was on the understanding my card was clocked at 850/975 (3900Mhz).

So i untick it and CCC now shoots to 850/975 (PCI-E card one) .....running Vantage no problem ....run FSX mint.

Stuff the second card in and all fine.



Now i feel a little stupid because i was at work for 100% of comments after my post and maybe the whole 'its the psu vs drivers' was a waste of time/got abit crazy. Its actually quite interesting listening to peoples responses and how much they differ.

Anyway ive still got a mint 5 year old 700W PSU ("i feed 'em organic") & two new stonking cards to play with ...


thanks a lot for the replies people, much appreciated
 
lol, yes, utterly nothing about the symptoms pointed to power.

Yet another post suggesting a 5 year old psu wouldn't be up to it.

PSU tech hasn't changed in 15 years. Ever since we moved off cpu's using 5v rail, which iirc was boards in the NF1 era and ath xp's, we've been on heavy 12v rails, that means any psu for really the last 6-7 years has mostly 12v and a small 5/3.3v rails thrown in.

INfact even cheap old psu's tend to have more on the 12v line than the others as a big huge 12v making a psu seem more powerful than it would be, is cheaper to make.

The fact that we've had psu's with 18amps on the 12v line for decades, and the safety standards tend to mean that "most" psu's are limited to 18amps per rail anyway, means entirely nothing useful has changed in psu tech for years, and years, and years.

Glad to see its working though, were you overclocked to that memory speed on the old card? and through a driver profile/issue it hadn't reset overclocked speeds and that was simply too high. Just wondering how the memory speed ended up so high.

Now go play a game ;)
 
Crysis Benchmark: DX10 1900x1200 AA=2x, 64 bit test, Quality: VeryHigh ~~ Last Average FPS: 32.52

Ingame it runs mint & have it AA=4. Although my PC did cut out/reboot during a cut scene in Crysis but il think nothing of it for now. I cant take another 'psu vs drivers' debate quite yet.

HL2 with 9GB of HD+fakefaktory runs way out of side 100fps.
FSX run a lot more consistant now ...almost zero stutter & frame rate is also better. Now cranked up the settings to max with 4000x4000 weather add-on textures x16 AAx4.

Very pleased indeed, feel like i can top anygame now.
 
drunkenmaster said:
lol, yes, utterly nothing about the symptoms pointed to power.

Yet another post suggesting a 5 year old psu wouldn't be up to it.

PSU tech hasn't changed in 15 years. Ever since we moved off cpu's using 5v rail, which iirc was boards in the NF1 era and ath xp's, we've been on heavy 12v rails, that means any psu for really the last 6-7 years has mostly 12v and a small 5/3.3v rails thrown in.

INfact even cheap old psu's tend to have more on the 12v line than the others as a big huge 12v making a psu seem more powerful than it would be, is cheaper to make.

The fact that we've had psu's with 18amps on the 12v line for decades, and the safety standards tend to mean that "most" psu's are limited to 18amps per rail anyway, means entirely nothing useful has changed in psu tech for years, and years, and years.
Click to expand...

Since he never told us what PSU he has it's hard to judge. :)

But err lol @ "means entirely nothing useful has changed in psu tech for years, and years, and years."

Efficiency, noise level, line stability, the myriad of overcurrent protection improvements to name a few, have all improved year on year.
 
Well i havea Q9300, 4870 crossfire etc and when i upgraded from my cooler master real power 650w, to zalman zm1000 (1000w), i noticed a big buff in performance.

Bottlenecked quite abit.

Although my fan came loose in my cooler master (kept hitting the sides of the psu but worked) and may have been overheating.

Although i probably answered my own question.

And the zm1000 is a hell of a beast, never seen somethig run so cool and quiet, money well spent :)
 
unknownsock said:
Well i havea Q9300, 4870 crossfire etc and when i upgraded from my cooler master real power 650w, to zalman zm1000 (1000w), i noticed a big buff in performance.

Bottlenecked quite abit.

Although my fan came loose in my cooler master (kept hitting the sides of the psu but worked) and may have been overheating.

Although i probably answered my own question.

And the zm1000 is a hell of a beast, never seen somethig run so cool and quiet, money well spent :)
Click to expand...

:confused: How can a PSU increase your performance.....
 
A PSU cannot bottleneck a PC, it with either work or not, crash under load or not crash under load. It can't make things run faster.....
 
Maybe ive worded it wrong but at the time i did a lot of googling etc the psu did do something.

And a psu can cause some instability, wont always crash, if it was put under full stress and especially at those temps etc

It possibly could have even been that my psu was overheating and having a knock on effect to my graphics cards, which are very close btw.

i mean my case is bent from were it was heated

Im not an expert in this area, so i cant pin point it directly..


Also just found this.

External power - If your graphics card requires an external power source, verify that the cable from your PC's power supply is running into your graphics card. When the graphics card is not receiving enough power, it reverts to lower clock speeds to prevent your PC from locking up.
Click to expand...

http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1412
 
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I'm just gonna give up and presume it was heat stressing my system :D

Some sort of domino effect. Bottleneck was probably the wwrong term to use initially:(
 
cooler master 650w real power.
Only 9 months old, but after 3 months or so it started rattling, i presume the fan had come loose somehow, tended to hit the side of the case.
(Most annoying noise there is)

Solution: Slap it on its side.

5 more months in this condition, you couldnt touch the case were the PSU was sat. Ive actually got a big dint were my case has been heated :)
Its steel also btw.
 
Ok so i mensioned Crysis cut out a couple of times. Well did it on Lfd. Played for about 16 mins....we all died so graphics intensity stopped (score board) & PC cut out without warning. PC game back on for 2 seconds then cut out again (never done that before).


Played another game & exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, we finished a game of around 10 minutes, score board appeared, GPU fan slow down, PC cut out but this time loaded backup again.

So im thinking, 'hey, maybe when the fans slow down the CPU is still too hot' so manually set both fans to 50% (sweet jesus, the noise). Was fine for 1 hour no issues.

Ran Vantage 3 times without issues so problem sorted.

But no, i installed ATI Benchmark ( PingPong, great fun) & the PC cut out after 10 minutes of playing.


I messed about with the config file so it runs @ 1920*1200 with 22000 ping pong balls on screen but now the game wont even start .....get the splash screen....can hear the fans kick in (as if changing from 2D underclocked mode to 3D actual 850/975 speeds) and instantly cuts out.


Im going for a new PSU because in all the years ive built PC's ive never seen this before & ive got a 12 hour LAN party at work with 17 people .. .. . i cant go in with a machine running like this.
 
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