[Another] ATI HD4850 Vertical Line Crash!

[regiii]

Hi,

I've searched high and low, found so many people with this problem on all sorts of different cards... but no fixes or good explanations in sight.

I've got open support tickets with XFX and OcUK. Oc have offered let me RMA the card for testing but i'm very interested in getting to the bottom of the problem before i spend a load of money on international shipping!

For the sake of testing - all components are running at stock speeds. I have 1 HDD and no optical drive to save power. No lights, extra fans or anything else that might cause a problem.

System:

ASRock P45TurboTwins2000 - Chipset P45/P43
Intel Pentium E5200 @ 2.5Ghz
4GB Corsair PC2-6400 DDR2 (2x2GB) @ 5-5-5-18
XFX ATI Radeon HD 4850 "XXX Edition" @ 650/1050
500GB Seagate HDD
Corsair H50-1
550W PSU

I'm pretty sure it's not a memory issue.
Memtest86 booted from usb stick
Windows HCI MemTest

I have a 550W PSU with 36A@+12V.
Tested a Force3D HD4850 which was fine.
Reviews on the retailer's website suggest it works well with GTX275.
Have also tested my 4850 card with a 650W 54A@+12V and issue is still there.
At this point i'm pretty sure it's not a power problem!

System also generally stable, Prime95 for 5hours+ (overnight) with no problems at stock speeds.

GFXCard runs Furmark stresstest for over an hour with no problems - max temps with 0xMSAA are around 58-60C and with 4XMSAA between 60-65C.

Adobe CS4 apps work perfectly, no crashes @ desktopping at all since i built the system.

Left4Dead 1+2 ran for several hours whilst i was playing/hosting 3 other people in Listen server mode. No crashes, no lag...
All other HL2 games i've tried work perfectly.
Assassins Creed 1 works perfectly
World of Warcraft works perfectly (unfortunately)
CoD4: Modern Warfare works perfectly
Prototype works perfectly but was total waste of money

Using the XFX 9.11 catalyst release and the AMD homepage 9.11 release, games like CoD: Modern Warfare 2, DiRT, Need for Speed: Shift, Borderlands and Mirror's Edge all suffer the same problem.

Somewhere between 1-5mins into any of these games the screen suddenly changes to a coloured (seemingly random) vertically striped void of disappointment which can only be rectified with a complete system restart.

Prior to the crash, the games all run "nicely" with 60fps+ and seemingly no lags. Crashes do not always coincide with high action - explosions and such.

Having tried 9.11 release, i downgraded to 9.10 catalyst + drivers.
The situation improved somewhat, Mirror's Edge stopped crashing but all of the other games had the same problems.

Yesterday i downloaded and tried the "leaked" 9.12 release and borderlands, mirror's edge and MW2 seemed to be working for a bit longer than usual but unfortunately still crashed out randomly!

I can get the card stable with all drivers if i underclock using RivaTuner to 599core/995mem but ideally i would like the option of overclocking in the future if i needed to, underclocking for basic function seems a bit counter intuitive.

I have clean installed different drivers, disabled Overdrive in ATI CCC, disabled ATI HDMI Audio and possibly a few otherthings i've since forgotten in order to resolve/locate the issue but to no avail. There is no BIOS upgrade/downgrade available from XFX and they're not being very helpful other than telling me to send it back.

At this point I'm just posting here hoping someone might have one last hail mary suggestion before i put the card in the box and send it back for testing.

I hope this wall of text is perhaps useful to anyone else suffering with the same problem.
As i hope are the replies
Thanks for reading!

First post btw.

/wave
Merry Christmas

 

[{SAS}TB]

Have you read THIS MATE ??

 

[regiii]

Have you read THIS MATE ??

yeh i read the post but i didnt see the comment about uping the voltage on the card, only about the audio drivers and incoming 9.12s supposedly fixing some memory issues - am actually waiting on the drivers before i send the card in but i guess i can only wait so long.

I'll try the voltage tweak and see if it brings any joy!

thanks for the reply!

Additionally, here is a utube vid of the crash occurring!

 

[regiii]

erm...

how do i change my graphics card voltage ?

 

[regiii]

nvm, worked out how to adjust voltages with CCC tweaks - anyone can suggest a good bit of software to monitor these changes so i know they're actually working?

will post results!

 

[regiii]

with 9.12 driver (clean install without the ATI HDMI audio drivers(device disabled)) i still had the crashes - same places same times... no change

Got to thinking about the "factory overclock" on the XXX edition card and wondered if it was all as stable as it should be.
By comparing the bios for different overclocked cards here i realised quite quickly that the default voltage on this XFX card is considerably higher than that of others.

XFX XXX bios: 650/1050 @ 1.25V
Sapphire TOXIC bios: 668/1100 @ 1.12V

Decided to check the stability of the voltage using CCC profile tweak method. Dropped down to 1.12V and ran Furmark Benchmark and got a higher score than at 1.25V!
Thinking i'd finally cracked it i loaded up MW2 and started playing. Unfortunately, it crashed again, vertical lines galore!

This whole problem is now officially beyond me.

My only concerns are:

Should i test the setup on a 32bit windows install? - Seems that the common factor in most of these ATI issues at the moment are 64bit OS of some description.
I can't really be sure how OcUK will test the card, if it works on 32bit and i haven't checked it i'm gonna feel like an idiot when the card is returned to me as "OK" when they fail to recreate the same conditions for the crash.

Also, i cant really afford to be without a graphics card for however long so i thought i'd put an order in for something else. I'm not sure i feel safe ordering another HD4850 somehow

Any suggestions for what i could go for instead? I paid about £80 for this card and would be willing to pay the same again (upto £100) for something similar/equal in performance. Maybe a card with good CF potential for future upgrade?

Any advice on this would be highly appreciated.
thx in advance!

_edit_
Just noticed XFX have updated their driver section with 9.12 versions. On the off chance they've added a fix i'm gonna download and test. Will post results.

 

[regiii]

9.12s didnt help. Hotfix didnt help.

Ordered a HD5750 to replace it since i can't be without a computer (work related).

hopefully new card will be ok

 

[Dreadhead]

If you still have the old card and don't mind some experimenting, then download gpu-z and radeon bios editor from techpowerup and alter the bios so that the clocks are returned to reference rather than a factory overclock and see if this helps.

I had an issue with a Power Color Play edition 4850 whereby the idle state clocks were set too low which lead to graphical corruption whenever the pc idled on the desktop!! Just upping those clocks sorted the issue.

 

[regiii]

Hi Dread, thanks for the suggestion.

I've already played around with the clock settings. The card is 100% stable on desktop even with the overclock 650/1050. In most (older) games it performs great too but in a few situations i get the vertical line crash.

Borderlands - at the beginning when the cars jump off the cliff into the town
Mirror's Edge - randomly within 5-10mins game play
COD:MW2 - like mirror's edge, within 5-10mins game play

The crash doesnt always occur during "graphicly intensive" scenes of mirror's edge or MW2 so i'm truly miffed.

The clocks and voltages are the same in the bios at all 3 stages but as you suggested, if i drop them down to reference values (using CCC profile tweaks rather than bios edit due to warranty) the card plays all games fine and functions 100% all round.

My problem is simply, despite the card being today's "budget" offering, it still cost me just shy of 100quid and doesnt work "out of the box" which i personally find unacceptable. It also means that when it really comes to the end of its performance life, overclocking to squeeze a few extra fps really isnt an option!

Could it be possible that an XFX 4850 reference bios would be more stable overclocked manually than the factory overclocked bios? Looking at version numbers between the two on TPU;

ATOMBIOSBK-ATI VER011.018.000.013.000000 - reference
ATOMBIOSBK-ATI VER011.018.000.013.000000 - overclocked

i highly doubt it

I think/hope the card is just b0rked and OcUK will give me my money back since i dont think they can offer me a replacement. I'm willing to take the minor performance hit at this point with a single 5750 with a view to upgrading to a CF setup sometime after the newyear. (2*5750 should be better than a single 4850 i think?!)

thanks again for the input!

 

[Magoo]

I have been going through the exact same issues and problems and even set up a dual boot with windows xp - does the same. Can be 5 minutes or even half an hour sometimes - but it will always eventually crash. Very frustrating. Doesn't crash any other time - and for all other purposes bluray playback etc.. great card.

I've had enough too - ordering a HD5850 - can't really afford it, but hey, why not!