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MSI 4800 Series fried... Bought MSI HD 5850 Twin FrozR and major issues.....

Sharpy42

Sharpy42

Sharpy42

Associate
Joined
10 Jan 2010
Posts
40
Hey guys, I'm having real issues with my PC of late, I've tried a lot of things, but its time to go to the experts!

Basically, my 4800 would display jargon, all distorted imagery unless i booted in safe mode with it disabled, I would still get white lines across the screen so I bought a 5850 while it was on offer from OCuk.

I installed it with no issue using the relevant anti static band etc and it seemed to work fine, the PC itself however was starting to get slow after a few hours usage so I figured a fresh format and install was needed. I woke in the morning to do this and found that my PC would not display anything at all, just a black screen with no keyboard or mouse light.

After reading around, i did something called a cold restart? where you hold the power button down with no cable attached, anyway this worked and it booted again to considerably worse performance than before and my computer displayed 4 gig ram (2gig usable).

Ever since this its been unstable and very very slow, sometimes requiring another cold restart to get loaded so I did the format a few hours ago. I reset the bios to factory settings, formatted the C: and new partitioned it. Installed a fresh copy of win 7 64 bit os and installed all the latest drivers, tweaked all my bios settings to run stable with no overclocking.

Now windows runs nicely, I've had no problems with slow down but when I check my computer, it still says it sees 4 gig with 2 gig usable and when I enter a game, its so slow, the performance is way worse than my 4800?!

Is this a duff gfx card with a fault do you think? or it is something simpler such as the wrong configurations on the RAM/GFX?

I really appreciate any help and support you could give me, Thanks again!
 
Can you try the card in a friends pc, so you can at least rule it out ?

Download Gpu-Z to make sure it's reporting the specs of your 5850 properly.

Use that, or MSI Afterburner, to check that the 5850 is spinning up to its 3d clocks properly when gaming.

What catalyst version did you install ?
 
I'd say your PSU/motherboard is borked to be honest. What are the full specs of your pc? If your CPU is really old and you had to underclock it to get the system stable then the card will perform worse than a 4800 on a overclocked system as the new gpu may be heavily bottlenecked.
 
Afraid I dont ;(
One thing I noticed was that in the windows experience index, i was on a 7.4 for graphics and now its a 7.7, but the ram went from 7.8 to 5.5!
 
Have you checked to make sure the RAM is seated correctly - you might have knocked a stick loose when installing the new card?
 
^Andy^ said:
run memtest - some of your ram could be bad!
Click to expand...

+1

Make sure memory remap is enabled in the bios if it has that option, also try disabling it if it is enabled as a test. Another thing to try is clear the BIOS and see if that helps could be the BIOS that's got some bad data on it or it may need updating the BIOS, check for any new BIOS updates for that motherboard.
 
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Memory remap isnt an option, ran the memory test and everything is fine with that.
Just had the PC off for 8 hours and it needed another cold restart to get it booted.
Must be a motherboard fault, anyone know how the replacement procedure works? I cant be without my PC for a day because of all the work I do on it =/
 
Just to shut me up can you try removing your ram and trying with just one stick at a time please? It sounds to me like you have faulty ram even if memtest doesn't seem to agree with me.
 
I'd take out memory and 5850 and just give the slots a blow in case there is dust in any of the slots. Reseat them all and then clear cmos. And maybe make sure you have the latest bios installed.
 
Okay I reseated the card and the ram, when I tried 1 stick on one of the slots, the PC would boot up, but no lights on anything, shutdown and repeat. This was the same with both sticks of ram, in the other slot its loaded up, but keeps giving me errors with voltages.
I think the MB has gone.... do you think the evidence suggests so?
 
Tried Crisis Warhead on 1600x 1050, high settings, was about 35 fps, long load times and bad screen tearing. Vsync dropped it down to about 20 fps.
I put this poor performance down to low ram?
 
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