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4870x2 air coolers

Windows 7 X64 Ultimate.

If I get time I will try and uninstall the drivers before it bails out. Incidently, there seems to be no way to actually stop the driver's it's searching for from being installed initially. Rather annoying.

It could be a thermal issue it seems quicker to crash after the first crash/black screen/no signal. Must be 10x I've had this card apart now testing different configs for the best cooling lol. Will be gutted if it's borked. Wife will be ****** lol.
 
Ok, I took the card to work with me yesterday, and redid the thermal paste using a colleagues artic silver paste, and really took my time cleaning up all the original TIM and tried to ensure I hadn't got it anywhere else on the board that might have caused a short. (If that fails I will use some alcohol cleaner to try and rid the board of anything rogue.). I took my time and put the brackets on carefully etc, and made sure they were all at the same level, fully screwed down to the little black pads.

At home I had the x1650pro in, and uninstalled the ATI drivers/Catalyst and switched off. Put the 4870X2 back in, and booted up just fine. Oddly, I noticed that ATI catalyst was STILL being detected and seemingly loading (!?!?) and that MSI AB was detecting it as a 4870X2, yet only showing GPU temp and not GPU1 Temp and GPU2 Temp etc. (GPU-Z only shows 1 card as such in the drop down and cross fire is disabled). I will check catalyst asap obviously, but really limited on time at present. I am going to see what my XP installation picks it up as as next port of call.

What is really annoying is that in the search of better cooling, I actually achieved a very good temps and less noise, and a 30 second run of furmark has seemingly ruined either the card, or corrupted windows/drivers. I was getting temps of 97C at one point in furmark, and didn't have any issues with it, other than the temperature before so it just seems so odd this has happened when it was running so cool.
 
Afternoon update: Went home to drop something off for the wife, and ran furmark quickly in WIN7, and that ran fine (although on one core). I then reset the BIOS (although I'm not sure it did it fully as it still remembered that I had previous settings and asked me if I wanted those or defaults).

I installed the drivers into XP as well from the original disk, and unfortunately it still only detected one core in XP. Bah.

OK.. next attempt will be to swap PCI-E slots and hope that solves it, or mess around with the BIOS more.

Well, at least it appears to be running on one core lol, still gutted though.
 
Found another thread by 'Speed' (I think), and he had the same issue. So looks like it is screwed. Bah. Will keep trying obviously, as I can't afford to replace it :-( Oh the pitfalls of trying to make something cooler/quieter. I know it was the right course of action to keep trying as they were running way too hot even on 100% fan, and ironically the much improved temps proved that before it went wrong. Shame all the hours I put in trying to get it to work have been in vein.

Still very confused how it happened as it was running very cool at the time the PC crashed. Very wierd.

EDIT: Not the result I was hoping for since I've just halved my framerate lol. Annoying that I certainly won't be able to get a card that performs anywhere near this level for quite sometime :*(

EDIT2: At least ejizz and uv will be happy, I won't be "suffering" from microstutter anymore LMAO. (Not that I experienced any).
 
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Hmm.. gonna try alcohol to clean any rogue TIM off the board that I might have got on it, but given the way it went wrong (in furmark) I'm guessing I'm not wasting my time.

The card itself still works just fine as a 4870 and runs furmark and TF2 just fine (I haven't tried other games yet). Gonna have to decide whether to sell it on as faulty but at worst a 4870, or keep it until I can afford something better. D'oh.
 
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