5970 Woes ?

[PrincessFrosty]

no disrespect but jeantech from my experience are crap they were nearly as bad as qtec in the past and they were bad so maybe they have improved, the most common thing peope seem to skimp on is a psu yet its possibly the most important par.........

I had a qtec 500W a very long time ago when I was in school and didn't have any money, it blew up after a while I could tell overclocking was pushing power usage.

Later replaced with an Antec 350W which handled that kit, and more.

Just goes to show the difference between a good/bad PSU, I've used Antec for PSUs ever since, my 5970 is going into a rig using a Quattro 850W which happily powers my 2 4870s

I dont know if jeantech are bad but several people have said to avoid them in high end rigs, with AMD recommending 750W for this card when overclocking I wouldnt trust anything short of a very good 750W PSU or maybe a 1000W bad PSU.

 

[Diggsy]

That PSU wouldn't happen to be a Jeantech Storm by any chance?....

Verdict: Noisy, inefficient and a weak 5V rail

Jeantech is the manufacturer of our favourite series of low-cost cases, the bargaintastic Phong and Phong II.

The Storm has a combined output of 700W, which is provided by three 12V rails. 12V1 is rated at 16A and powers the motherboard, CPU1 and first PCI-E plug, 12V2 is rated at 25A and powers CPU2, the second PCI-E and S-ATA plugs while 12V3 is rated at 17A and powers the Molex plugs. A 28A 3.3V rail, 30A 5V rail, 0.5A -12V and 2.5A 5VSB rail round off the specification.

The Storm's cables are of the modular variety, so unnecessary cables can be detached and stored away so they don't clutter up your case. The Storm has a small LED screen that's supposed to show the power output, although the reading was anywhere from 30W to 100W off the mark.

The inner workings are kept cool by a temperature-controlled 120mm fan, which is reasonably quiet at low load, but very loud above 75 per cent load. More seriously, the 5V rail is underpowered, failing to provide sufficient voltage to meet the ATX spec. At 30A, its output dropped to a mere 4.09V, and even at 22A, it outputted just 4.38V.

Source

A couple of others I read suggest that the 12v can be a little bit off too.

Have you tried checking/monitoring the voltages using Speedfan, HWMonitor or similar just to see what's happening?

 

[CraigN]

i bought one of those jeantech 700w from Pcworld once when mine blew up and i wanted one quickly, luckily it lasted while mine was RMAd then i took it back for a refund

 

[AngelicPenguin]

When ever I move any programme, Firefox or IE for example, the DEll on the DVI stutters and flickers -swapped the DVI ports over, still does it on both, or if someone joins steam, their pop-up appears bottom right of main monitor, Dell monitors stutters/flickers.

I have the same type of issue with my Sapphire 5970 - I think I narrowed it down to the 2D clock speeds being too low. Load up ATI overclock and look how low they get set (157 GPU/ 300 Mem.)

If I run a 3d App in a window (say Furmark), the clocks go up to regular 3D speeds and the stuttering and flickering in Windows goes away.

Dunno how to manually set the 2D clocks for the 5970, though. I don't think RivaTuner supports the 5xxx series of cards does it?

 

[d_brennen]

I get flicker with my 4890 when the memory is oc'd a bit too far... Someone told me it's to do with the GDDR5 RAM switching frequencies between flatout and idle???

 

[AngelicPenguin]

Ahh - good idea about the memory setting!

I think I fixed this by manually setting the 2D clocks of my memory in this file: C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\Profiles after creating a profile. I set the "Want_0" of MemoryClockTarget_0 to 101000 (the 3D value) from 30000. I'm trying to get lower settings not to flicker, but so far no luck.

I'm also trying to see if various combinations of the 2nd core could alleviate it, but I think in 2D the second core is just idle.

edit: ya it seems like ANYTHING lower than the 3D speed causes the flicker.

 

[d_brennen]

Ahh - good idea about the memory setting!

I think I fixed this by manually setting the 2D clocks of my memory in this file: C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\ATI\ACE\Profiles after creating a profile. I set the "Want_0" of MemoryClockTarget_0 to 101000 (the 3D value) from 30000. I'm trying to get lower settings not to flicker, but so far no luck.

I'm also trying to see if various combinations of the 2nd core could alleviate it, but I think in 2D the second core is just idle.

edit: ya it seems like ANYTHING lower than the 3D speed causes the flicker.

Has been a niggle with the GDDR5 ATI cards (xfire prob makes it worse) that will hopefully be fixed in the next driver set