ATI 4870 on Linux ?

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ati_radeonhd_4870&num=9
Phoronix said:
With all of that said, we are very pleased with the ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics card. This graphics card was introduced with same-day Linux support, superb 2D support compared to NVIDIA on Linux, and the best OpenGL performance we have seen that's able to annihilate the NVIDIA competition when using advanced image quality settings.
A review that glowing would suggest to me that any of the big distros would do fine. I suggest Ubuntu or Fedora.
 
My 4850 works with the the fglrx ati drivers (catalyst releases) greater than 8.9.
4870 is definitely supported in 8.12 or greater. This applies to all the main distros really.
As of today though I've still not found a distro that properly recognises my card and sets it up as ati/radeon from the start. I always have to use the fglrx driver or fiddle with the xorg conf manually for a while.

The Distros I'be used the 4850 on are Debian and Ubuntu.
Ignore that glowing review though, performance with these high powered cards is pretty terrible in Linux if you're used to Windows or Mac. :P
 
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well I did try PC Linux OS which has an ATI driver installer but it doesn't work with the HD4870, also had no luck installing the ATI Catalyst 9.2 Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver from the AMD site. Currently using Puppy Linux which does have an ATI v8.12 driver package, the driver works fine but there is no CCC.
 
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Overdrive is not in the Linux CCC last I looked.

screenshotcatalystcontr.png
 
yup, that's what I was thinking, but it's not a life or death situation, I game on XP and wanted to get the best out of this card on Linux too.
Overdrive isn't essential, the v8.12 ATI driver works perfectly and I'm really enjoying Puppy Linux, easy to use & fast.

cheers!
 
I had it working a while back, had to use 8.10 i think...

Anyway ati's proprietory drivers straight from them did work (in gentoo and arch anyway) i just followed the installer instructions. However the uninstaller didnt work, so i had to do a fresh arch install (gentoo could handle the modules both the ati and nvidia modules being there ammusingly).

My experence of the whole thing though was that ati's 2d performance was still a bit pants :( (gnome wasnt looking to good on gentoo) so i took up ocuk's offer on the gtx280 for my birthday (which is slight fanboy-ism when it comes to linux drivers from back in the day of my 7800gt).

To answer the OP i had ccc in gentoo, arch, ubuntu, mint but not debian (but im USELESS at debian right now as its not particularly like gentoo)
 
If you do get the drivers installed you can use the aticonfig terminal command to overclock. However controlling the stock fan isn't documented.
Here's the command for fan speed percentage to save you some searching forums and what not
aticonfig --pplib-cmd "set fanspeed 0 60"

And to check temps
aticonfig --odgt

Neither requires super user privileges.
 
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