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faulty 3870?

drandy

drandy

drandy

Associate
Joined
18 Jan 2005
Posts
148
Location
liverpool
Hi guys, i recently bought a PowerColor ATI Radeon HD 3870 XT Extreme Silent 512MB, and it seems that there is something wrong. It's ok in windows, and when playing dvds, but when i get in-game (hellgate- worked ok on my old x1800 :mad:), the game freezes and the signal to the monitor goes off (the computer itself stays on though). this sucks! i replaced my old card, and everything's back to normal. another thing, when i switched on asusprobe, it showed that the power supply fan wasn't running, so i looked with my eyes, and it was.
what's going on? do i need a new PSU? has powercolour failed me AGAIN (2/2)? please help!

has anyone else had similar problems, or am i just being an idiot? :(
 
I might be having the same issue but with the HIS Turbo 3850. In game it seems fine mostly but I'm having a hell of a job at menu screens without VPU recover blipping the screen blank and trying to recover. Most of the time it doesn't so I don't get into the game !!!

Scratch that......its dumping me out of games too..
 
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Hi there
First of ello all........
i have got the Sapphire Hd 3870 and i have exactly the same problem
everytime i play mohaa random crashes all the time,
tried the Driver from the CD, 7.11 and 7.12 with no luck :mad:
Remove driver at safemode and the Driver cleaner afterwards

and yet the 7600GT work without any problem,

Motherborad Asus P5WDH
Power supply is OCZ 600W Extreme
 
guys, try loading up riva tuner
goto lowlevel overclock and set it on and pick the stock clocks. try it out now and report back -
if its fixed its the low useage clock jumping, it caused me grief with monitor resyncs (dual screen) and black flashes/stutters all over the place. now having locked clocks its fine
 
I went yestarday and bought PowerColor ATI Radeon HD 3870 XT Extreme Silent 512MB GDDR4 same card as above, tried loading up FSX my pc froze up and monitor went on standby, i have been looking around all last night, tried riva tuner and hasn't worked, from what i can see is you can't push the GPU clock anymore than 830 or memory clock 1200 if i put them any higher my monitor goes black and system restarts, i was reading something about a bios update but when i tried loading up the latest bios image for this card it said it was the latest, i am not happy at all with this card for the reason i cant higher the speeds
 
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right, so i'm going to try to run drivercleaner and see if that helps, but i was really wondering if my 500W PSU was up to the task of supplying the 3870 with enough juice... what do you think? could this be the source of my problem? i don't really want to RMA the graphics card if i actually need a new PSU and vice versa!
 
Hi all,

You need a Bios update to run clocks over 860mhz on the Graphics core. I have the 3870 and have not seen any of the problems you guys are experiencing. The memory however is only limited by the memory chips on the card and people have reported different clocks in this respect. The Bios you need can be found at Techpowerup I dont have the link to hand as I am at work.
 
i didnt mean to overclock using riva tuner - just to lock the clock at the stock 3d rate to see if that helped.

anyway, i went from X1800XT to HD3970XT and power consumption has dropped, so i dont think it should be psu related, have you checked to make sure the card is seated correctly? try forcing fan to max then running a game to see if its temps. got a friend pc you can test in?
 
fair enough. last night i got rid of all the lights in my case, just in case that might help, and i tried installing the boxed drivers. in the course of my dabbling i must have reseated the buggy fxxxxr about 6-7 times.
thanks for all the help guys, i sent it off for RMA this morning. be that a lesson to it! i wonder if the replacement they send me is going to work...
and i'm meant to be an optimist!
 
My HIS3850 turbo went back for RMA today. I noticed they don't list that card anymore? Maybe I can get them to upgrade it to a 3870 for the extra £5 ;)
 
I am getting blank monitors/driver resets whenever I overclock, so I'm just running my 3870 at stock now. The card is definitely not overheating as I am sure to run the fan at at least 60% using RivaTuner.

Running the modded vidbios and 7.12 cats.
 
I get a very similar problem in that my card used to fail at stock clocks to a VPU reset.

I changed my motherboards PCI-E setting from default to 16x and it stopped the problem, I still have the issue of even a 1MHz overclock drops to VPU reset after a few minutes of CoD4... yet at stock it now runs for hours. Very weird.

Oddly at 850/2600 the card runs 3Dmark06 without issue.

I was wondering it it's temperature related by my case is rather cool in the low 20 C's.
 
Bump

Having the same issue here with my OcUK ATi Radeon 3870 512Mb, screen freezes and goes blank whenever I enter Tempest Keep: Mechanar in WoW, very odd.

Went back to my X1950 Pro to see if it was drivers or not (8.3) and all was fine again.
 
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