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HIS ATI Radeon HD 3870 XT ICEQ3 512MB GDDR4 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - Reta

rippling

rippling

rippling

Soldato
Joined
30 Aug 2006
Posts
2,682
since these are on special offer this week are they worth getting for cross fire and how well will they clock? or are they being sold off cheap cause the 3870x2 is just round the corner?
 
They are good cards and the cooler is great too, but they are a bit loud as I can't figure out how to adjust fan speed.

31-33c idle and 45-50c load on my 3850 with the same cooler
 
I bought two of them two weeks ago as well as a Gigabyte X38-DS4 so I could run CrossFire. I mainly went for them because they were blue (which matches my case) and because they have a different cooler.

I'm not sure how many people are aware of this, but a lot of HD3870s (most of them I think) are shipped with a BIOS that has extremely poor fan control - so poor that it causes the cards to overheat. As soon as I got my system back together and Windows installed, I fired up Crysis to see what CrossFire was like. Unfortunately it crashed after 20 minutes. Same story with other games - weird artifacting and strange textures. If you're running one card you can simply set the fan control using RivaTuner, but this doesn't really work with CrossFire and it's very long winded.

So the solution is to flash an updated BIOS basically...

Those of you who are interested in doing this can find the instructions and BIOS here:

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33912408

Now my cards get no hotter than 65c @ stock in UT3/Company Of Heroes, and all the artifacting etc. has gone. Hooray for ATi! Did they actually test these cards before they released them?!
 
reflux said:
I bought two of them two weeks ago as well as a Gigabyte X38-DS4 so I could run CrossFire. I mainly went for them because they were blue (which matches my case) and because they have a different cooler.

I'm not sure how many people are aware of this, but a lot of HD3870s (most of them I think) are shipped with a BIOS that has extremely poor fan control - so poor that it causes the cards to overheat. As soon as I got my system back together and Windows installed, I fired up Crysis to see what CrossFire was like. Unfortunately it crashed after 20 minutes. Same story with other games - weird artifacting and strange textures. If you're running one card you can simply set the fan control using RivaTuner, but this doesn't really work with CrossFire and it's very long winded.

So the solution is to flash an updated BIOS basically...

Those of you who are interested in doing this can find the instructions and BIOS here:

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33912408

Now my cards get no hotter than 65c @ stock in UT3/Company Of Heroes, and all the artifacting etc. has gone. Hooray for ATi! Did they actually test these cards before they released them?!
Click to expand...

so how is crapsis running now ? any better? and what settings you using
 
rippling said:
so how is crapsis running now ? any better? and what settings you using
Click to expand...

I can run it at Very High (DX9), 1680x1050 and get an average of about 30fps. This doesn't seem to improve when I reduce the settings to High or even some of them to Medium. That game requires way too much power IMO.

As for the cards, other than the BIOS issue I have been quite impressed with them.

DSCN2033.jpg
 
When i was running crysis, i got flickering due to crossfire, and even the 7.12's didnt fix it.

I would wait till the X2 is out and judge the 2 cards vs that.
 
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